MUMBAI: Amid a raging global debate on the consequences of artificial intelligence (AI), India has formed a "policy group" to study the new technologies and recommend a framework for its adoption, IT industry body Nasscom said today. "We all are currently working out on a policy framework on AI," its vice president K S Viswanathan told, when asked about concerns over AI or the intelligence exhibited by machines. He said a "policy group" has been created by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with representation from the academia, which has done a lot of research on the subject, and Nasscom for the industry's perspective. The group will focus on aspects like skilling the workforce, privacy, security and fixing responsibility if anything goes wrong, Viswanathan said. No artificial intelligence is not taking away your jobs, claims this Capgemini report Globally, on average, 15% of the new job roles created by artificial intelligence were for staff members, that number is just 1% in India.

When Gang Xu, a 46-year-old Beijing resident, needs to communicate with his Canadian tenant about rent payments or electricity bills, he opens an app called iFlytek Input in his smartphone and taps an icon that looks like a microphone, and then begins talking. The software turns his Chinese verbal messages into English text messages, and sends them to the Canadian tenant. In China, over 500 million people use iFlytek Input to overcome obstacles in communication such as the one Xu faces. Some also use it to send text messages through voice commands while driving, or to communicate with a speaker of another Chinese dialect. The app was developed by iFlytek, a Chinese AI company that applies deep learning in a range of fields such as speech recognition, natural-language processing, machine translation, and data mining (see "50 Smartest Companies 2017").

The thought of AI with an intelligence at human level on our not too distant horizon being subject to similar vulnerabilities combined with our inability to protect current systems does nothing to give confidence when the world leading expert Professor Bostrom says "that it would be like securing any other computer system," something we are currently failing at. We have to hope that the developers of AI look to its security with the same enthusiasm they have with developing its "intelligence" and let's hope the cybercriminals don't get there first.

How can artificial intelligence fit into human life and society in India? That will be the primary focus of a high-powered team tasked by the Indian government to understand and recommend how best AI can be shoehorned into India, the largest contributor to the global workforce in the next 10 years. The 18-member task force, set up by the central government on August 25, has been asked to make recommendations to leverage AI, widely acknowledged as an altering force in the world economy in the next few decades, for the country's economic benefit. Other mission objectives include a policy and legal framework to accelerate deployment of AI technology and five-year recommendations for specific government, industry, and research programmes. The task force has identified over a dozen domains of focus.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In the day's other news: President Trump said that he will reach across the political aisle again, this time to help pass a tax reform plan. To that end, he invited Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the House and Senate Democratic leaders, to dinner tonight. He also called in Republican and Democratic lawmakers this afternoon to talk about cutting business and personal income tax rates. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If we can do things in a bipartisan manner, that will be great. Now, it might not work out, in which case, we will try and do them without.

"Artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia but of all of mankind ... Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Russian President Vladimir Putin made this statement to a group of students two weeks ago. Shortly thereafter, Tesla's Elon Musk, who has worried publicly about the hazards of artificial intelligence (AI) for years now, posted an ominous tweet in response to Putin's remarks. "China, Russia, soon all countries w/ strong computer science," he wrote. It's tempting to dismiss Musk's tweet as alarmist, but is it?

Moscow-based Kaspersky makes anti-virus software for computers. On Wednesday, the U.S. government banned federal agencies from using it over concerns about the company's ties to the Kremlin and Russian spy operatives. Kaspersky has denied any unethical ties with Russia or any government.

Deep learning is cutting edge artificial intelligence. It's what Google used to build AlphaGo, which beat the world champion of board game Go earlier this year in China. And it's being used by many of the world's top tech companies as the basis for recommender systems, fraud detection and cybersecurity. Government should be using deep learning, because it is a sophisticated tool that can help agencies fulfill their mission for use cases as diverse as risk profiling, cost forecasting and the analysis of satellite imagery. An additional benefit that supports both recent governmentwide policy and tight budgets is that most of the best deep-learning algorithms are open source.

Self-driving cars were just the start. In a thrilling science talk, Kenneth Cukier looks at what's next for machine learning -- and human knowledge. Kenneth Cukier is the Data Editor of The Economist. From 2007 to 2012 he was the Tokyo correspondent, and before that, the paper's technology correspondent in London, where his work focused on innovation, intellectual property and Internet governance. Kenneth is also the co-author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger in 2013, which was a New York Times Bestseller and translated into 16 languages.

At last year's Business Insider IGNITION conference, David Kenny, the general manager of IBM's Watson division, discussed the AI project. According to Kenny, Watson is most advanced in the health field. "The University of Tokyo ran her genetic sequence through Watson," which found a second strain of leukemia, Kenny said. "They then treated her, and now she's healthy." "About one-third of the time, Watson is proposing an additional diagnosis," Kenny said.