As the Trump administration prepares to expand retaliatory tariff hikes of up to 25% to another $300 billion of Chinese products, Beijing has sought to highlight China's capacity to endure and overcome hardship. Yi told Bloomberg Television in an interview broadcast Friday that he expected the meeting with Mnuchin to be "difficult." But he said China's central bank, the People's Bank of China, had plenty of room to maneuver to help keep the economy growing despite the pounding the country's export manufacturers are taking as the toll from higher tariffs mounts. Speaking Thursday in France, Trump said he plans to make a decision about ramping up tariffs on China after speaking with Xi at the summit in Osaka at the month's end. "I will make that decision I would say over the next two weeks -- probably right after the G-20," he said. The Trump administration began slapping tariffs on imports of Chinese goods nearly a year ago, accusing China of resorting to predatory tactics to give Chinese companies an edge in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics and electric vehicles.

More questions than answers were generated during a recent conversation at Stanford University between a pair of Artificial Intelligence giants -- Yuval Noah Harari and Fei-Fei Li. Nicholas Thompson, editor in chief of WIRED, moderated the 90-minute conversation in the packed Memorial Auditorium, filled to its 1705-seat capacity. The purpose was to discuss how AI will affect our future. Harari, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and two-time winner of the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality, is the author of international best sellers "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" and "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow." Li is a renowned AI researcher, engineer and computer science professor.

Joseph "Joe" Kava, head of data centers at Google, third from right, and Scott Beaumont, head of Greater China at Google, first right, attend the opening ceremony of the Google data center in Changhua, Taiwan, in 2013. After a decade spent trying to remain competitive in the global high tech race, officials in Taiwan appear to have decided the answer lies in AI. Taiwan has been losing out on consumer electronics orders from offshore brands–the island's long-time strength–as manufacturers look to cheaper factory hubs such as China. But investments in Taiwan by Google, Microsoft and Nvidia among others, all over the past year or two, show that Taiwan can start pivoting from hardware and become a leading R&D center in artificial intelligence. In response, the government is now scrambling to develop talent, which may otherwise fall short of what it takes to keep attracting investments from big businesses.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced its Scout sidewalk delivery robot. At the time, details were sparse, except for the fact that the company had started to make deliveries in a neighborhood in Washington State. Today, at Amazon's re:Mars conference, I sat down with Sean Scott, the VP in charge of Scout, to talk about how his team built the robot, how it finds its way around and what its future looks like. These relatively small blue robots could be roaming a sidewalk near you soon, though as of now, Amazon isn't quite ready to talk about when and where it will expand its network from its single neighborhood to other areas. "For the last decade, we've invested billions of dollars in cargo planes and delivery vans, fulfillment center robots, and last holiday period, we shipped over a billion products with Prime free shipping," Scott told me.

What data actually matters for appraising a property? There is a long list of things to consider, this is a complicated process for humans and not much has changed with the process for decades. Something that human appraisers have struggled to consider are all of the unstructured elements on the property. Many of these topics have been too "subjective" for influence on your price estimate. Sure, if there are gross quality issues (damaged flooring, etc..) that can go into it, but your choice in tile for the backsplash?

Robert Downey Jr. used his part of the opening keynote for Amazon's Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas Tuesday evening to announce the launch of a new organization that is committed to using advanced technologies for the good of the environment. The Footprint Coalition, as the group is called, is scheduled to officially launch by April of 2020. "Between robotics and nanotechnology, we could clean up the planet significantly, if not totally, in 10 years," Downey Jr. said, relaying that he had been given these insights a few weeks back by a roundtable of experts. They're like Wikipedia with character defects," he joked during his talk. The announcement came at the end of a 20-plus minute freewheeling talk about artificial intelligence, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Downey Jr.'s own career and the evolution of his Tony Stark character, which featured cameos from Amazon's AI assistant Alexa as well as Matt Damon, who joined via video.

The use of AI to create high-resolution fake images and videos has raised concerns about the use of disinformation as a political tool. Over the past few years, the application of artificial intelligence to create faked images, audio, and video has sparked a great deal of concern among policymakers and researchers. A series of compelling demonstrations -- the use of AI to create believable synthetic voices, to imitate the facial movements of a president, to swap faces in faked porn -- illustrate the rapid speed at which the technology is advancing. Machine learning, the subfield of artificial intelligence that underlies much of the technology's modern progress, studies algorithms that improve through the processing of data. Machine learning systems acquire what is known in the field as a representation, a concept of the task to be solved, which can then be used to generate new iterations of the thing that has been learned.

NEW YORK - Google on Thursday released new details about its cloud streaming video game service Stadia, which will be available in 14 countries starting in November. For the launch, Google will sell its "founders edition bundle" hardware pack for $129, with a monthly subscription price of $9.99. In Europe, the price will be €129 and €9.99 per month. The new gaming platform aims for a Netflix-style subscription that enables players to access games on any device, powered by the cloud. That could disrupt the huge gaming industry by allowing users to avoid consoles and game software on disc or download.

Founded in 2014 as a technology transfer venture company for the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture-based Miraisens Inc. says its haptic technology would make it possible to get a realistic sensation of touch through subtle changes of vibration patterns traveling through the fingertips. Miraisens founder and Chief Technology Officer Norio Nakamura, the developer of the technology, says the important thing is "how we trick our brain, which means what stimulus patterns should be given." Similar devices using haptic technology, which creates the sense of touch through force, vibrations or motion, have been developed by other companies to achieve just that, but they are generally expensive and inconvenient. Miraisens says its technology, dubbed 3D Haptics, can eliminate these worries as it is lightweight and small enough to be embedded in a game controller or TV remote at an affordable price. Miraisens Chief Executive Officer Natsuo Koda notes that haptics itself is not a novel technology; it has already been used in the flat and stationary home button on some iPhone models, Koda explains, which provides the clicking sensation when we press the button. But the firm's own technology can re-create a variety of sensations of touch in a 3D world, rather than on a surface -- a technology Koda says is "the world's first."

The government on Friday adopted a draft bill to realize its "supercity" initiative to create cities that make use of artificial intelligence, big data and other advanced technologies. In such cities, autonomous driving, cashless payments, goods delivery by drone and novel services using sophisticated technologies will be introduced in an integrated manner. Initially, the government planned to submit to the Diet a bill to revise the national strategic special zone law by the end of March. But it was unable to do that because of difficulty obtaining support from the Cabinet Legislation Bureau for related deregulation. The bill is unlikely to pass the Diet before the end of the ongoing ordinary session, set for June 26.