The UK government is setting aside £2.6 million for new satellite and drone technology that could deliver essential supplies during the coronavirus lockdown. The UK Space Agency (UKSA) is funding new solutions to deliver equipment such as test kits, masks, gowns and goggles for frontline NHS staff. The joint initiative with the European Space Agency could lead to vital equipment soaring through British skies via drones to support the NHS in tackling COVID-19. Companies can submit their proposals, including ideas for deployment and a pilot phase, on the European Space Agency (ESA) website. The UK's space industry is also looking for ways to combat the spread of coronavirus and preventing future epidemics using satellites.

Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter. You can sign up here. In late March, the scooter-sharing company Bird invited about a third of its employees to attend a thirty-minute "COVID-19 update" via Zoom. The meeting only lasted about two minutes, and it wasn't really an update. With what one employee later described as a "robotic-sounding, disembodied voice," an executive told the 406 employees they were fired.

AI startups continued to outpace the overall U.S. venture capital market in the first quarter of 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic is expected to have a severe impact on funding across all sectors for the rest of the year. According to data from the National Venture Capital Association, 285 AI-related companies in the U.S. raised $6.9 billion in the first quarter of 2020. At that pace, AI funding would have easily topped the $19.98 billion raised by 1,509 companies in 2019, according to the Q1 2020 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. The report adjusted the latter up from its previous report of $18.05 billion for 2019. Those figures are the lastest sign of the growing impact technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are having on an expanding range of industries.

At a hotel in Shanghai, a staffer placed a packaged meal into a robotic waiter and entered the room number of a suspected coronavirus patient on the waiter's touch screen. The robot then automatically made its way to the room. "Please take your meal," the robot said, notifying the guest to take the bento box -- eliminating the need for human-to-human contact. The coronavirus pandemic is boosting demand for robots in China's service sector, where automation is helping restaurant and hotel operators navigate staffing shortages and infection risks. The robot used by the Shanghai hotel was developed by Keenon Robotics, founded in that city in 2010.

Social distancing involves probabilities, and handy lessons from AI self-driving cars. When you get behind the wheel of your car and go for a leisurely drive, you become an estimator of probabilities whether you realize it or not. Driving down your neighborhood street, you might spy a dog that's meandering off its leash. Assuming that you are a conscientious driver (I hope so!), you would right away start to consider the chances or probabilities that the dog might decide to head into the street. Presumably, you aren't going to just wildly gauge the odds of the dog doing so, and instead will use some amount of logical reasoning in making your estimation.

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) announced that it joining Andreas Dengel to get AI into more people's hands while advances are made in the technology. Dengel is a German computer scientist and university lecturer as well as site manager of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, which was founded in 1988. NVIDIA has joined him and his roughly 1,000 colleagues as a shareholder in DFKI. "A study last week said many companies are collecting data, but they don't know what to do with it. We can help them join an increasingly data-driven economy," said Dengel.

One of us (Julie) is an AI researcher and a roboticist at MIT. The other (Neel) is a physician at a major hospital and a public health researcher at Harvard. Our dinnertime conversations tend to focus on the future. Lately, unsurprisingly, they've become hushed and grim. Amid the daily news churn, policy makers seem to be facing an impossible choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods.

Adoption of artificial intelligence continues to increase in U.S. contact centers. According to Canam Research, 78% of contact centers in the U.S. report plans to deploy artificial intelligence in their contact center in the next 3 years, with an overwhelming number (97%) of survey respondents planning to use artificial intelligence to support agents as opposed to 7% who plan to use AI to replace some or all of their current call center staff. Top uses of artificial intelligence include bots, self-service, and AI for quality management. These insights stem from a survey sponsored by Bright Pattern, the leading provider of AI-powered omnichannel cloud contact center software for innovative enterprises. The survey examined the current state of U.S. contact centers' usage and preferences around artificial intelligence in the contact centers.

Robots do not become ill, Robots do not get Quarantined. Robots keep working no matter what is happening around the world. So, with this mind, We say again, Is AI a Fundamental Existential Risk for the Future of the Human Civilization? Let us know what you think! We always want to know what YOU have to say.

MOSCOW, April 14 (RAPSI) – The State Duma has approved in the second and third reading a bill envisaging that since July 1 an experiment concerning the introduction of a legal framework governing implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in Moscow for a 5-year period is to be launched, according to a statement on the official website of the lower house of Russia's parliament. The AI technologies include computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition and synthesis. The experimental legal regime is to govern only those participating in the experiment: legal entities and individual entrepreneurs listed on a respective register on the basis of their applications. The complex of technologies to be used includes such components as systems and means for processing of information and software. The document also regulates the issues relating to the storage, use, and destruction of anonymized personal data.