Vermont lawmakers are considering legislation to create an artificial intelligence task force. If the bill wins final approval, Vermont will be the first state in the country to take this step. Milo Cress, a junior at Champlain Valley Union High School, went to the Vermont Statehouse this winter to testify in favor of this bill. Vermont Edition recently spoke to Cress about his interest in this subject and the advice he gave state lawmakers looking at the bill. The below interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

A team of computer scientists and a lawyer at University of Washington are raising a curious question: Do current US laws cover cutting-edge research that allows people to bend AI to their will? The research, called adversarial machine learning, takes advantage of the way AI looks at the world, tricking the algorithm to make a different decision than it was designed to make. For example, an attacker might trick AI into perceiving a stop sign as a speed limit sign, or poison an automated credit-rating system in order to get a cheaper loan. The issue could affect every tech company using AI today: If this kind of intervention constitutes hacking, are companies now legally required to protect their systems from adversarial machine learning as they do typical hacking? And if this is not hacking under the legal definition, who's responsible if an attacker crashes someone else's car by tricking its AI?

It's been nearly two weeks since a self-driving Uber killed a woman crossing an Arizona street, but the crash still hangs over the future of the auto industry--even as it gathered this week for the New York International Auto Show. Shows like this are all about spreading visions of the future, through personal, up-close interactions with the coolest concepts and hottest products designers could muster. So while Arizona Governor Doug Ducey banned Uber from testing in Arizona indefinitely, SF Motors showed off a sweet electric SUV and Waymo peacocked its new partnership with Jaguar Land Rover and its all-electric i-Pace. It all feels a little incongruous? But also a good reminder that all is not bleak.

Let's make one thing clear: one year isn't going to fix decades of gender discrimination in computer science and all the problems associated with it. Recent diversity reports show that women still make up only 20 percent of engineers at Google and Facebook, and an even lower proportion at Uber. But after the parade of awful news about the treatment of female engineers in 2017--sexual harassment in Silicon Valley and a Google engineer sending out a memo to his coworkers arguing that women are biologically less adept at programming, just to name a couple--there is actually reason to believe that things are looking up for 2018, especially when it comes to AI. At first glance, AI would seem among least likely areas of programming to be friendly to women. Writing in Fast Company recently, Hanna Wallach, an AI researcher and cofounder of the Women in Machine Learning Conference, said that only 13.5 percent of those working in machine learning are female.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer the stuff of science fiction; it is here, and it is real. We at PwC project that AI will contribute an additional US$15.7 trillion to global GDP by 2030, an increase of 14%. The greatest economic gains will be in China and North America accounting for almost 70% of the global economic impact. Yes, robots will take some human jobs--especially those that involve repetitive tasks--but that's not the whole story. AI promises to enhance the way we live and work and, if introduced properly, offset jobs lost with new, more fulfilling ones.

A law requiring that a safety assistant be present during long-distance commercial drone operations will be scrapped, according to new rules announced Thursday by the transport and industry ministries. Under the rule change planned for the end of the year, when flying a drone that moves beyond an operator's line of sight, a safety assistant will no longer be required to keep the aircraft in view if flight safety can be fully ensured remotely through devices such as cameras and sensors. The government is seeking to make it easier for companies to use drones to deliver packages to difficult-to-reach places, with the aim of making them able to fully service mountainous areas by the end of the year. The new rules also say that, regardless of whether an operator is accompanied by an assistant, a drone that is out of sight must have a long safety record and stay below an altitude of 150 meters.

Foreign fourth-generation descendants of Japanese will be able to work in Japan for up to five years under a preferential visa program to be introduced this summer, the Justice Ministry said Friday. The new program applies to ethnic Japanese between 18 and 30 who have basic Japanese skills equivalent to the N4 level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Applicants will also be required to have support from residents they know in Japan, such as family members or employers, who can get in touch with them at least once a month. Among those planning to apply are people who spent their childhoods in Japan with their parents before losing their jobs during the 2008 global financial crisis. Some of their parents later returned to Japan, but their grown-up fourth-generation offspring could not because the visa system only grants preferential full-time working rights and semi-permanent status to second- and third-generation descendants.

It's time to identify the trends that will shape the global web development market in 2018 and beyond! All rights reserved 2017 R-Style Lab 6. HOW WILL AI IMPACT WEB DEVELOPMENT IN 2018? All rights reserved 2017 R-Style Lab 7. FOCUS ON SECURITY All rights reserved 2017 R-Style Lab 8. IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW… • Cybercrime has become a $ 600 billion opportunity; • Over 200 thousand malware samples are captured on a daily basis; • In 2021, cyberattacks will cost enterprises & individual users $ 6 trillion (up from $ 3 trillion in 2016); • Nearly 43% of cyberattacks now target small- and medium-sized businesses. All rights reserved 2017 R-Style Lab 9. New threats force companies to increase cybersecurity spending (from $ 80 billion in 2016 to $ 1 trillion in 2021). All rights reserved 2017 R-Style Lab 10.

Maintaining regulatory compliance is a daunting task. Up to 200 regulatory changes occur every day, varying from large scale regulation like Dodd Frank, to minute changes to the font and size of footnotes in regulation text. The cost of not being compliant is astronomical – since 2008, more than $50 billion in fines have been paid. Banks and financial institutions are looking for any advantage they can get to streamline operations and reduce compliance costs. IBM Think, the three-and-a-half day event that emphasizes'mankind machine', highlights using IBM's vast background in cognitive computing to, in this instance, help compliance professionals to play by the rules and maintain compliance, avoid sizeable penalties and leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to make their jobs easier.

According to OECD predictions, exceeding budgets on health spending remains an issue for OECD countries. Maintaining today's healthcare systems and funding future medical advances will be difficult without major reforms. Public expenditure on health and long-term care in OECD countries is set to increase from around 6 percent of GDP today to almost 9 percent in 2030 and 14 percent by 2060. Moreover, in 2011 a study of the World Economic Forum estimated that the global economic impact of the five leading chronic diseases -- cancer, diabetes, mental illness, heart disease, and respiratory disease -- could reach $47 trillion over the next 20 years. The estimated cumulative output loss caused by the illnesses, which together already kill more than 36 million people a year and are predicted to kill tens of millions more in the future, represents around 4 percent of annual global GDP over the coming two decades, the study said.