The New York Times recently revealed that Facebook entered into agreements with at least 60 mobile device companies, giving them access to Facebook user data so that the companies could recreate Facebook-like features. Among those companies are four Chinese firms -- Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL -- which has spurred some concern among US lawmakers. Today, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) sent letters to both Alphabet and Twitter, inquiring as to whether they entered into similar data-sharing agreements with any mobile device companies based in China. "Since at least October 2012, when the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released its widely-publicized report, the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and equipment makers like Huawei and ZTE has been an area of national security concern," wrote Warner. He then goes on to ask both companies if they've had agreements in place similar to Facebook's and if so, whether any Chinese firms like Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo or Xiaomi were included.

Google will not allow its artificial intelligence software to be used in weapons or'unreasonable surveillance' efforts. Following a major backlash from employees, the Alphabet unit has laid out new rules for its AI software. The new restrictions could help Google management defuse months of protest by thousands of employees against the company's work with the U.S. military to identify objects in drone video. Google will not allow its artificial intelligence software to be used in weapons or'unreasonable surveillance' efforts, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, pictured, said today. Google will pursue other government contracts including around cybersecurity, military recruitment and search and rescue, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said in a blog post Thursday.

Machine learning and AI are reshaping the industries. Gartner predicts that the global enterprise value derived from AI will total $1.2 trillion in 2018, which is a 70% increase from 2017. By 2022, the number will reach $3.9 trillion [1]. From IBM Watson to Google Alpha Go, enterprises have made great strides in AI research in the last couple of years. While almost all executives believe AI is the key driver of growth and success [2], they are still in the early stage of applying the technology to their businesses.

Artificial intelligence is already firmly rooted in our lives, and rarely does a month pass by without significant breakthroughs making the news. But amidst all the hype, it can be difficult to get a bird's-eye view of just how far AI has come, the hurdles it faces and the direction in which it's headed. In a bid to paint as precise a portrait of the AI sector as possible, The Minutes team scribbled down every noteworthy bit of information mentioned during the AI Forum 2018, a C2 Montréal track dedicated to artificial intelligence and created in partnership with Element AI. Here are the key insights they gathered. "Montreal and the Canadian AI ecosystems are winning the early innings of the AI game," says Jean-Nicolas Delage, a partner at Fasken's Intellectual Property Group.

Earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described artificial intelligence as more profound to humanity than fire. Thursday, after protests from thousands of Google employees over a Pentagon project, Pichai offered guidelines for how Google will--and won't--use the technology. One thing Pichai says Google won't do: work on AI for weapons. But the guidelines leave much to the discretion of company executives and allow Google to continue to work for the military. The ground rules are a response to more than 4,500 Googlers signing a letter protesting the company's involvement in a Pentagon project called Maven that uses machine learning to interpret drone surveillance video.

A Tesla's autopilot function was engaged in the minutes before a fiery crash that killed its driver in California earlier this year, according to a federal inquiry. In the roughly 20 minutes before the vehicle slammed into a barrier near Mountain View and burst into flames, the car's autopilot feature was in "continuous operation", the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found in its initial investigation. During the critical 60 seconds leading up to the crash, the NTSB reported, the car's driver repeatedly placed his hands on the steering wheel. Tesla crashes into parked police car in Autopilot mode Wall Street blasts Elon Musk's'truly bizarre' Tesla earnings call Tesla faces labour investigation after allegation of injury undercount But six seconds before the accident, evidence suggests the driver had removed his hands from the steering wheel. The vehicle also accelerated in the final three seconds.

Robots appear to be in the middle of a gradual but persistent transition from automated tools that perform specific tasks to artificially intelligent entities that we interact with socially and emotionally. It's not at all clear where this is going to end up--people toss around the idea of robot companionship and even robot love with some frequency, for example. What hasn't been explored nearly as much is the idea of robots in a religious context. We've seen a few examples of robots assisting in religious tasks, but what if robots could take things a step farther, and become sacred objects, embodying divinity within a robot itself? At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) in March, Gabriele Trovato from Waseda University in Japan (with colleagues from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) presented a paper taking a look at whether divine robots might be possible, and why it could be useful to develop such robots in the first place.

The global race to a 5G network is on. This new wireless broadband technology will offer an exponential speed increase over 4G. It has the capability to deliver services such as remote surgery and self-driving cars with near perfect reliability. But a new report shows that the US is lagging behind China and South Korea in developing 5G networks. The US is the global leader in 4G mobile wireless networks, technologies, apps, and services, and we've reaped the benefits: When 4G mobile broadband was first deployed, a new economy took off, adding $100 billion to the nation's GDP.

India's Mahindra & Mahindra, one of the biggest suppliers of smaller tractors to the U.S., and other manufacturers are racing to develop what they see as the future of farming: robo-tractors and other farming equipment to help produce more food, more sustainably at a lower cost. John Deere has tractors and combines on the market that free the driver in the cabin from the actual driving so he or she can monitor the crops and adjust pesticide, water and soil levels. Technology from Agco Corp.'s Fendt lets several driverless tractors follow a lead tractor driven by a human. Japanese firms Kubota and Yanmar are planning to launch driverless tractors that they expect to be popular with elderly farmers. The next generation is tractors that can drive entirely by themselves.