Uncle Sam is padding the Treasury with millions of dollars to assess bots at the same time that corporations invest more in advanced technology and labor-saving machinery, according to experts. New "robot" taxes are expected to multiply in the coming decades as millions of Americans see their jobs automated away. "Yes, governments already tax robots because they tax virtually everything that goes into developing and making robots," economist and author Mark Thornton told The Post. "In a few cases, there are subsidies such as government grants for robot development. But that still means they are taxing you and me to provide the subsidies." Taxing robots -- a proposal first suggested by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 2017 as a way for government to tame the inexorable ascent of machines, and to finance new programs like elder care and education -- is back on the front burner.

Artificial intelligence is now being used to make decisions about lives, livelihoods, and interactions in the real world in ways that pose real risks to people. We were all skeptics once. Not that long ago, conventional wisdom held that machine intelligence showed great promise, but it was always just a few years away. Today there is absolute faith that the future has arrived. It's not that surprising with cars that (sometimes and under certain conditions) drive themselves and software that beats humans at games like chess and Go.

LINCOLN -- Through a $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, a University of Nebraska–Lincoln research team is developing ways to maximize …

Not so long ago, stories about cyberwar started with scary hypotheticals: What if state-sponsored hackers were to launch widespread attacks that blacked out entire cities? Crippled banks and froze ATMs across a country? Today, these scenarios are no longer hypotheticals: Every one of those events has now actually occurred. Incident by catastrophic incident, cyberwar has left the pages of overblown science fiction and the tabletops of Pentagon war games to become a reality. More than ever before, it's become clear that the threat of hacking goes beyond nuisance vandalism, criminal profiteering, and even espionage to include the sort of physical-world disruption that was once possible to accomplish only with military attacks and terroristic sabotage. So far, there's no clearly documented case of a cyberwar attack directly causing loss of life. But a single cyberwar attack has already caused as much as $10 billion dollars in economic damage.

And to demonstrate exactly how absurd the problem is, a new AI called Grover, developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Washington (and spotted by AI Weirdness), allows you to enter a headline, and it will generate hundreds of words of convincing, fake text that looks like it belongs in the New York Times or on CNN. Luckily for you, the researchers put Grover's fake news generator online for anyone to try. And let me say, from personal experience, that it can create some doozies. For a test, I wrote the headline: "Why Donald Trump Eats 100 Cheeseburgers a Day." This is an article that even I, a journalist, don't know how I'd go about writing.

After a year of development, Huawei today announced the commercial availability of the Huawei Ascend 910 AI computing chip and the machine learning framework MindSpore. Huawei says the Ascend 910 is the world's fastest AI processor, packing twice the performance of rival Nvidia's Tesla v100. Billed as the single chip with the greatest computing density, Ascend 910 delivers performance of up to 256 teraFLOPS under FP16 and 512 teraOPS under IN8 with declared max power consumption of 310W. In comparison, the GPU Tesla V100 delivers up to 125 teraFLOPS with a max power consumption of 300W, while Google's TPU 2.0 with four ASICs can reach 180 teraFLOPS. Ascend 910 is designed for deep learning training, and targets users such data scientists, researchers and engineers.

When HSBC thwarted a $500 million central-bank heist, sophisticated computer software didn't raise the alarm. The funds flowed undetected from Angola's reserves to a dormant company's account in London. It was a teller at a suburban bank branch who became suspicious, declined a request to transfer $2 million, and triggered a review that uncovered the scam, according to one account of the episode. That was two years ago, and the finance industry's battle to stop the illicit transfer of as much as $2 trillion a year around the globe hasn't become any easier. At least a half-dozen lenders in Europe have found themselves at the centre of fresh allegations of dirty money schemes in the past year.

If you want to understand what's happening with artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity, look no further than this week's news. On Monday, Palo Alto Networks introduced Magnifier, a behavioral analytics solution that uses structured and unstructured machine learning to model network behavior and improve threat detection. Additionally, Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced Chronicle, a cybersecurity intelligence platform that throws massive amounts of storage, processing power, and advanced analytics at cybersecurity data to accelerate the search and discovery of needles in a rapidly growing haystack. So, cybersecurity suppliers are innovating to bring AI-based cybersecurity products to market in a big way. OK, but is there demand for these types of advanced analytics products and services?

Recently, in cognizance of this seismic shift, the world's top AI researchers met in Asilomar, California to deliberate on AI principles and goals. In doing so, this eminent artificial intelligence society gifted humanity a framework of how to own the future. It is only by navigating AI ethical dilemmas, that we will avail the life saving technologies of applied artificial intelligence. The EU in its Responsible Research and Innovation initiative calls for investment in legal, social and ethics [LSE] research. Investment in LSE research will generate knowledge that can match artificial intelligence goals and society's needs.

Security threats to businesses have always been there -now it only shifted from physical to cyberspace. So, today's business world revolves around "data," which adds intrinsic value to both businesses and consumers. Since business operations have become smarter with technology, so does the manipulation. Enhanced technology changes the very nature of business. Manipulation in the hands of technology is especially true for all the leading business giants, investing in AI to foster their cybersecurity system.