Since the beginning of the republic, Presidents have had a great deal of influence on promoting innovation. A year after Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first words on the telephone to Mr. Watson, Rutherford B. Hayes installed a phone in the White House. The Obama administration has prided itself on its relationship with emerging technologies, from hosting White House Science Fairs to the Frontiers Conference this past August at Carnegie Mellon University. This week the administration updated the U.S. Robotics Roadmap that was first initiated by the President in 2009. Henrik Christensen the author of the Roadmap, and director of UC San Diego's Institute for Contextual Robotics, explained that the purpose of the document is to identify the future impact of robotics technology on the country; outline its economic, social, and security needs; and to provide a strategy for addressing various scientific and technological challenges.

As the science fiction novelist William Gibson famously observed: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed." I wish people would pay more attention to that adage whenever the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) comes up. Public discourse about it invariably focuses on the threat (or promise, depending on your point of view) of "superintelligent" machines, ie ones that display human-level general intelligence, even though such devices have been 20 to 50 years away ever since we first started worrying about them. The likelihood (or mirage) of such machines still remains a distant prospect, a point made by the leading AI researcher Andrew Ng, who said that he worries about superintelligence in the same way that he frets about overpopulation on Mars. That seems about right to me.

It was not long ago that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was only in the realm of science fiction. Today, it has become a reality and is only growing more prominent in many different industries every day. This includes the internet as AI in search engine technology has been around for a few years. The algorithms used to rank pages have been affected considerably by AI already and that trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Currently, Google's RankBrain, an AI process used help set search engine rankings, is having a major impact which is only expected to expand.

Sometimes, the tide of technological innovation seems unstoppable. But tech companies still have to abide by laws, rules and regulations, like the rest of us. Moreover, governments and other regulatory bodies are increasingly concerned with ensuring that basic rights and liberties don't get washed away as the digital future rushes in. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides a great example of how regulations will shape the development of powerful new technologies like big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. GDPR is a new European Union regulation that will come into force in late May 2018.

Among the top companies in attendance was General Atomics, a San Diego-based defense contractor known for its Predator drones. The UAE previously purchased some $200 million worth of surveillance-only Predator drones.

In the coming months, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio will announce a new task force on "Automated Decision Systems" -- the first of its kind in the United States. The task force will recommend how each city agency should be accountable for using algorithms and other advanced computing techniques to make important decisions. As a first step toward this goal, we urge the task force to consider a framework structured around Algorithmic Impact Assessments (AIAs). Automated decision systems are here, and are already being integrated across many core social institutions, reshaping how our criminal justice system works via risk assessment algorithms and predictive policing systems, optimizing energy use in critical infrastructure through AI-driven resource allocation, and changing our educational system through new teacher evaluation tools and student-school matching algorithms. And these are merely what journalists, researchers, and the public record expose -- to date, no city in the US has explicitly mandated that its agencies disclose anything about the automated decision systems they have in place or are planning to use.

Despite efforts to tackle corruption around the world, progress is still frustratingly slow, according to the latest report from Transparency International. Its annual Corruption Perception index reveals some alarming trends. It shows public service corruption is still a huge problem for two-thirds of the world's economies. The report uses a scale of zero to 100 to rank countries: zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. New Zealand comes out on top but with a score of 89.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised Indian Scientists in his Mann Ki Baat on Sunday. Har Gobind Khorana and Satyendra Nath Bose, he said they are the proud of the country. Pointing out the increasing importance of Artifiacial intelligence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged Scientists to find ways in which we can enhance lives of our'divyang' brothers & sisters through artificial intelligence. Prime minister also asked,"can we make use of Artificial intelligence in early detection of natural calamities?" Talking about natural calamities prime minister Narendra Modi said most of these disaters happens due to our negligence.

NEW DELHI: Stressing that the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) will not make jobs disappear, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc said that on the contrary it will create more jobs. Wozniak was speaking at the fourth edition of the Economic Times Global Business Summit at New Delhi on Saturday. "We will require lot more jobs to build those machines," he said. Wozniak added that the next generation will have different types of jobs to choose from. The American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer, philanthropist, and technology entrepreneur who is created to be the developer of Apple I which led to the launch of Apple, said that even though he designed the machines, it required an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs to "market it".

The government budget for bolstering artificial intelligence in fiscal 2018 is less than 20 percent the amount to be spent by the U.S. and Chinese governments, a Kyodo News tally has found, potentially exacerbating Japan's competitive disadvantage in the field. Planned AI-related spending totals ¥77.04 billion ($720 million) in the draft budget for the year starting April 1, up some 30 percent from the current year, but still far short of the approximately ¥500 billion and ¥450 billion expected to be spent by the U.S. and Chinese governments, respectively. Both government and private companies in the United States and China are aggressively investing in AI technologies, which are expected to dramatically improve productivity and accelerate innovation. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is promoting the use of AI to improve productivity in Japan, which has a rapidly graying population and is already grappling with a labor shortage. Still, the widening gap in AI-related investment between Japanese and U.S. firms suggests it will be difficult for Tokyo to challenge American dominance.