Every minute of every hour we hear more about the vast, sometimes scary power of artificial intelligence. We've invited it into our homes and businesses. In some cases, it has come in uninvited. Last week, the President of Microsoft, Brad Smith, wrote a piece about the need for both regulation and corporate responsibility to ensure that technology is used for good. And technology can do incredible good.

Thousands of the world's pre-eminent technology experts called for a global ban on the development of lethal autonomous weapons, warning they could become instruments of "violence and oppression". More than 2,400 individuals and 150 companies from 90 different countries vowed to play no part in the construction, trade, or use of autonomous weapons in a pledge signed on Wednesday at the 2018 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Stockholm, Sweden. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, and representatives of Google's DeepMind subsidiary were among supporters of the pledge. "The decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine," a statement said. "Lethal autonomous weapons - selecting and engaging targets without human intervention - would be dangerously destabilising for every country and individual."

Bio: Ahmed Gad received his B.Sc. degree with excellent with honors in information technology from the Faculty of Computers and Information (FCI), Menoufia University, Egypt, in July 2015. For being ranked first in his faculty, he was recommended to work as a teaching assistant in one of the Egyptian institutes in 2015 and then in 2016 to work as a teaching assistant and a researcher in his faculty. His current research interests include deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, digital signal processing, and computer vision.

Google Cloud Platform is down (cloud.google.com) Credit card thieves using free-to-play apps to launder their ill-gotten gains (kromtech.com) How SSH port became 22 (www.ssh.com) Federal Reserve chair says decline in workers' share of profits'very troubling' (www.latimes.com) Trump's sycophants sink to new lows after (back.ly) U.S. To Make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Docs Play (www.bloombergquint.com) Iron Ox is hiring a Project Manager to help build the robotic farm (jobs.lever.co) Facebook's algorithm change leads to plummeting traffic and layoffs (thelogic.co)

A recent study of 34 major banks across several geographies (US, EU, Singapore, Africa, Australia, India) by MEDICI Team found that 27 out of these 34 banks have implemented AI in their front-office functions in the form of chatbots, virtual assistants, and digital advisors. Across these regions, some of the most prominent banks in this space are Bank of America, OCBC, ABN Amro, YES BANK, etc. Front-office applications have certainly seen a significant increase in intensity, scope, and adoption. In reality, however, the AI strategy in the US banking industry is far more diverse. Automation is one of the more explored areas of AI/ML application. The estimated global market potential of RPA is projected to be $8.75 billion by 2024.

Facebook will dramatically accelerate its research into artificial intelligence, its chief AI scientist said Tuesday, in hopes of ensuring the social network doesn't fall behind with the technology it will need to contend with Internet rivals and police its gargantuan audience. The world's biggest social network said it would recruit high-profile engineers and expand its AI-research division to roughly 170 scientists and engineers across eight global offices, including Paris, Pittsburgh, Montreal, London and Tel Aviv. The expansion of the international labs and new academic partnerships will be devoted to the study of robotics, virtual animation, learning machines and other forms of AI. Yann LeCun, Facebook's chief AI scientist and an early machine-learning architect, said the expanded research effort was pushed by Facebook leaders such as CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "AI has become so central to the operations of companies like ours, that what our leadership has been telling us is: 'Go faster. You're not going fast enough,'" LeCun said.

"There, there; at least you've got your health." It is the saying our elders turn to as comfort when times are bleak. Its widespread use is indicative of the value we place for healthcare in general, even as the Fourth Industrial Revolution blurs the lines between the physical and the virtual. We may all go along with the digital tune, but we have not entirely abandoned age-old priorities. And there are stark indicators that we are not averse to letting the digital realm play a central role in the maintenance of our health, especially when it comes to robotics and artificial intelligence.

Newly elected Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali of Ethiopia was elected on a mandate of transformational change and has promised a new era for Ethiopia and the African continent. Ethiopians are jubilant and excited about the future as Abiy launches significant political and economic reforms. Abiy Ahmed and his team are building towards a vision that embraces all Ethiopians and facilitates their effective participation in the global economy. When our team visited the beautiful city of Addis Ababa two weeks ago, we were energized by the passion of her people and also their unwavering optimism and faith in the future. Sophia echoed our sentiments too and Dr. Ben Goertzel had in-depth discussions with Abiy and his team.

Facial-recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph. When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time. But the darker the skin, the more errors arise -- up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker-skinned women, according to a new study that breaks fresh ground by measuring how the technology works on people of different races and gender. These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, show how some of the biases in the real world can seep into artificial intelligence, the computer systems that inform facial recognition.

Today, we can pull out our smart phones and use various apps to enhance our everyday lives. Digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri are able to complete a number of helpful tasks in- and outside the home. Powered by complex coding and algorithms, these technologies are affecting how we interact with things around us, and even each other. But tech experts are warning that while AI has some positive impacts, these new advances could harm our environment. "Like any new innovation, we need to consider and manage potential new risks," Jahda Swanborough, a global environmental leadership fellow and lead at the World Economic Forum, told DW.