China might be at loggerheads with the United States over trade, but it is calling for a friendlier approach to the development of artificial intelligence. Speaking at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this week, China's vice premier, Liu He, said that AI would depend heavily on international cooperation. "We're hoping that all countries, as members of the global village, will be inclusive and support each other so that we can respond to the double-edged-sword effect of new technologies," He said through a translator. "AI represents a new era. Cross-national and cross-discipline cooperation is inevitable."

Executives in companies around the world are increasingly looking to artificial intelligence to create new sources of business value. This is especially true for leading adopters of AI -- those that have invested in AI initiatives and seen impressive results. This small group of companies is doubling down on AI investments, building competencies, and working to take AI to scale. The opportunities and challenges these AI Pioneers face are the focus of the 2018 MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Artificial Intelligence Global Executive Study and Research Report. Continuing last year's analytical approach, our latest research combines a global survey of 3,076 business executives and 36 in-depth interviews with business executives.

Most studies about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and the economy have focused on developed countries such as the United States and Britain. Through my work as a scientist, technology executive and venture capitalist in the US and China, I have come to believe that the gravest threat AI poses is to emerging economies. In recent decades, China and India have presented the world with two different models on how countries can climb the development ladder. In the China model, the nation leveraged its large population and low costs to build a base of blue-collar manufacturing. The country then steadily worked its way up the value chain by producing better and more technology-intensive goods.

Machines and algorithms in the workplace are expected to create 133 million new roles, but cause 75 million jobs to be displaced by 2022 according to a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) called "The Future of Jobs 2018." This means that the growth of artificial intelligence could create 58 million net new jobs in the next few years. With this net positive job growth, there is expected to be a major shift in quality, location and permanency for the new roles. And companies are expected to expand the use of contractors doing specialized work and utilize remote staffing. In 2025, machines are expected to perform more current work tasks than humans compared to 71% being performed by humans as of now.

The Japanese tech giant said Tuesday the special'First Litter Edition' is now open for pre-orders in the US, with the robotic'puppy' arriving on consumers' doorsteps in mid-December - 'just in time for the holidays,' Sony said. The new-and-improved Aibo was first announced in August and comes at a hefty cost, with a price tag of $2,899. The tech giant said a special'First Litter Edition' will go on sale in September for the hefty price tag of $2,899 Aibo is billed as a pet that behaves like a puppy using artificial intelligence (AI) to learn and interact with its owner and surroundings. The reborn Aibo features new actuator technology allowing it move more smoothly and naturally like a real dog. With sensing and AI technologies, Aibo can run toward its owner and detect smiles and words of praise, and can remember what actions please the owner.

The three college-age defendants behind the creation of the Mirai botnet--an online tool that wreaked destruction across the internet in the fall of 2016 with unprecedentedly powerful distributed denial of service attacks--will stand in an Alaska courtroom Tuesday and ask for a novel ruling from a federal judge: They hope to be sentenced to work for the FBI. Josiah White, Paras Jha, and Dalton Norman, who were all between 18 and 20 years old when they built and launched Mirai, pleaded guilty last December to creating the malware that hijacked hundreds of thousands of Internet of Things devices, uniting them as a digital army that began as a way to attack rival Minecraft video game hosts, and evolved into an online tsunami of nefarious traffic that knocked entire web hosting companies offline. At the time, the attacks raised fears amid the presidential election targeted online by Russia that an unknown adversary was preparing to lay waste to the internet. The original creators, panicking as they realized their invention was more powerful than they had imagined, released the code--a common tactic by hackers to ensure that if and when authorities catch them, they don't possess any code that isn't already publicly known that can help finger them as the inventors. That release in turn lead to attacks by others throughout the fall, including one that made much of the internet unusable for the East Coast of the United States on an October Friday.

Insurance companies are resorting to big data and artificial intelligence as they try enlarge commercial insurance's coverage and seek to protect themselves from insuring ineligible policyholders. The insurers are being forced to to resort to big data and AI in a bit to mitigate growing risks to their operations from factors like anti-selection and insufficient information on policyholders, according to Shanghai Renascence Insurtech Limited Company. Anti-selection basically means people acting on known information to gain an advantage to secure an insurance policy without telling the truth about themselves or their pre-existing medical conditions to the insurers. Accident insurance, critical diseases insurance and medical insurance are under great pressure and better pricing strategies underpinned by effective risk control and more precise profiling of the would-be insured are necessary, said Xing Jing, chief executive officer of the insurance technology startup during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. Insurers therefore need to rely on big data and technologies to improve their capability to catching possible risks in insuring certain people.

"If agriculture goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right in the country" M. S. Swaminathan Agriculture has evolved with mankind through centuries. Today, agriculture contributes 3.8% to the world's GDP, although the contribution of individual nations across the spectrum varies widely, between 0%-60%. Over the years, while its share in the world economy has reduced vis-à-vis manufacturing and services, the importance of agriculture hasn't. The demand for food is never ending and is projected to increase by 70% by 2050 with limited natural resources at disposal. This situation throws up unique challenges; advanced technologies may be a solution.

It's hard to believe how quickly the future is approaching. Waymo, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project, plans to launch its first commercial service for self-driving cars later this year, essentially a fully automated ride-hailing service covering about 100 square miles in Phoenix, Arizona. The company is called Navya, and its two self-driving cars currently on sale include the Autonom Shuttle and the smaller Autonom Cab. Both run on fully electric power, and while the top speed is 55 mph the vehicles are intended for urban environments only where maximum speeds reached are only around 30 mph. Navya says its vehicles have been designed for "last mile" travel, i.e. the final leg of a trip.

Artificial intelligence has a bias problem and the way to fix it is by making the tech industry in the West "much more diverse", according to the head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum. Just two to three years ago, there were very few people raising ethical questions around the use of AI, Kay Firth-Butterfield told CNBC at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China. But ethical questions have now "come to the fore," she said. "That's partly because we have (the General Data Protection Regulation), obviously, in Europe, thinking about privacy, and also because there have been some obvious problems with some of the AI algorithms." Theoretically, machines are supposed to be unbiased.