Google, a company whose motto used to be "don't be evil," has had its ethics questioned lately over its insistence on developing AI for the Pentagon. If you're among the many people who don't understand why, against the grain, the Mountain View company would risk such damage to its reputation, you're not alone. According to a report from Gizmodo, Google is getting around $9 million. Sure, for most of us that would set us up for life, but let's not forget that Google is worth nearly a trillion dollars. It can afford to skip a project that doesn't suit its ethical makeup.

TORONTO, ON - APRIL 30: Saudi Arabian citizen Humanoid Robot Sophia is seen during the Discovery exhibition on April 30, 2018 in Toronto, Canada. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is nothing if not controversial. Whether the subject of scrutiny behind hair-raising advances in sex robots which was heavily reported the other week or the topic of the latest disgruntled executive voicing opinions about Elon Musk's crusade against AI's perceived perils, all eyes are on this new area in tech. While no one is yet absolutely sure of AI's definitive path, one thing is certain. Value and expenditures pertaining to this area of emerging technology are on a definite upward curve.

The above video was provided by Intel. If you're a six-foot human standing on a paddleboard, it's just as well you don't know that a 60-foot, 40-ton humpback whale with 16-foot flippers is surfacing directly beneath you. The only thing more unsettling would be if there were four 60-ft., 40-ton humpback whales with 16-foot flippers doing the same. Just such a don't-look-down moment played out off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 2016. Ordinarily, it would have been the kind of experience that the paddleboarder--who came through unharmed--would have described to his friends with a helpless "You should've seen it."

Last fourth of July, as fireworks burst across the night sky near the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, S.C., convicted kidnapper Jimmy Causey tucked a lifelike dummy into his bed, sneaked out of his prison cell and completed a daring escape. It wasn't until three days later, when Texas Rangers found Causey holed up 1,200 miles away, that authorities offered an explanation for how he had obtained the equipment for the breakout, including a pair of wire cutters used to snip through four fences that encircle the maximum security prison. "We believe a drone was used to fly in the tools that allowed him to escape," Bryan Stirling, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, told reporters at a news conference. A lengthy investigation confirmed that an accessory role was played by a small, off-the-shelf drone. And with that, law-enforcement and national security officials added "prison breaks" to the potential ill uses lurking in a technology widely available at retailers including Amazon and Walmart.

Six clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) across south east London will soon be able to access VisualDX's AI-powered visual diagnostic tool, as per terms of a deal between the NHS and the healthcare software company. The move, which focuses on enhancing diagnostic accuracy and aiding therapeutic decisions and diagnosis, marks a first for VisualDX, as it launches its first foothold into the UK's National Health Service (NHS). Art Papier, chief executive officer of VisualDX, said: "This agreement with NHS CCGs in South East London helps patients and clinicians alike to share in the decision-making process to optimise patient-centred outcomes in the pursuit of clinical excellence." According to the ECRI Institute, misdiagnoses took the top spot for safety concern among patients. While the cause for each misdiagnosis varies, VisualDX has build a library of more than 41,000 peer-reviewed medical images to help physicians, especially generalists, to make better informed diagnoses by allowing direct imagery comparison and offering diagnostic possibilities.

The European Commission's recent outline of an artificial intelligence strategy does not give in to European Parliament calls to grant personhood for AI. The Commission is right in this, though not for the reasons mentioned in a recent open letter published by experts, writes Thomas Burri. Thomas Burri is Assistant Professor of International Law and European Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. In a resolution of 2017, the European Parliament urged the European Commission to propose what it called "electronic personality" for sophisticated autonomous robots. This move by the European Parliament prompted a number of experts to publish an open letter in April 2018 calling upon the Commission to ignore the Parliament's move and reject "electronic personality".

Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. It suggests not only that hugely successful startups are rare, but also that there's something unreal about them. Founded by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, who went on to become the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, it raised nearly a billion dollars from investors and was valued at $10 billion at its peak. It claimed to have developed technology that dramatically increased the affordability, convenience, and speed of blood testing. It partnered with Safeway and Walgreens, which together spent hundreds of millions of dollars building in-store clinics that were to offer Theranos tests. Tens of thousands of Americans had their blood tested by its proprietary technology. The problem was that Theranos' technology was never close to ready. In a series of devastating articles published in the Wall Street Journal starting in 2015, reporter John Carreyrou reminded us that unicorns are usually found only in fairy tales.

On a video screen projected to a crowd attending the United Nations' summit Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a small drone whizzes past a tech executive. It shoots a projectile into the skull of a test dummy, detonating an explosive that could kill a human. In front of an audience, the executive pitches the drones as "unstoppable" and calls them capable of "an airstrike of surgical precision" that could render nuclear weapons obsolete. The scene quickly cuts to the drones being hijacked by terrorist organizations and going on a killing spree, targeting politicians and social media activists. The film, titled Slaughterbots and produced by the Future of Life Institute, shows how easily autonomous weapons could become weapons of mass destruction.

New technology allows U.S. Soldiers to learn 13 times faster than conventional methods, and Army researchers said this may help save lives. At the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, scientists are improving the rate of learning even with limited resources. It's possible to help Soldiers decipher hints of information faster and come up with quicker solutions, such as recognizing threats like a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device or potential danger zones from aerial war zone images. The researchers relied on low-cost, lightweight hardware and implemented collaborative filtering, a well-known machine learning technique on a state-of-the-art, low-power Field Programmable Gate Array platform to achieve a 13.3 times speedup of training compared to a state-of-the-art optimized multi-core system and 12.7 times speedup for optimized GPU systems. The new technique consumed far less power too.

In early September 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin brought artificial intelligence from the labs of Silicon Valley, academia, and the basement of the Pentagon to the forefront of international politics. "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind," he said. "It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Putin's remarks reflect a belief, growing in sectors and regions across the world, that advances in artificial intelligence will be critical for the future -- in areas as varied as work, society, and military power.