Picture this: You use your hotel's app on your phone to ask for extra towels. Your phone rings and you hear that your delivery is ready. Open the door and you find a 3-foot-tall bellhop has arrived with your linens. Were you picturing a robot? Because at certain Hilton and Marriott hotels across California, a robot is what you'd find.

Journalism involves the search for and critical analysis of information.18 How journalists discover and select sources of this information is important to avoid bias, to be credible and trusted, and to create angles with which to generate new stories of value to readers. Journalist creative thinking, to discover and generate new associations during this search and analysis of information, contributes to the generation of new stories. Journalists are known to seek opportunities to develop new creative skills with which to discover information.17 Applying these skills enables journalists to maintain control over their work.25 However, discovering and examining information sources about complex stories takes time--time that journalists increasingly lack as news organizations reduce staff numbers.22 The digitalization of news production and consumption has led many news businesses to become uncompetitive.

Chips designed specifically to model the neurons and synapses in the human brain are poised to change computing in profound ways.

This is an ethics guide for United States Intelligence Community personnel on how to procure, design, build, use, protect, consume, and manage AI and related data. Answering these questions, in conjunction with your agency-specific procedures and practices, promotes ethical design of AI consistent with the Principles of AI Ethics for the Intelligence Community. This guide is not a checklist and some of the concepts discussed herein may not apply in all instances. Instead, this guide is a living document intended to provide stakeholders with a reasoned approach to judgment and to assist with the documentation of considerations associated with the AI lifecycle. In doing so, this guide will enable mission through an enhanced understanding of goals between AI practitioners and managers while promoting the ethical use of AI.

Cybersecurity researchers revealed on Thursday a newfound vulnerability in an app that controls the world's most popular consumer drones, threatening to intensify the growing tensions between China and the United States. In two reports, the researchers contended that an app on Google's Android operating system that powers drones made by China-based Da Jiang Innovations, or DJI, collects large amounts of personal information that could be exploited by the Beijing government. The world's largest maker of commercial drones, DJI has found itself increasingly in the cross hairs of the United States government, as have other successful Chinese companies. The Pentagon has banned the use of its drones, and in January the Interior Department decided to continue grounding its fleet of the company's drones over security fears. DJI said the decision was about politics, not software vulnerabilities.

The burger chain White Castle announced a partnership Wednesday with the California-based startup Miso Robotics to introduce Flippy, a kitchen robot that flips patties and cooks fries.

UNESCO has embarked on a two-year process to elaborate the first global standard-setting instrument on the ethics of artificial intelligence in the form of a Recommendation, following the decision of UNESCO's General Conference at its 40th session in November 2019. In 2020, the focus will be on preparing the draft text for the Recommendation with the assistance of an Ad Hoc Expert Group. This phase will include inclusive and multidisciplinary consultations with a wide range of stakeholders. These broad consultations are extremely important to ensure that the draft text is as inclusive as possible. Towards the end of 2020 and in 2021, the focus will be on an intergovernmental process and on negotiation on the draft text to produce a final version of the Recommendation for possible adoption by UNESCO's General Conference at its 41st session at the end of 2021.

That could cost you – in fact, the algorithms they use may be biased against you, or at least your travel plans. This is according to a study by George Washington University published last month. The report found that passengers being picked up or dropped off in lower-income communities or in sectors with minorities were being charged more per mile. "Uber determines demand for rides using machine learning models, using forecasting based on prior demand to determine which areas drivers will be needed most at a given time," reads the study by Aylin Caliskan and Akshat Pandey. "While the use of machine learning to forecast demand may improve ride-hailing applications' ability to provide services to their riders, machine learning methods have been known to adopt policies that display demographic disparity in online recruitment, online advertisements, and recidivism prediction."

Later this month, NASA is expected to launch its latest Mars rover, Perseverance, on a first-of-its-kind mission to the Red Planet. Its job is to collect and store geological samples so they can eventually be returned to Earth. Perseverance will spend its days poking the Jezero Crater, an ancient Martian river delta, and the samples it collects may contain the first evidence of extraterrestrial life. But first it has to find them. For that, it needs some damn good computers--at least by Martian standards.

And a tool like this has many new uses, both good (from powering better chatbots to helping people code) and bad (from powering better misinformation bots to helping kids cheat on their homework). But when a new AI milestone comes along it too often gets buried in hype. Even Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk, tried to tone things down: "The GPT-3 hype is way too much. It's impressive (thanks for the nice compliments!) but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes. AI is going to change the world, but GPT-3 is just a very early glimpse. We have a lot still to figure out."