The Pentagon is making a massive push to accelerate the application of artificial intelligence to ships, tanks, aircraft, drones, weapons and large networks as part of a sweeping strategy to more quickly harness and integrate the latest innovations. Many forms of AI are already well-underway with US military combat systems, yet new technologies and applications are emerging so quickly that Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan has directed the immediate creation of a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. "The Deputy Secretary of Defense directed the DoD Chief Information Officer to standup the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center in order to enable teams across DoD to swiftly deliver new AI-enabled capabilities and effectively experiment with new operating concepts in support of DoD's military missions and business functions." DoD spokeswoman Heather Babb told Warrior Maven. Pentagon officials intend for the new effort to connect otherwise disparate AI developments across the services.

If we are to be struck by an impact event resulting in human extinction, it would most likely occur in the Spring or Fall. If you were to ask 100 people what they believed the greatest risk to human civilization is I would bet the top 3 answers would be nuclear war, global pandemic and global warming/climate change. However, less than 10 years ago a meteor with a diameter of approximately 20 meters and a mass of 10,000 tons exploded 30 km over the city Chelyabinsk in Russia. Although there were no fatalities, the blast was estimated to have resulted in $30 million worth of damages and injured 1,500 people. About 100 years previously, in 1908, a meteor 50–60 meters in size exploded over Siberia with the power of a 12 megaton explosion which destroyed about 2,200 squared kilometers of forest.

Prisoners' risk of reoffending was being judged by AI tools The unregulated use of AI in the U.K. justice system is potentially creating miscarriages of justice, according to a new report from the House of Lords. The report cites several examples of AI systems being used by the police, prison and probation services without "any thorough evaluation of their efficacy". "Proper trials methodology is fully embedded into medical science but there are no minimum scientific or ethical standards that an AI tool must meet before it can be used in the criminal justice sphere," the Lords' Justice and Home Affairs Committee found. The committee further warns that "without sufficient safeguards, supervision, and caution, advanced technologies may have a chilling effect on a range of human rights, undermine the fairness of trials, weaken the rule of law, further exacerbate existing inequalities, and fail to produce the promised effectiveness and efficiency gains". The report makes specific mention of questionable uses of AI in U.K. law enforcement.

Module #6 of Metis' Data Science and Machine Learning bootcamp is all wrapped up! For this module we focused on Deep Learning, working with non-tabular data, and building models using Google's Tensorflow library. For our project, we were tasked with creating an image classification model to solve for a real-world problem. This module took place during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The conflict has highlighted the use of satellite imagery by journalists, human rights organizations, and open-source intelligence analysts.

A US judge has approved an $18m settlement between Activision Blizzard and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, bringing one of several discrimination lawsuits against the gaming company to a close. During a hearing on Tuesday, US district judge Dale Fischer said she would give final approval to the settlement after Activision and the EEOC made various tweaks she requested last week. The maker of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and other popular video games still faces suits filed by additional former employees, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), and shareholders accusing the company of widespread sex discrimination. Fischer on Tuesday also rejected a renewed effort to intervene in the case by the DFEH, which filed its own suit against Activision months before the EEOC and argued the settlement could hurt its own case. EEOC spokeswoman Nicole St Germain said the agency was pleased that Fischer said she would approve the settlement.

After two months, Tho Vu was infatuated. The 33-year-old customer service agent, living in Maryland, had met "Ze Zhao" through a dating app, and says she quickly began exchanging messages with him all day on WhatsApp. He seemed like someone she could rely on--he called her "little princess" and sent her reminders to drink enough water. By October 2021, despite never having met in person, they were talking about where to buy a house, how many kids to have, even how he hoped she'd do a home birth. "I want to take you with me when I do anything," he said, in messages seen by TIME.

Disasters stemming from natural hazards are increasing in both frequency and intensity, reflecting the immediate reality of climate change and prompting a growing succession of humanitarian crises. Fortunately, new technologies can help detect and prepare for extreme weather and other hazards, as well as communicate to people and communities effectively about the necessary response. "We are all exposed to natural hazards, and this will worsen in the future," said Jürg Luterbacher, Director of Science and Innovation of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), at a recent AI for Good online seminar. "We need to act upon them accordingly." WMO has set out, along with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), to explore the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to strengthen disaster mitigation worldwide.

Draft legislation, leaked ahead of its official release later this month, suggests the EU is attempting to find a "third way" on AI regulation, between the free market US and authoritarian China. In a way, the news is no surprise, as the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, promised to urgently bring in AI legislation when she was elected in 2019. Daniel Leufer at Access Now, one of the groups that has previously advised the EU on AI, says Europe has long had a strategy to take a third way between the US and China on tech regulation, and says the draft legislation has promise. It remains to be seen whether the UK will follow the EU in regulating AI now that it has left the bloc. The UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy told New Scientist that the government has formed an independent panel called the Regulatory Horizons Council to advise on what regulation is needed to react to new technology such as AI.

Last fall, around the same time as a historic amount of funding for expanding broadband access across the country passed into law, a friend introduced me to a video game called Death Stranding. Within the first few minutes, I realized that while the game was maybe not for me as a gamer. It felt a little too immersive, and I didn't like the huge monsters and assassin types floating around everywhere. But it appealed to me in my professional role advocating for universal access to telecommunications service. Though Death Stranding was released before COVID-19, the pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns created an unavoidable parallel between real life and the world of the game that revealed in both cases, the essential nature of networked communications. The game's designer has explicitly reiterated the importance of connection as one of the game's main themes.

At The Good AI, we strongly believe Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be inclusive and celebrate diversity. However, AI is also the reflector of its creators and this translates into the reproduction of certain biases into AI products related to race, gender or sexual orientation among others. The following article from the MIT Technology Review explains how. In the light of this, the tech industry has an important responsibility towards society, and the death of George Floyd at the hands of a city police officer in Minneapolis, USA on 25 May 2020, -one in a long series of racists attacks against African Americans -, should urge us to take action. We need to make sure we are not perpetuating and letting racism or any other kind of discrimination take roots in our AI systems.