In 2018, several high-profile controversies involving AI served as a wake-up call for technologists, policymakers, and the public. The technology may have brought us welcome advances in many fields, but it can also fail catastrophically when built shoddily or applied carelessly. It's hardly a surprise, then, that Americans have mixed support for the continued development of AI and overwhelmingly agree that it should be regulated, according to a new study from the Center for the Governance of AI and Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. These are important lessons for policymakers and technologists to consider in the discussion on how best to advance and regulate AI, says Allan Dafoe, director of the center and coauthor of the report. "There isn't currently a consensus in favor of developing advanced AI, or that it's going to be good for humanity," he says.

You've made it to the fourth and final day of our CES 2019 liveblog. By now we've toured most of the expo halls, seen most of the demos, and touched most of the gadgets. Follow along to see reports from Thursday at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the newest updates appearing at the top. For more coverage, try the liveblogs from Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, and the photo galleries from Tuesday and Wednesday. After roaming CES for nearly a week trying devices that don't make hot chocolate, I was incredibly receptive to the Infini Mix by Japanese company Stuff, which does nothing but make glass after glass of delicious hot cocoa.

A police force in the UK is using an algorithm to help decide which crimes are solvable and should be investigated by officers. As a result, the force trialling it now investigates roughly half as many reported assaults and public order offences. This saves time and money, but some have raised concerns that the algorithm could bake in human biases and lead to some solvable cases being ignored. The tool is currently only used for assessing assaults and public order offences, but may be extended to other crimes in the future. When a crime is reported to police, an officer is normally sent to the scene to find out basic facts. An arrest can be made straight away, but in the majority of cases police officers use their experience to decide whether a case is investigated further.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere but it is considered in a wholly ahistorical way. To understand the impact AI will have on our lives, it is vital to appreciate the context in which the field was established. After all, statistics and state control have evolved hand in hand for hundreds of years. Its origins have been traced not only to analytic philosophy, pure mathematics and Alan Turing, but perhaps surprisingly, to the history of public administration. In "The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer" from 2003, Jon Agar of University College London charts the development of the British civil service as it ballooned from 16,000 employees in 1797 to 460,000 by 1999.

At Wake Radiology in North Carolina, roughly 50 doctors scrutinize x-rays and other images for local medical providers. Within a few weeks, they should start to get help on some lung CT scans from machine-learning algorithms that highlight potentially cancerous tissue nodules. Although Wake is based in a region known as the Research Triangle, for its intensity of high-tech R&D, the lung-reading software hails from elsewhere--China. Infervision, a four-year-old Beijing startup, has amassed more than a million scans from Chinese hospitals that it's using to train and test algorithms. Gathering medical data is much easier for Chinese companies than for their US counterparts, because patient populations are larger and the burden of privacy regulations smaller. "In the US, particularly for big academic hospitals, you have to go through so many processes and it can take a really long time to access data," says Yufeng Deng, Infervision's chief scientist.

The Health and Human Services Department sees value in integrating automation and artificial intelligence technologies into its workflows and is building a contract vehicle to help other agencies, as well. The Program Support Center, a shared services agency within Health and Human Services, released a request for proposals Thursday for the Intelligent Automation/Artificial Intelligence, or IAAI, contract. The five-year, $49 million contract vehicle will offer a host of automation and AI technologies and support services, including robotic process automation, machine and supervised learning and machine vision. "PSC believes that IAAI solutions will be doing everything from reducing backlog and cutting costs to performing functions, such as predicting fraudulent transactions and identifying critical suspects via facial recognition, which are considered difficult for an individual to complete on their own," contracting officers wrote in the RFP. The center's efforts fall in line with the administration's policy of shifting federal employees from low-value to high-value work by automating rote processes that can be digitized.

Footage has emerged showing bizarre prototypes of military contraptions during a parade in Ghana. A robot'walking tank' shaped like a pair of human legs and a giant armoured vehicle with leather seats inside were among the items on display at the event, said to have taken place in the capital, Accra. There were also people walking in military fatigue-coloured exoskeletons, in what appeared to be a product launch by manufacturer Kantanka. It is unclear whether the new products have any connection to the official Ghanaian military. Footage from the event shows the men in exoskeletons taking cumbersome steps in their heavy gear.

Technology built for self-driving cars could be the next step in the US fight against illegal immigrants arriving from Mexico. Lidar, a laser-based detection system, would cost far less to install than a border fence and could alert authorities to people trying to cross the border. Quanergy Systems, a start-up company based in California, presented its Lidar-based system at CES in Las Vegas. The firm claims it is better for the environment, cheaper to operate and'more capable' than Donald Trump's proposed physical wall. His plans for a border wall have been fiercely opposed by Democrats, forcing a shutdown of the US federal government.

An asteroid-circling spacecraft has captured a unique snapshot of home. NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft took the picture days before going into orbit around asteroid Bennu on New Year's Eve. The tiny asteroid - barely one-third of a mile (500 meters) across - appears as a big bright blob in the long-exposure photo released last week. NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft took the picture before going into orbit around asteroid Bennu. Seventy million miles (110 million kilometers) away, Earth appears as a white dot in the lower left, with the moon an even smaller dot but still clearly visible.

Japan has deployed robots to work in Tokyo subway stations to help tourists in preparation for the 2020 Olympic Games. The six-foot robot named Arisa, created by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, will give subway travellers directions and show them the way to the restrooms. Tokyo is facing an influx of millions of spectators for the forthcoming international event which they will host for the second time in history, after 1964. An ageing population and low birth rate has resulted in a national labour shortage, prompting the need for multilingual Arisa to guide the swarm of foreign tourists. Japan has deployed robots to work in Tokyo subway stations to direct tourists in preparation for the 2020 Olympic Games. Arisa is a project by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.