China, India, Japan, France and the European Union are crafting bold plans for artificial intelligence (AI). They see AI as a means to economic growth and social progress. Meanwhile, the U.S. disbanded its AI taskforce in 2016. The U.S. technology sector has long been a driver of global economic growth. From the PC to the Internet, the greatest advancements of the past 50 years were spawned in the U.S.

Almost everyone knows the story of HAL 9000, the killer supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's landmark film 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose 50th anniversary will be celebrated on May 12, 2018 at the 71st Cannes Film Festival. In an intriguing scheduling coincidence, IBM, Kubrick's partner during the filming of A Space Odyssey, and Airbus have just unveiled the CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) project, an "intelligent, mobile and interactive astronaut assistance system" that will join the International Space Station. These two events propel us into a debate over the risks created by the development of superintelligence that could eliminate jobs on a massive scale or, even worse, wipe the human species off the face of the planet – and raise the question of how to assess such a threat. To date, we have no experience of accidents or disasters due to faulty or malicious AI. However, the imaginations of artists and scientists are a treasure trove of material that tells the story of superintelligence freed from any human control.

Investigators from the Mayo Clinic and AliveCor demonstrated that a trained artificial intelligence network can help identify people at increased risk of arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death despite displaying a normal heart rhythm on their electrocardiogram. Up to half of patients with long QT syndrome can show a normal interval on a standard test, the personal EKG manufacturer AliveCor said in a statement. Correct diagnoses and treatment can be crucial, especially when using drugs that may prolong heartbeats. The researchers' deep neural network generated the results using data from a single lead of a 12-lead EKG--measuring the voltage between the left and right arms--suggesting that simpler, portable devices may be used to detect the concealed heart condition, the company said. The network had an overall accuracy of 79%, with 73% sensitivity and 81% specificity.

The U.S. Postal Service is reporting another quarterly loss. That's because strong gains in package deliveries were outweighed by an unrelenting decline in mail volume and the costs of its health care and pension obligations.

Lately, there has been a lot of concern about the recent explosion of AI, and how it could reach the point of 1) being more intelligent than humans, and 2) that it could decide that it no longer needs us and could in fact, take over the Earth. Physicist Stephen Hawking famously told the BBC: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Billionaire Elon Musk has said that he thinks AI is the "biggest existential threat" to the human race. Computers running the latest AI have already beaten humans at games ranging from Chess to Go to esports games (which is interesting, because this is a case where AI could be better than humans at playing games which were built as software from the ground up, unlike Chess and Go, which were developer before the computer age). AI has been making dramatic leaps over the past few years -- the question that Hawking and Musk are asking is: Could AI evolve to the point where it could replace humans? If this scenario sounds like science fiction, it's one that science fiction writers have posed again and again. One of the most popular is of course, Skynet, the intelligence that takes over in the Terminator universe and decides to wipe out most of humanity and enslave the rest (except for the resistance fighters, led by John Conner, but that involves a terminator travelling back in time, and time travel will be handled in another essay). In perhaps equally popular trilogy of the Matrix, super-intelligent machines take over the planet as well, but rather than killing humans they enslave them in a unique way. In order to ensure that electricity generated by the human brain can be put to use, the super-intelligent machines put humans in pods, keeping our minds busy playing a giant video game or simulation (i.e. the Matrix).

The White house Office of Science and Technology Policy hosts its first ever summit on AI; Gillian Turner reports.

America is great at artificial intelligence--and it's going to get even greater. So the White House trumpeted Thursday, in the current administration's first substantial engagement with the technology widely predicted to upend every area of life and society. At a meeting that mingled industry, academia, and government, the Trump White House framed AI as a path to continued economic dominance over other nations. The exercise also seemed to expose an administration that lags other countries--and even its US predecessor--in developing its views and strategy on AI's implications and government's role in managing them. "America has been the global leader in AI, and the Trump administration will ensure our great nation remains the global leader in AI," the president's deputy assistant for technology policy, Michael Kratsios said at the meeting's opening.

Transportation is a world full of visionaries: big ideas gone even bigger. It attracts world shakers (and breakers) like Grimes' Boyfriend, Travis Kalanick, and Mark Moore, a 30-year NASA veteran who decamped last year for Uber's new flying car project. There are lots of fanciful renderings and prototypes, lots of pulled-off covers and pointing of spotlights. Plans that run out of money, petering out and puttering toward death. Cars that crash and kill. Which is all to say: It was a mixed bag of a week.

The White House has finally broken its silence on the issue of artificial intelligence (AI), and the results are a mixed bag. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced the start of a new AI technology committee that will uphold President Trump's'America first' mentality in the tech sector. The Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence was announced at a recent White House AI summit by Michael Kratsios, Trump's deputy chief technology officer and the de facto head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). At the @WhiteHouse #AI Summit today, @WHOSTP DepAsst Michael Kratsios announced new Select Committee of federal leaders to coordinate research and rollout pic.twitter.com/WQH8gBvPCe Tech figures received the news with enthusiasm. "Today's White House meeting is critical to ensuring the potential of AI is achieved and advanced in a fashion that is broadly beneficial to Americans," said Dean Garfield, the President of Information Technology Industry Council, a lobbying group for major technology firms.

Technology, internet in particular, has enabled the democratization of information and news. But it has come with a price. Or this: a video in which Mukesh Ambani makes a calamitous-worthy announcement, sending the stock market into a tizzy and shareholders scurrying to save their asses. These two instances are not slices from a dystopian fictional account, but could be possible, thanks to the disruptive powers of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The marriage between news dissemination and technology has already led to the unwitting and disastrous birth of fake news.