Editor's Note: This piece was written by Gary Newgaard, Vice President, Public Sector at Pure Storage. The opinions represented in this piece are independent of Smart Cities Dive's views. Ask average citizens about their biggest frustrations in dealing with government organizations and you're likely to conjure up at least a few stories of never-ending lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Bureaucracy and manual processes have, fairly or not, become synonymous with the business of government. They upset constituents, and chances are they don't help government workers get their jobs done, either.

Several years ago, Canary Pete's political cartoon flooded email inboxes and social media pages. The humorous illustration showed a middle-aged executive walking into a typical job interview, with the exception that he had to build his own office chair (since he was applying to work at IKEA). Pete's satire might be short-lived, as last week the robotics industry achieved a new milestone – building an IKEA chair in less than 10 minutes! It is unclear how soon bots will be replacing human assemblers like TaskRabbit, but in the the words of Jackie DeChamps, Chief Operating Officer of IKEA USA,"We are always looking at ways we can innovate and help make our customers' lives at home easier." Addressing the elephant in the room, I debated a colleague earlier this month at The Frontier Conference in New Orleans. I expressed that it is critical for mechatronic companies to engage early with organized labor for successful deployments.

The European Commission launched today the 3rd Data Economy Package aiming to assess emerging data issues to ensure a fair Digital Single Market. Also, the Communication on Artificial Intelligence (AI) was released – the EU's first step to look at the ethical questions surrounding AI. BusinessEurope Director General Markus J. Beyrer commented: "Comprehensive assessment is a good approach to foster digital technologies. Not every technological advance needs to be followed by legislation, only real market failures should be legislated for. The existing liability framework is fit for purpose. Although completely autonomous systems could need adapted rules in the future – we are not there yet. We need a balanced approach for the access of data. Openness is essential for the development of the digital economy, at the same time it is crucial that investments are protected. In our Digital Single Market, we prefer having contractual solutions because a number of parties with various roles are involved in the provision of digital services."

Brussels has called for a €20bn (£14bn) cash injection for artificial intelligence research, while pouring cold water over controversial plans to give robots human rights. The European commission wants governments and private companies to boost research and innovation spending on AI, amid rising concern Europe is losing ground to the US and China, where most leading AI firms are based. Health, transport and agriculture are among the areas the commission would like researchers to prioritise. But the commission distanced itself from proposals to give the most advanced robots the legal status of personhood. "I don't think it will happen," Andrus Ansip, a commission vice-president in charge of digital single-market policy told journalists.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission will boost its investment in artificial intelligence by about 70 percent to 1.5 billion euros ($1.83 billion) by 2020 to catch up with Asia and the United States, which are each investing at least three times more than Europe. Artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize sectors from healthcare to transport to agriculture and Europe is keen not to be left behind in the digital race. The Commission, the EU executive, wants total private and public investment in AI to reach at least 20 billion euros by the end of 2020 to ensure the bloc retains competitiveness and does not face a brain drain. In 2016 European private investments in AI totaled around 2.4-3.2 billion euros, compared to Asia's almost 10 billion euros and America's 18 billion euros. "Just as the steam engine and electricity did in the past, AI is transforming our world," said Andrus Ansip, Vice-President of the European Commission, on Wednesday.

Long, narrowly spaced rows of shelves fill a multi-storey building about the size of two sports fields. The shelves are lined with open containers of food and water. It is warm, humid and dark all year round, with freedom to roam to find food and reproduce. Fully sealed like a prison, it has strict limitations on access to visitors. From birth to death, inhabitants never see the sun.

"Today, we are giving a boost to researchers so that they can develop the next generation of AI technologies and applications, and to companies, so that they can embrace and incorporate them." Other European countries such as France and Britain have also made AI investment a priority. French President Emmanuel Macron promised 1.5 billion euros of public money for AI in March. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.

Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov settled into the commander's chair in a secret bunker outside Moscow. His job that night was simple: Monitor the computers that were sifting through satellite data, watching the United States for any sign of a missile launch. It was just after midnight, Sept. 26, 1983. A single word flashed on the screen in front of him. The fear that computers, by mistake or malice, might lead humanity to the brink of nuclear annihilation has haunted imaginations since the earliest days of the Cold War.

The notion that we should understand how artificial intelligences make decisions is gaining increasing currency. As we face a future in which important decisions affecting the course of our lives may be made by artificial intelligence (AI), the idea that we should understand how AIs make decisions is gaining increasing currency. Which hill to position a 20-year-old soldier on, who gets (or does not get) a home mortgage, which treatment a cancer patient receives … such decisions, and many more, already are being made based on an often unverifiable technology. "The problem is that not all AI approaches are created equal," says Jeff Nicholson, a vice president at Pega Systems Inc., makers of AI-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. "Certain'black box' approaches to AI are opaque and simply cannot be explained."

"In the US, it is entirely driven by the private sector, large corporations, and some startups dealing with them. All the choices they will make are private choices that deal with collective values," warned Macron. "On the other side, Chinese players collect a lot of data driven by a government whose principles and values are not ours," he pointed out. Macron showed in the thought-provoking interview he knew that if you want to shape how AI will affect us, you have to be involved at the design stage, and set the rules. "If we want to defend our way to deal with privacy, our collective preference for individual freedom versus technological progress, integrity of human beings and human DNA, if you want to manage your own choice of society, your choice of civilisation, you have to be able to be an acting part of this AI revolution," the French leader said, adding he wanted to "frame the discussion at a global scale". A similar message is due to come out of Brussels on Wednesday (25 April), when the European Commission presents its strategy paper on artificial intelligence - namely, that the EU should take the lead to shape the ethics of AI.