The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently ruled that only flesh and blood humans can be granted patents, not artificial intelligence beings, thus ensuring that a Skynet scenario will play out (you didn't think I'd talk about AI without a Skynet reference, did you? Not it faces a lawsuit over its decision. What set this in motion is the filing of two patent applications in July of last year by Stephen Thaler, a physicist and AI researcher, on behalf of an AI "creative engine" called DABUS. One of the patents relates to an adjustable food container and the other one has to do with an emergency flashlight. On both applications, Thaler listed DABUS as the inventor.

The White House has recently announced its plans to invest $1 billion into AI and quantum computing, two very promising tech frontiers. Last year, President Trump's executive order on AI had presented their intention to bolster their dominance in the field. However, these orders failed to address anything on funding and other plans. In February 2020, the Trump administration called for an investment of two billion dollars in non-defense for AI and quantum research by 2022. The new initiative by the house will fund a series of academic and private sector R&D hubs that are linked to federal agencies.

The US plans to invest $1 billion (£760 million) in quantum computing and artificial intelligence research, the White House has announced. The initiative will fund 12 hubs around the country and help the US in its bid to compete with China and Europe in two of the most promising next-generation technologies. US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios described the investment as "unprecedented" and a "defining achievement" of the Trump administration. "Built upon the uniquely American free market approach to technological advancement, these institutes will be world-class hubs for accelerating American innovation and building the 21st century American workforce," he said in a statement. Governments around the world are investing heavily in the development of AI and quantum computers, as well as technology giants like Alphabet and Alibaba.

Building out its previous commitment, the White House is announcing a $1 billion investment into two of tech's most promising frontiers, AI and quantum computing. Last year, the Trump administration rolled out an executive order on AI declaring its intention to bolster U.S. dominance in the field, but the order didn't address much in the way of funding its plans. This February, the Trump administration called for more than two billion dollars to be invested in non-defense AI and quantum research by 2022. The White House's new initiative will fund a series of academic and private sector R&D hubs linked to federal agencies to work on foundational problems and "pursue transformational advances" across topics like quantum computing, machine learning, computer vision. In a statement, U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios called the institutes "world-class hubs for accelerating American innovation and building the 21st century American workforce."

Hong Kong (CNN Business)British researchers have identified 50 new planets using artificial intelligence, marking a technological breakthrough in astronomy. Astronomers and computer scientists from the University of Warwick built a machine learning algorithm to dig through old NASA data containing thousands of potential planet candidates. It's not always clear, however, which of these candidates are genuine. When scientists search for exoplanets (planets outside our solar system), they look for dips in light that indicate a planet passing between the telescope and their star. But these dips could also be caused by other factors, like background interference or even errors in the camera.

Editor's note: This article is based on a roundtable discussion sponsored by Optum. The full report of the roundtable discussion, Strategy: The Key Factor in the Future of Healthcare Innovation, is available as a free download. Innovation is paving the way for hospitals and healthcare systems to move into the future and truly change healthcare delivery. While solutions featuring artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, and natural language processing are fueling advances, healthcare innovation is more than a technology play. Effective transformation requires formulating new strategies for payment, reimagining models of care, applying real-time data, and addressing social determinants of health.

In 2019, more than 627 million online records were comprised due to hacking and other types of cyber attacks. This is a pretty staggering number to anyone who has made an online transaction, but the amount of attacks that were stopped is much higher, so it's worth some optimism. As COVID-19 has pushed many companies into the remote work world, online transactions and records are growing exponentially, and most experts believe that remote work will continue to be very popular even after stay-at-home orders get lifted and life goes back to some form of normal. The pros of remote work for businesses are plenty, and for many employees, it is now a requirement when trying to land the best jobs they can find. Costs are lower when employees are remote, employees are generally happier, meaning less employee turnover and the associated time and costs.

An artificial intelligence algorithm has discovered 50 new potential planets that were missed by humans. It analysed data from telescope missions such as Nasa's Kepler and TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which looks for signs of distant planets. As well as being trained to recognise real planets, the algorithm could also detect false positives. Once that was done, researchers from Warwick's Departments of Physics and Computer Science, ran the algorithm against unconfirmed potential planets from Kepler data, finding the new worlds. Previous machine learning tools have ranked planets' likelihood of being planets, but have never been able to determine the probability that they are exoplanets, the scientists said.

A debate that is still hot in the discussion as the United States Presidential election 2020 date draws near. There are many reasons to deploy robots in an election, trade pundits believe that robots are imperative to control the narrative during political debates and skew its discourse. However, it is still not clear to what extent the automated AI-driven bots can manipulate social media activity and what kind of influence they have on public opinion and election outcomes. Bots can exist in all kinds of social media. They can, for example, be active in various forms of discussion forums or commentary fields, Twitter for instance.

Brian Patrick Green is the director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. This article is an update of an earlier article which can be found here [1]. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are rapidly transforming society and will continue to do so in the coming decades. This social transformation will have deep ethical impact, with these powerful new technologies both improving and disrupting human lives. AI, as the externalization of human intelligence, offers us in amplified form everything that humanity already is, both good and evil. At this crossroads in history we should think very carefully about how to make this transition, or we risk empowering the grimmer side of our nature, rather than the brighter. Why is AI ethics becoming a problem now?