France will dedicate 1.5 billion euros (1.85 billion US dollars) to developing artificial intelligence (AI) by 2022, President Emmanuel Macron announced here on Thursday. During a speech to the "artificial intelligence for humanity" conference, Macron presented strategies to develop new technology in order to make France one of the "world leaders" in AI. Mathematician and national assembly representative Cedric Villani said AI "concerns the whole society" and spoke of the "wake up call to France and Europe". The French president said: "We must not have fear or refuse change. We must neither be naive", in order to "define the route which will allow us to have a strategy for AI".

The UK's first major Parliamentary inquiry into Artificial Intelligence has called for a new cross-sector ethics code to ensure that the country becomes a world leader in AI. Lord Clement-Jones, the Chairman of The House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, told Techworld that an ethical approach was essential to ensure public support for AI. "What we want is to make sure that the public is fully trusting in this technology, and you can only do that if they believe it's for the benefit of them and others when they're being applied, and also that it's transparent and unbiased in its application," he said. The proposed "AI Code" could attract public support by creating consistent guidelines for developing and using AI across all organisations and companies in both the public and private sectors. In a report titled AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able?, the committee set out five principles to form the basis of the code, which could be adopted internationally: This AI code could provide the basis for future statutory regulation, but the committee stopped short of recommending new regulation specifically for AI at this point.

The UK's House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, has finally published its major report into the impact, regulation and use of AI, called'AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?' after taking evidence from multiple experts across many sectors, including from the legal industry. For those who have been following the debate closely it will come as no surprise that the report understandably sticks to the main themes of jobs and ethics. Although'the law' appears many times as a subject related to liability, transparency and ethics, there is little about the actual business of law and AI, or the New Wave of legal technology that is driven by AI tech such as NLP and machine learning. Although, again, there are references to the need for transparency in any algorithms that may help make decisions related to a defendant in a court case. The Lords committee also have asked the UK's Law Commission to review whether existing laws on liability cover errors created by an AI system.

In 1739, Parisians flocked to see an exhibition of automata by the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson performing feats assumed impossible by machines. In addition to human-like flute and drum players, the collection contained a golden duck, standing on a pedestal, quacking and defecating. It was, in fact, a digesting duck. When offered pellets by the exhibitor, it would pick them out of his hand and consume them with a gulp. Vaucanson died in 1782 with his reputation as a trailblazer in artificial digestion intact.

A controversial Facebook AI tool could soon be making a return to Europe and Canada. Facial recognition, launched in 2010, suggests names for people it identifies in photos uploaded by users. It was suspended for users in Europe in 2012 over privacy concerns, but still lives on in the US and other regions worldwide. Now the firm says it will make a comeback, using the new European data protection regulations as a chance to collect more information if users opt in. The move to reintroduce the image scanning software is likely to ruffle feathers, coming in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data handling debacle.

Artificial intelligence may still be in its earliest stages, but it is still a future that may be creeping up on us faster than anyone would like. Killer robots taking over the world and supplanting humanity have been sci-fi tropes for decades. Terminators and the other evil machines have even become very compelling and frightening villains. We just wouldn't want to live in a world where they exist. Outside of fiction, there are very good reasons for both excitement and fear about the emerging technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the many digital disruptions that poses unique opportunities and risks to all parts of business, including payroll, says Lavine Haripersad, vice chairman of the South African Payroll Association (SAPA). In America over 550 start-ups raised around $5-billion in funding to incorporate AI as a core component of their services in 2016. In the same year, around £1 billion was invested in AI firms in the United Kingdom, with the expectation that the industry will be able to boost the UK's economy by over £230 billion in the next 12 years. "With increased app-based capabilities as well as vibrant systems, contemporary staff members are more used to getting personalised, on-demand communication and feedback. Not only is today's workforce more likely to use self-regulating technologies, but HR teams are getting smaller and they must meet increasing demands from the business," says Haripersad.

Facebook has started to seek explicit consent from users for targeted advertising, storage of sensitive information, and – for the first time in the EU – application of facial recognition technology as the European general data protection regulation (GDPR) is due to come into force in just over a month. The company is only required to seek the new permissions in the European Union, but it plans to roll them out to all Facebook users, no matter where they live. The move follows Mark Zuckerberg's stated goal to apply the spirit of GDPR worldwide. When Facebook users log in during the coming weeks, they will be asked to agree to the company's updated terms of service, and to make specific choices in a number of areas defined by the new law. In a blogpost, Facebook executives Erin Egan and Ashlie Beringer said users would be asked to review information about targeted advertising, and to choose whether or not they want the social network to use data from partners to show them ads; to explicitly confirm whether they're happy to share "political, religious, and relationship information", which is defined as specially protected data under EU law; and to agree to the use of facial recognition technology, which Facebook says will be used to detect which pictures users are in and help protect them against strangers using their photos.

In the largest survey of its kind so far, researchers have looked at the "DNA" of over 340,000 stars in our home galaxy, to identify the stars with the same chemical composition as the sun. Stars with the same chemistry originated in the same star clusters, and the survey would help astronomers find siblings of the sun before the Milky Way tore apart the stellar nursery where they all formed. The research is led by astronomers from Australia, supported by colleagues from Europe, and is called the Galactic Archaeology survey, or GALAH. It "is a large-scale stellar spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way and designed to deliver chemical information" about a large number of stars. The announcement Tuesday about 342,682 stars was the first major public release of data by GALAH, which will eventually look at over one million stars.

Shiseido Co., the Japanese firm that sells Laura Mercier cosmetics and Dolce & Gabbana fragrances, sold ¥1 trillion ($9.3 billion) worth of beauty products last year, mostly in traditional stores where customers can sample brands in person. Consumers in their teens and twenties often prefer to shop online, beyond the reach of in-store salespeople. To partner with -- and even buy up -- small startups in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs to gain expertise in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other technologies. His ambition is to help shoppers replicate online the experience of trying on cosmetics in a store, and use data from smart devices to create personalized makeup for customers. "Particularly with the younger generation, often they don't go into the stores," Uotani said in an interview.