Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order for the "American AI Initiative," to guide AI developments and investments in the following areas: research and development, ethical standards, automation, and international outreach. This initiative is indicative of the changing times, and how, as a country, the U.S. is learning to navigate the implications of AI. Leaders in the business world, specifically, are faced with the responsibility of equipping our employees with the skills necessary for paving long-lasting career paths, and the workforce must discover what will be expected as technology continues to disrupt the norm, and work as we know it. As a global business leader, an AI optimist, and a father, I find myself asking: What will make a career sustainable in 2020 and beyond? Will the future of education rise to meet the demands of the future of work?

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of this document in a more accessible format, please email webmaster@digital.fco.gov.uk. Please tell us what format you need. It will help us if you say what assistive technology you use. The UK's Department for International Trade (DIT) is pleased to announce 12 high-growth Canadian FinTech companies from across 5 major Canadian cities chosen to participate in a trade mission to the UK – 21- 25 October 2019. These leading companies have collectively raised over half a billion in venture capital and are well positioned for global expansion.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes is launching today to fund $200 million in grants over the coming years, which shall go towards benefiting society. "Sustained R&D investments are needed to advance trust in AI systems to ensure they meet society's needs" Building trustworthy AI is at the top of the funding priorities for the new program led by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and supported by a whole bunch of government agencies and their many acronyms. Together, these six areas shall prove to have a profound impact on our lives in the future -- from the management of our food supply to curing and preventing diseases and making giant leaps in our understanding of our place in the cosmos. "Sustained R&D investments are needed to advance trust in AI systems to ensure they meet society's needs and adequately address requirements for robustness, fairness, explainability, and security," according to the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan: 2019 Update. NSF Director France Cordova stated, "Advances in AI are progressing rapidly and demonstrating the potential to transform our lives.

When being empathetic is your full-time job, burning out is only human. Few people are more aware of this than customer service representatives, who are tasked with approaching each conversation with energy and compassion -- whether it's their first call of the day or their 60th. It's their job to make even the most difficult customer feel understood and respected while still providing them accurate information. But over the last few years, an unlikely aide has come forward: artificial intelligence tools designed to help people tap into and maintain "human" characteristics like empathy and compassion. One of these tools is a platform called Cogito, named for the famous Descartes philosophy Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").

I cover AI and future trends for a living. One overreaching theme I've noticed is how AI is being used not to augment people, but to weaponize their data against them. Businesses across almost every industry deploy artificial intelligence to make jobs simpler for staff and tasks easier for consumers. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Indeed unbridled adoption of AI won't just result in job losses, but data purgatory, and an internet that feels more like slavery than education and freedom.

The world's top technology and business leaders gather this week in Yerevan, Armenia for the 23rd World Congress on Information Technology. WCIT is organized by the World Information Technology & Services Alliance, the Consortium of ICT associations of 83 countries representing 90 percent of the industry. Running for 40 years, the WCIT is one of the oldest and most prestigious ICT events in the world that brings together CEOs, investors, policy makers, government officials, academics, and technologists to discuss the current state of the industry as well as where it is going. This year, WCIT has focused its attention on the Power of Decentralization: Promise and Peril. During the congress, held from 6 to 9 October at the Karen Demirchyan Sports and Concert Complex, ICT leaders will explore how information and communications technology (ICT) is transforming the world and our lives, both for better and for worse.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 8 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com Exploding enemy targets with precision artillery, "lasing" ground targets for drone air attack and waging close-combat urban warfare with hand-carried small arms -- are all scenarios entertained recently in high-tech virtual training wargame designed to closely replicate anticipated future warfare. The exercise, intended to virtually "create" high-threat, multi-domain modern warfare, was intended to move the Army closer to its goal of engineering a new "force-on-force" mobile training technology designed to prepare soldiers for the risks and perils of a new kind of war. "This was a computer-based simulation down to the individual model -- using real-time data and responding in a real-world manner," Col. Chris Cassibry, Maneuver Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate's Concepts Development Division director, recently told reporters.

I cover AI and future trends for a living. One overreaching theme I've noticed is how AI is being used not to augment people, but to weaponize their data against them. This is going to be a long read, and it's because I feel a bit passionate about this topic. The debate over free-speech this week related to the Hong Kong protests signals no trade war resolution will take place since a cold tech war also is about information wars and basic freedom of speech. As companies with billion-dollar market caps like Microsoft, Apple and Google cave into creating censorship products, we all lose and begin to enter a potential data-based Neo-Fascism era of control and surveillance.

The United States is blacklisting a group of Chinese tech companies that develop facial recognition and other artificial intelligence technology that the U.S. says is being used to repress China's Muslim minority groups. A move Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department puts the companies on a so-called Entity List for acting contrary to American foreign policy interests. The blacklist effectively bars U.S. firms from selling technology to the Chinese companies without government approval. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a written statement Monday that the U.S. government "will not tolerate the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities within China." The blacklisted companies include Hikvision and Dahua, both of which are global providers of video surveillance technology.