Where did all the jobs go? Well, we're finally starting to find some satisfactory answers to the granddaddy of all economic questions. The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 -- amounting to about 11.4 million fewer workers in 2016. At least half of that decline probably was due to an aging population. Explaining the remainder has been the inspiration for much of the economic research published after the Great Recession.

After initially performing routine cleaning tasks, the robot, using facial recognition, identifies the finance minister. It approaches her and detonates a concealed bomb. That's one of the scenarios sketched out in a new report called The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence. Produced by 26 researchers from universities, thinktanks and campaigning organisations in Europe and the US, it is the latest in a series of studies warning of the dangers of AI. "The development of full artificial intelligence", Stephen Hawking has claimed, "could spell the end of the human race." Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, has suggested that "we are summoning the demon".

We're excited to announce a medical research partnership with the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), one of the world's leading healthcare organisations responsible for providing high-quality care to veterans and their families across the United States. This project will see us analyse patterns from historical, depersonalised medical records to predict patient deterioration. Patient deterioration is a significant global health problem that often has fatal consequences. Studies estimate that 11% of all in-hospital deaths are due to patient deterioration not being recognised early enough or acted on in the right way. Alongside world-renowned clinicians and researchers at the VA, we are analysing patterns from approximately 700,000 historical, depersonalised medical records in order to determine if machine learning can accurately identify the risk factors for patient deterioration and correctly predict its onset.

The dawn of the artificial intelligence age is upon us and the speed of technological development threatens to leave regulatory control in its wake. Those concerns were one of the key themes to emerge from the World Government Summit staged in Dubai this week. From agriculture and transport to healthcare and education, technology that was once considered science fiction is edging closer to reality. How that is managed in the decades to come is providing an imminent conundrum for governments and policy makers, and proved a common topic of discussion in forums during the three-day summit. "I believe we are right at the start of this revolution happening right now and I imagine more natural ways of communication so it will become seamless," said Carol Riley, president of Drive – AI. "This means non-verbal communication and machines start to understand what we are thinking."

Kathy Conrad, director of digital government for Accenture Federal Services, talks about the ways AI might help agencies complete tasks and streamline workflows in the future.

Earlier this week Google and Verily Life Sciences shared the latest advance in computer vision to identify signs of heart disease. With an accuracy of 70 percent, early results from the AI trained on retinal scan images from more than 200,000 patients is as precise as methods that require blood tests for cholesterol, said Google Brain product manager Lily Peng. It's the latest example of AI being used to tackle the biggest killer in the world: heart disease. It takes more lives than any other cause of death -- 800,000 in the United States alone, according to the American Heart Association. To save lives, an AI army is joining the fight.

It is easy to confuse the current geopolitical situation with that of the 1980s. The United States and Russia each accuse the other of interfering in domestic affairs. Russia has annexed territory over U.S. objections, raising concerns about military conflict. As during the Cold War after World War II, nations are developing and building weapons based on advanced technology. During the Cold War, the weapon of choice was nuclear missiles; today it's software, whether its used for attacking computer systems or targets in the real world. Russian rhetoric about the importance of artificial intelligence is picking up – and with good reason: As artificial intelligence software develops, it will be able to make decisions based on more data, and more quickly, than humans can handle.

As Harvard University economist Jason Furman said when he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, our biggest worry about AI should be that there might not be enough of it. The United States needs to develop this powerful new technology to its fullest to maintain our economic and technological leadership in the face of increasingly sophisticated competition from China, which has made AI-development a strategic priority. Of course, AI is fraught with ethical challenges. In the course on AI and Ethics I teach at Georgetown University, I find the students concerned that AI will be a biased, unaccountable force in their lives and that it will be deployed to create joblessness and exacerbate social and economic inequality. The trade association I work for, the Software & Information Industry Association, addressed these challenges in its recent publication on ethical principles for developers and users of AI.

A report by leading experts calls on governments and businesses to address the "clear and present danger" posed by unregulated AI. The foreboding report is titled'The Malicious Use Of Artificial Intelligence' and was co-authored by experts from Oxford University, The Centre For The Study of Existential Risk, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and more. Digital security -- The risk of AI being used for increasing the scale and efficiency of cyberattacks. These attacks could be to compromise other systems by reducing laborious tasks, or it could exploit human error with new attacks such as speech synthesis. Some provided examples include connected vehicles being compromised to crash, or even situations once seen as dystopian such as swarms of micro-drones.

Entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk may have a little more time on his hands (maybe), as he's departing his spot on the board of the artificial-intelligence safety group OpenAI, according to a blog post. The departure is likely the result of Tesla's move into the realm of A.I., which he said in 2017 would be the "best in the world" and would even be able to "predict your destination." Musk will continue to "donate and advise the organization," OpenAI said in a blog post Feb. 20, adding that "As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon." Musk and Y Combinator CEO Sam Altman co-founded the nonprofit venture in December 2015, with backing from the likes of Peter Thiel (an early backer of Facebook), Reid Hoffman (who co-founded LinkedIn), Jessica Livingston (founding partner of Y Combinator), Greg Brockman and computer scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to the OpenAI website. OpenAI's mission is to develop safe AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ensure those developments are made public; its 60 or so researchers are tasked with long-term research, according to the company.