When you think of AI (artificial intelligence), the first thought you may have is in regards to games, recreation, and futuristic robots. After all, AI is the next big thing in virtual video games, taking "reality" to a whole new level. However, AI is so much more than that. There has been a lot of hype about AI in the last couple of years. Again, most of it in the form of promises of faster answers, better outcomes, and improved productivity.

Last week, the White House announced plans to levy tariffs on up to $60 billion of Chinese imports. The primary, and legal, rationale hinges on the little-used Section 301 of a 1974 trade law that permits retaliation against countries that infringe US intellectual-property rights. Determined to halt what it perceives as a steady decline relative to an emergent China, the Trump administration and not a few voices in Congress are embracing a tough-on-China approach that they believe will at long last reassert American primacy. It will not; the strategy and the tactics of this trade war are a classic case of fighting not just the last war but fighting it on the adversary's terrain. Zachary Karabell is head of Global Strategies Envestnet and the president of River Twice Research.

On Thursday, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, gave a speech laying out a new national strategy for artificial intelligence in his country. The French government will spend €1.5 billion ($1.85 billion) over five years to support research in the field, encourage startups, and collect data that can be used, and shared, by engineers. The goal is to start catching up to the US and China and to make sure the smartest minds in AI--hello Yann LeCun--choose Paris over Palo Alto. Directly after his talk, he gave an exclusive and extensive interview, entirely in English, to WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson about the topic and why he has come to care so passionately about it. Nicholas Thompson: First off, thank you for letting me speak with you. It was refreshing to see a national leader talk about an issue like this in such depth and complexity. To get started, let me ask you an easy one. You and your team spoke to hundreds of people while preparing for this. What was the example of how AI works that struck you the most and that made you think, 'Ok, this is going to be really, really important'? Emmanuel Macron: Probably in healthcare--where you have this personalized and preventive medicine and treatment. We had some innovations that I saw several times in medicine to predict, via better analysis, the diseases you may have in the future and prevent them or better treat you.

This story was originally published by CityLab and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. What's 1.6 million square kilometers, weighs 80,000 metric tons, and is three times the size of continental France? That would be the Great Pacific Garbage Patch--the enormous collection of detritus that floats in the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Hawaii and California. Also known as the "GPGP," the patch's sprawl has made it notoriously difficult to measure. But a new study in the journal Scientific Reports has gathered the most comprehensive measurement yet.

While this reality has become more tangible in recent years through consumer technology, such as Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, the applications of AI software are already widespread, ranging from credit card fraud detection at VISA to payload scheduling operations at NASA to insider trading surveillance on the NASDAQ. Broadly defined as the imitation of human cognition by a machine, recent interest in AI has been driven by advances in machine learning, in which computer algorithms learn from data without human direction.1 Most sophisticated processes that involve some form of prediction generated from a large data set use this type of AI, including image recognition, web-search, speech-to-text language processing, and e-commerce product recommendations.2 AI is increasingly incorporated into devices that consumers keep with them at all times, such as smartphones, and powers consumer technologies on the horizon, such as self-driving cars. And there is anticipation that these advances will continue to accelerate: a recent survey of leading AI researchers predicted that, within the next 10 years, AI will outperform humans in transcribing speech, translating languages, and driving a truck.3 Despite a flurry of recent discussion about the role and meaning of AI in medicine, in 2017 nearly 100% of U.S. healthcare will be delivered with 0% AI involvement.

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron promised 1.5 billion euros ($1.85 billion) of public funding into artificial intelligence by 2022 in a bid to reverse a brain drain and catch up with the dominant U.S. and Chinese tech giants. The investment is part of an AI strategy laid out by the centrist leader at the elite College de France research institute in Paris and builds on a report that points to the assets and drawbacks of France in the field. Business-friendly Macron wants to turn France into a "start up nation" and bets that easing labor laws and higher investments technology will create jobs, alleviate the domination of Alphabet's Google, Facebook and lay out the seeds for Europe-based champions. "There's no chance of controlling any effects (of these technologies) or having a say on any adverse effect if we've missed the start of the war," the president said on Thursday in front of a row of ministers and top executives, including BNP Paribas Jean-Laurent Bonnafé. He spoke between two black boards covered with complex equations in the main amphitheatre of the institute, founded in the 16th century.

Debris disks around stars are good indicators of exoplanets. As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets. Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself. The scale of the search demands automation: There are nearly 750 million possible light sources in the data accumulated through NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission alone. In tests, the machine-learning system agreed with human identifications of debris disks 97 percent of the time.

To put it like it is, entrepreneurs now see artificial intelligence as the most effective competitive edge one can install in their business. However initially, not many establishments could afford its cost –but now, thank goodness that AI can be served from the clouds as a service. Yes, the cloud is making sharing of top technologies easier than ever, in fact, the platform has made available amazing computing powers and software possibilities to customers with low financial strength, worldwide. AI software being the most sought of all technologies. IDC puts it clear that going by the current demand in cognitive and AI systems which has raised to 50% according to Compound Annual Growth Rate, spending on these techs will shoot to 57 billion come 2021, from the current state of $12 amount.

Tech Review (TR 2018-03-31)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech news with commentary, analysis and opinion: Features • 1) Why Alibaba and Tencent Dominate Mobile Payments, 2) AI & Deep Learning Conference GTC 2018 NVIDIA, 3) Investing: The Week, Investing Notes, 4) ICYMI Tech News. 1) How Alibaba and Tencent Became Dominant in Mobile Payments Chinese tech companies Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) and Tencent have emerged as global leaders in mobile-payment technology. This animated video charts the key steps along their rise to the top. March 26-29, 2018 Check out the latest and greatest from the first days of #GTC18, the world's premier AI event. Get all the keynote highlights at https://t.co/1dwOgpzMJU. "We've been pioneering this computing approach called GPU computing for over the last decade," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said.

To avoid misuse of artificial intelligence, French President Emmanuel Macron proposed setting up a panel akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. France is going big on artificial intelligence (AI). President Emmanuel Macron yesterday announced a €1.5 billion plan to turn his country into a world leader for AI research and innovation, a field dominated by the United States and China. It calls for a hefty investment, a handful of specialized institutes, a focus on ethics and open data, and a call to recruit foreign researchers and French scientists working abroad to the country, not unlike Macron's 2017 "Make Our Planet Great Again" climate initiative. Macron presented his plans in a lengthy speech peppered with erudite references and touches of humor at the end of the"AI for Humanity" conference in Paris.