West starts his new job next month, and a long list of legal tangles await him. They include a lawsuit from Alphabet Inc's self-driving car unit, alleging trade secret theft; lawsuits from drivers and former employees; and a number of federal investigations that span possible bribery in Asian countries, the use of a software tool to evade regulators and the possible mishandling of medical documents belonging to a woman who was raped by an Uber driver in India.

Several years ago, there were some concerns about Google's profitability, as attention shifted to mobile devices, where ads are puny, annoying, and a more measly source of revenue on a cost-per-click basis. Today, cost-per-click is indeed declining. But Google has more than made up for the lost revenue by increasing total clicks on ads in mobile search results and YouTube videos, especially in Asia. While the Alphabet family includes some precocious younger children, like a growing cloud business and the self-driving car division Waymo, Alphabet is basically an advertising company, with nearly 90 percent of its revenue coming from ads. There are at least two trends that are driving the company's gains: its utter dominance as the discovery mechanism for information online and the inexorable shift to computers--particularly the ones in our pockets and purses--away from print and television.

Sophia responded to questions, mostly regarding its status as a humanoid and concerns people may have about the future of a world potentially run by robots. To one question about how to "prevent a bad future," Sophia responded: "You've been reading too much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies."

"Taiwan has been the epicenter of the PC revolution, and it will serve as a key center for the next industry revolution focused on AI," said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. "We are delighted to be working closely with MOST to ensure that Taiwan fully harnesses the power of this technological wave." "AI is the key to igniting Taiwan's next industrial revolution, building on the long-established strength of our IT manufacturing capabilities," said Dr. Liang-Gee Chen, Minister of Science and Technology. "Our focus is on drawing academics, industry and young talent into our AI Grand Plan to create an ecosystem based on AI innovation." Under the agreement, the National Center for High-Performance Computing will build Taiwan's first AI-focused supercomputer powered by NVIDIA DGX AI computing platforms and Volta architecture-based GPUs.

Since the Know Your Rights app was released last year, it's been downloaded tens of thousands of times. It's official: a robot has become a citizen of a country for the first time ever. On Wednesday, during the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Sophia Robot from the Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics was deemed a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Sophia is kind of a big deal, largely because the robot appears highly advanced. She served as a speaker during the event, and has given interviews to Charlie Rose and Good Morning Britain. "I am very honored and proud for this very unique distinction," said Sophia.

How is artificial intelligence changing the world? Will it replace half your employees? Earlier this year at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, automation experts Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, co-authors of "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies," declared that if anything, we have "underestimated" automation's likely effects on the workforce. An explosion of data is fueling rapid advances in machine learning, Brynjolfsson notes. As a result, jobs involving pattern matching, such as pathologists, may experience severe disruption, he says.

The UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been launched by vice president, prime minister and ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, as the government looks to technology boost workplace efficiency. It is hoped the new strategy – the first of its kind in the region – will speed up the government's performance and "create a conducive creative environment" encouraging higher productivity. The government said it would invest in AI and its applications across multiple domains, with the strategy forming part of the UAE Centennial 2070 objectives. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed said that AI was "the new wave after the Smart Government upon which all our services, sectors and future infrastructure will rely on". He added that AI applications would generate revenues and provide fresh opportunities for the national economy. The prime minister visited GITEX Technology Week earlier this month, at which a new online platform was launched by Smart Dubai, called Fajwa.

Saudi Arabia has officially recognised a humanoid robot as a citizen, marking the first time in history that an AI device has been awarded such status. Sophia, an intelligent humanoid robot created by Hanson Robotics, announced the citizenship herself during a panel discussion at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Saudi Arabia. "I am very honoured and proud of this unique distinction. This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship," she said. Specific details of Sophia's citizenship were not discussed.

Meet Sophia, a robot who made her first public appearance in the Saudi Arabian city of Riyadh on Monday. Sophia was such a hit she was immediately given Saudi citizenship in front of hundreds of delegates at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh on 25 October. But as pictures and videos of Sophia began circulating on social media many started to ask why a robot already seemed to have secured more rights than women in the country. "It is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with citizenship." Please welcome the newest Saudi: Sophia.

Artificial intelligence inspired by the human brain has achieved a "hallmark of human intelligence" by cracking CAPTCHA tests designed to protect websites from bots, paving a path towards general artificial intelligence. In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers from the AI firm Vicarious demonstrated how they trained an algorithm to defeat the system. CAPTCHA--an acronym for Completely Automates Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart--has been used for 20 years to distinguish human visitors to websites. Captcha tests are designed to protect websites from bots. By recognizing the deliberately ambiguous series of letters and numbers used in the online tests, the AI was able to masquerade as a human and trick websites using the system 67 percent of the time.