Failure to advance a digital single market undermines the EU's arguments against Brexit. A new species has arrived: the Health Care Optimist. Last year, the European Commission came out with an ambitious, multipronged strategy to create a digital single market in Europe. National interests and powerful lobbies force Commission to scale back ambitions for digital single market. 'We should be leading Europe, not leaving it,' says ex-British prime minister.

Google's secretive AI division is working on a'big red button' that can halt its artificial intelligence software. Researchers have previously warned that AI could threaten humanity, with doomsday scenarios of AIs taking over, with one expert involved in the new paper admitting Google's historic win over Go world champion proves AI can be'unpredictable and immoral'. Now the DeepMind team say they have the answer - an off switch. Google's DeepMind team say AI agents are'unlikely to behave optimally all the time' and have called for'safe interruptibility' to be built into systems. Google has set up an ethics board to oversee its work in artificial intelligence.

One video, for me, changed everything. It's footage from the old Atari game Breakout, the one where you slide a paddle left and right along the bottom of the screen, trying to destroy bricks by bouncing a ball into them. You may have read about the player of the game: an algorithm developed by DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence company whose AlphaGo programme also beat one of the greatest ever Go players, Lee Sedol, earlier this year. Perhaps you expect a computer to be good at computer games? Once they know what to do, they certainly do it faster and more consistently than any human. DeepMind's Breakout player knew nothing, however. It was not programmed with instructions on how the game works; it wasn't even told how to use the controls. All it had was the image on the screen and the command to try to get as many points as possible. At first, the paddle lets the ball drop into oblivion, knowing no better. Eventually, just mucking about, it knocks the ball back, destroys a brick and gets a point, so it recognises this and does it more often.

LONDON – The machine that Hitler used to send coded messages to his generals on Friday met the supercomputer that revealed its secrets, watched by veteran operatives whose painstaking work helped bring World War II to an end. Scientists at Bletchley Park in southern England, the WWII code-breaking headquarters, fired up the valves, whirring wheels and spinning tors of the two machines to re-create how German military chiefs sent secret messages and how they were deciphered. Hitler's Lorenz machine boasted 1.6 million billion possible coding combinations thanks to a series of twelve rotors, a million times more complex than the more feted Enigma machine. Through luck and the ingenuity of engineer Tommy Flowers, scientists were able to deduce how the machine operated and then build a machine to work out the settings of Lorenz's rotors. "Colossus" is regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic digital computer, but received little attention as the project was kept secret for decades, depriving those responsible of due accolades.

Animals have evolved sophisticated ways of processing sensory data to make sense of their surroundings. Now, robotics researchers are drawing inspiration from biological processes to improve the way machines handle information, perceive their surroundings, and react to stimuli. While the human brain is often seen as the ultimate model for robotic intelligence, scientists are also learning plenty from the neurobiological structures and processes of more humble creatures, from fruit flies to rodents. Take the fruit fly – or rather, the maggot that grows up to be a fruit fly. Drosophila fruit fly larvae have fewer than 10 000 neurons – compared to about 100 billion in the human brain.

If artificial intelligence goes off the rails, which many philosophers and tech entrepreneurs seem to think is likely, it could result in rampant activity beyond human control. So some researchers think it's important to develop systems to "interrupt" AI programs, and to ensure the AI can't develop a way to prevent those interruptions. A study, conducted in 2014 by Google-owned AI lab DeepMind and the University of Oxford, sought to create a framework for handing control of AI programs over to human beings. In other words, a "big red button" to keep the software in check. "If such an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions -- harmful either for the agent or for the environment -- and lead the agent into a safer situation," reads the team's paper, titled "Safely Interruptible Agents" and published online with the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

The river Seine is the fourth-highest it's been in a century, with the water threatening to rise as high as 21 feet. The river winds through Paris, and it threatens life, limb, and history itself. Already museums are moving precious works to higher ground, and the storm causing the flooding has killed over a dozen across Europe. Here, instead, is a focus on a much smaller slice of the disaster. Château de Chambord, a country estate built for King Francis I, is partially underwater.

Bing uses search, social, and other relevant data to make intelligent predictions about upcoming events, like sporting events, reality TV shows, award shows, and political elections. In this episode, Jennifer Marsman chats with Kushal Lakhotia and Walter Sun about the machine learning that powers Bing's predictions of who will win sporting matches like the NCAA March Madness tournament, the NBA playoffs, the NFL season, Wimbledon, the Cricket World Cup, the English Premier League, and more.

Nearly 250 million video surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the world, and chances are you've been seen by several of them today. Most people barely notice their presence anymore -- on the streets, inside stores, and even within our homes. We accept the fact that we are constantly being recorded because we expect this to have virtually no impact on our lives. But this balance may soon be upended by advancements in facial recognition technology. Soon anybody with a high-resolution camera and the right software will be able to determine your identity.

Have you ever begun a Google search, only to click on the words the box lays before you? Tagged a friend's face when Facebook prompted it? Have you spoken to your iPhone? The artificial intelligence technology behind these tools is neither self-aware nor homicidal. But they are driven by a computational technique called machine learning, which is, at its simplest, a way to teach machines to teach themselves.