"We looked at'Battlefield 2042' and said, 'Hey, we really want to push the sandbox forward. What's the most innovative way we can do that, to push the market forward, to push our own franchise forward?'" Gabrielson asked rhetorically in a later interview with The Washington Post. "The first thing we said is, okay, we're going to reimagine all-out warfare. Up the player count, up everything else to really deliver that kind of high scale, epic warfare experience. And then we said there's probably more ways for us to innovate and push further.

In a world fueled by digital data, the use of artificial intelligence is prolific--from the automation of human processes to discovering hidden insights at scale and speed. Machines can do many tasks far more efficiently and reliably than humans, resulting in everyday life that increasingly resembles science fiction. This inevitably sparks concern about controls--or lack thereof--to inspect and ensure these advanced technologies are used responsibly. Consumers want reassurance about ethical use and fairness related to AI. Businesses need to mitigate the risk of unintended consequences when employing these advanced, complex solutions. Enter: Explainable AI, or XAI, an attempt to create transparency in the "black box" of artificial intelligence. Can you confidently answer the simple questions below about your current AI solutions?

The European Union has been digging into the competition implications of AI-powered voice assistants and other Internet of Things (IoT) connected technologies for almost a year. Today it's put out a first report discussing potential concerns that EU lawmakers say will help inform their wider digital policymaking in the coming years. A major piece of EU legislation introduced at the back of last year is already set to apply ex ante regulations to so-called'gatekeeper' platforms operating in the region, with a list of business practice'dos and don'ts' for powerful, intermediating platforms being baked into the forthcoming pan-EU Digital Services Act. The bloc's competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, has also had her eye on voice assistant AI technologies for a while -- raising concerns about the challenges being posed for user choice as far back as 2019, when she said her department was "trying to figure out how access to data will change the marketplace". The Commission took a concrete step last July when it announced a sectoral inquiry to examine IoT competition concerns in detail.

With the US economy just starting to recover from Covid-19 and millions still out of work, Congress authorized expanded unemployment benefits that supplement state assistance programs. While it's laudable to fortify struggling Americans during an ongoing crisis, bad actors have made unemployment fraud a serious problem. Unfortunately, the many states seeking to stop fraud through surveillance are installing biased systems that may do far more harm than good. Twenty-one states have turned to high-tech biometric ID verification services that use computer vision to determine if people are who they claim to be. This is the same technology that allows users to unlock their phone with their face--a one-to-one matching process where software infers if your facial features match the ones stored on a single template.

A'weird' planet recently discovered has excited scientists in their hunt for extraterrestial life. Researchers from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of New Mexico discovered exoplanet TOI-1231 b orbiting an M dwarf star – otherwise known as a red dwarf. Scientists were able to characterise that star, and measure both the radius and the mass of TOI-1231 b. This then gave them the necessary data to calculate density, and hypothesise what the atmosphere is made of. The planet, a temperate sub-Neptune sized body with a 24-day orbit, is eight times closer to its star than the Earth is to the sun, but its temperature is similar to our home planet because the red dwarf itself is less potent. Its atmosphere is approximately 330 Kelvin or 140 degrees Fahrenheit, making TOI-1231b one of the coolest, small exoplanets accessible for atmospheric studies discovered yet.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer the future – it is already in use in our homes, cars, and, often, our pockets. As the technology continues to expand its role in our lives, an important question has emerged: what level of trust can--and should--we place in AI systems? That is the very question that the EU Commission has set out to answer with its newly proposed EU Artificial Intelligence Act. "On artificial intelligence, trust is a must, not a nice to have," said Margrethe Vestager, the Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age. "With these landmark rules, the EU is spearheading the development of new global norms to make sure AI can be trusted."

The current generation of robots with legs are significantly less efficient than they could be, which means the future for such machines may be bright. Alexander Kott at the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland, and his colleagues have performed an assessment using the Heglund formula, which describes the power needed by an animal of a specific size to move at a given speed.

Eight years ago, Dr Dean Mohamedally, principal teaching fellow at University College London's computer science department, launched a new initiative aimed at ridding computer science programmes of fiction. "It's called the Industry Exchange Network (or IXN): it's a teaching methodology we developed with UCL and Microsoft, whereby we help students to engage with real-world problem-solving," Mohamedally explains. "Computer-science teaching across the country is basically about teaching maths, with very little implementation and activities in the real world. So we set about removing fiction from syllabuses. For instance, if students are learning about data, we give them some synthetic sample data and get them to clean it, make it ready, and see what happens when they use it in a machine learning environment."

A new education focus around artificial intelligence for healthcare professionals and patients could be the way forward when it comes to the future of health. Jane Rendall from Sectra and Rachel Dunscombe, CEO of the NHS Digital Academy, explore. A crisis point could be on the horizon for NHS imaging disciplines. Rising demand and pervasive recruitment challenges mean there will be too few experts to go around based on current ways of working. We certainly don't want to reach that point, and to achieve that the health service will need to adopt artificial intelligence in new ways as an important mechanism in redesigning services.

The US Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill to boost American semiconductor production and the development of artificial intelligence and other technology in the face of growing international competition, most notably from China. The 68-32 vote for the bill on Tuesday demonstrates how confronting China economically is an issue that unites both parties in Congress. It is a rare unifying issue in an era of division as pressure grows on Democrats to change Senate rules to push past Republican opposition and gridlock. The centerpiece of the bill is a $50bn emergency allotment to the US commerce department to boost semiconductor development and manufacturing through research and incentive programs previously authorised by Congress. Overall, the bill would increase spending by about $250bn, with most of the spending occurring in the first five years.