Sophia, a humanoid robot with Saudi Arabian citizenship, speaks during the United Nation's innovation conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, on March 21, 2018. Sophia, who is now a citizen of Saudi Arabia, is the most advanced robot with artificial intelligence developed by a Hong Kong based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia, a social humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics, addressed a conference on the theme'Public Services and Development' organised by the United Nations Development Programme, at Hotel Yak & Yeti, in Durbarmarg, Kathmandu, on Wednesday. Sophia started the speech with a joke on how the moderator was not like Nepali actor Anmol KC and when asked about her view on how artificial intelligence can help better public services in Nepal, she said, "the opportunities are endless," adding that AI can help improve the education sector, develop medicine, connect remote areas of Nepal to the centre, and help develop Nepal fulfill the Sustainable Development Goals. Similarly, in an answer to what she, as an AI can do, she claims that maybe she will be the first non-human to climb the Mount Everest.

Jeff Bezos has his left foot propped up on a fire pit, his face illuminated by the flames. A drink in his hand, he's feeling relaxed, often bursting out in that signature bellow of a laugh. Joining Bezos at the firepit that night and over the course of three days at the Parker Hotel in Palm Springs, California are about 200 of the world's smartest and most accomplished people–among them: two astronauts, at least one Nobel Prize winner, the former head of DARPA, NASA's former number two, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich ("BK," he's called here), MythBuster Adam Savage, Segway inventor Dean Kamen, and so on. With cigars and whiskey in their hands, these global power players are talking earnestly about Big Issues: gravitational waves, ground-breaking tools for helping the deaf perceive the world in new ways, cutting-edge robot grasping technology, hyper-efficient 3D-printed rocket engines, and AI, always AI. Welcome to Amazon's MARS Conference–or, as Bezos calls it, "Summer camp for geeks." Amazon's has numerous reasons for hosting the event.

Aligned with the recent global trend towards nationalism over globalization, we have seen stark changes in various nation's reactions to Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) and trade in particular. There is a reason and one of them is the advances in AI. In July of 2017, China Vice Minister of Science of Technology, Li Meng, expects that China's AI technology and research centers will match other countries by 2020. To get there, they are seeping $150 billion into the project in the next few years (NBD). This is compared to the Trump Administration's 10% cut to the National Science Foundation's funding for intelligent systems research, totaling only $175 million.

I had the opportunity to glimpse a large part of the future this week. I think you will find it as amazing as I did. Dr. Kiron Skinner, a remarkable scholar, hosted me at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. According to the U.S. News & World Report's "Best Colleges" rankings, Carnegie Mellon has the nation's top graduate level artificial intelligence (AI) program and one of the top five undergraduate computer engineering programs. On Wednesday, the people at Carnegie Mellon showed me a few of the reasons they are held in such high regard.

At a time when Google is moving into an'artificial intelligence first' world, the Internet giant sees India playing a key role for many of its AI related bets. Google's AI technologies are being used for numerous applications such as detecting diabetic retinopathy, hunting for exoplanets using data from space agency NASA and analysing a vast amount of footage shot by drones. "I think [India's role] is a very significant one," Prabhakar Raghavan, vice-president of engineering at Google, told The Hindu. "You need a somewhat technically literate workforce and I am not talking about PhDs in computer science. And if you look at that, India is already a leader by any means," he said.

In a bid to counter China's move towards usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the NITI Aayog will be chalking out a national policy on AI to outline its scope in research and commercial adaptation of the technology, according to a report by The Economic Times. The report suggests that the policy is expected to lay out short, medium and long-term goals which will have to be achieved by 2022, 2026 and 2030, starting from this year. The new policy may propose deadline for commercial adaptation of the technology in the fields of agriculture, health, education, banking, retail transportation, the report says. The policy may also incentivise startups and venture capital funds that take up AI research and adaptation. The Aayog has already undertaken half a dozen pilots on AI in agriculture, health, and education.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and C.E.O. of Facebook, admitted recently his company knew, in 2015, that the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which assisted with Donald Trump's election campaign, had improperly acquired information on 50 million Facebook users. "This was a breach of trust," Zuckerberg said, in a Facebook post. "We need to fix that." But that's not the only thing Facebook needs to fix. "The problem with Facebook is not just the loss of your privacy and the fact that it can be used as a totalitarian panopticon," said François Chollet, an artificial intelligence and machine learning software engineer at Google DeepMind, in a tweet yesterday.

Brad Smith is Microsoft's President and Chief Legal Officer. Harry Shum is the Executive Vice President of Microsoft AI and Research Group. They've teamed to write this foreword for the company's new book. Twenty years ago, we both worked at Microsoft, but on opposite sides of the globe. In 1998, one of us was living and working in China as a founding member of the Microsoft Research Asia lab in Beijing. Five thousand miles away, the other was based at the company's headquarters, just outside of Seattle, leading the international legal and corporate affairs team. While we lived on separate continents and in quite different cultures, we shared a common workplace experience within Microsoft, albeit with differing routines before we arrived at the office. At that time in the United States, waking to the scent of brewing coffee was a small victory in technology automation. It meant that you had remembered to set the timer on the programmable coffee maker the night before. As you drank that first cup of coffee, you typically watched the morning news on a standard television or turned the pages of the local newspaper to learn what had happened while you slept.

In the book, Pinker argues that war and poverty are in decline and that humanity's progress can be attributed to reason and science, central aspects of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th century. However, critics accuse Pinker of cherry-picking data. They point out that the statistics he uses to support declining death rates begin from 1945, thus excluding the millions killed the decades before, including during World War I and II. "The claim about the Enlightenment is not that it instantaneously brought an end to war, but the Enlightenment did bring the first ideas on how to reduce war out in the open," says Pinker. "The decline in war is really a post-1945 phenomenon."

Tempe police have released two angles of a fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber SUV and a pedestrian on March 18, 2018. A self-driving Uber vehicle fatally struck a woman Sunday, March 18, 2018, in Tempe. PHOENIX -- The woman who was hit by a self-driving Uber vehicle this week in Arizona could be blamed for the incident, an expert said. Video released Wednesday of Sunday's accident in Tempe, Ariz., shows the car not appearing to brake or steer away from pedestrian Elaine Herzberg, 49, as she walked across an open lane and in front of the car. Herzberg appeared to be looking away from the oncoming vehicle, while an in-car camera shows Uber driver Rafaela Vasquez looking down at something below the dashboard, out of view of the camera, before the collision.