Robots could bring about a four-day working week in Britain as automation and artificial intelligence increase workplace efficiency, a new study has revealed. If new technologies were passed on to staff, they would be able to generate their current weekly economic output in just four days. Even relatively modest gains from using robots and AI had the potential to give British workers Scandinavian levels of leisure time, according to research done by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank. The research will boost John McDonnell's plans to reduce hours in the working week The conclusions of the study will come as a boost to John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, who wants to look at reducing hours in the working week. TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady used her speech to the organisation's annual gathering last month to call for a four-day working week, saying that it should be achievable by the end of the century.

Important resources like minerals, oil and diamonds often go hand-in-hand with conflict and poor governance. But when it comes to one particular resource -- the most important resource of all -- many think a different theory will hold true. Often referred to as the water wars thesis, it suggests that growing water scarcity will drive violent conflict as access to water dries up for certain communities. Analysts worry that people, opportunistic politicians and powerful corporations will battle for dwindling water supply, inflaming tensions. In a new study, researchers tried to map out how water wars will emerge around the world and which countries are most likely to see water-related conflict in the coming decades.

Former DARPA director and leader of secretive skunkworks divisions at Facebook and Google Regina Dugan said companies need to think about how using AI technology can go wrong in order to try to understand the ethical, societal, and legal implications of their work. More specifically, she suggests technologists and engineers working with emergent technologies practice red teaming and blue teaming to imagine best and worst-case scenarios. Doing both allows you to consider how to mitigate negative consequences. Thinking in these terms should take place at the earliest stages in order for changes to have long-term impact. "I think it's impossible to know at any one point in time what all the unintended consequences will be," Dugan said in an interview with Samsung Electronics president and chief strategy officer Young Sohn.

Across various domains--such as health, education, and housing--improving societal welfare involves allocating resources, setting policies, targeting interventions, and regulating activities. These solutions have an immense impact on the day-to-day lives of individuals, whether in the form of access to quality healthcare, labor market outcomes, or how votes are accounted for in a democratic society. Problems that can have an out-sized impact on individuals whose opportunities have historically been limited often pose conceptual and technical challenges, requiring insights from many disciplines. Conversely, the lack of interdisciplinary approach can leave these urgent needs unaddressed and can even exacerbate underlying socioeconomic inequalities. To realize the opportunities in these domains, we need to correctly set objectives and reason about human behavior and actions. Doing so requires a deep grounding in the field of interest and collaboration with domain experts who understand the societal implications and feasibility of proposed solutions. These insights can play an instrumental role in proposing algorithmically-informed policies. In this article, we describe the Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) research agenda, which involves using insights from algorithms, optimization, and mechanism design to improve access to opportunity. The MD4SG research community takes an interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to improve societal welfare. We discuss three exciting research avenues within MD4SG related to improving access to opportunity in the developing world, labor markets and discrimination, and housing. For each of these, we showcase ongoing work, underline new directions, and discuss potential for implementing existing work in practice.

As has become an unwelcome tradition, as Friday wound down and the weekend was so close we could nearly taste it, breaking news hit. The biggest Friday night bombshell came in the form of an indictment of a Russian national engaged in a massive conspiracy to influence the upcoming midterm elections. With millions of dollars at her disposal, she and her co-conspirators have allegedly been engaging in a coordinated effort to use Americans' weaknesses and divisions against us, to amp up racial discord, and generally sow chaos and discontent. Of course, it wasn't like the week had been drama free up until that point. The fun, if you can call it that, began last Saturday, when Robert Mueller expert Garrett Graff explained what he expected to see next from the investigation into Russia's attack on the 2016 election.

Some women can be treated with lumpectomies, which conserve the breast. But more women are turning to mastectomies, not only to treat breast cancer, but also to prevent it; the rate of mastectomies increased 36 percent from 2005 to 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Efforts to develop artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly being framed as a global race, or even a new Great Game. In addition to the race between countries to build national competencies and establish a competitive advantage, firms are also in a contest to acquire AI talent, leverage data advantages, and offer unique services. In both cases, success will depend on whether AI solutions can be democratized and distributed across sectors. The global AI race is unlike any other global competition, because the extent to which innovation is being driven by the state, the corporate sector, or academia differs substantially from country to country. On average, though, the majority of innovations so far have emerged from academia, with governments contributing through procurement, rather than internal research and development.

The late Stephen Hawking did not believe in an afterlife, but he has one all the same. He has appeared as a co-author in two posthumous research papers since he died in March. One takes a fresh look at the problem of just how complex the universe far beyond our horizon could be; the other returns to the intractable but apparently not entirely insoluble problem of what happens to information once it falls into a black hole. This second paper is a response to a paradox that concerns only theoretical physicists but the first addresses the machinery of creation that seems to have needed no creator. Not surprisingly, he returns to both themes and many more in what his publishers call his final thoughts.

But if this is to happen, the Cambridge University Professor believes a political rethink is required: "As to whether that will happen or not will depend on whether this county's politicians are prepared to learn from Scandinavian countries instead of the US. "Scandinavia has a good welfare state and high taxation, the opposite to the US, with its very inadequate welfare state and low taxes. "The present government seems to admire the US system more." The celebrated cosmologist and astrophysicist does however foresee a difficulty with collecting taxes from these multinational tech giants, based on current controversies over their tax arrangements. Facebook's UK tax bill, for example, is 0.62 percent of their £1.3billion

Tim Cook has hit back at Bloomberg for a story claiming the servers of tech giants including Apple contained spy chips. Apple, Amazon and Super Micro, the Chinese motherboard manufacturer Bloomberg claimed introduced the chips, all deny claims the chips, which were'not much bigger than a grain of rice,' would have given China unprecedented backdoor access to computers and data. There is no truth in their story about Apple,' Cook told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview. 'They need to do that right thing and retract it.' Apple CEO Tim Cook, center, talks with Qu Zhangcai, left, and Liu Zhipeng, right, founders of the Xichuangzhu software app, during a visit to the Confucius Tempe in Beijing earlier this month.