These past months have given us some news about developments in artificial intelligence. OpenAI was launched, and Tech Insider reported some interesting statistics on the future of robotics and artificial intelligence, citing research from the 300-page Merrill Lynch Report on what the future holds. Makes you stop and think for a moment, huh? However, these findings make me wonder about what's not being said, questioned or discussed. Personally, I come from the place of an observer.

Two of the most polarising words in the English language at the moment (aside from "Donald Trump") must be "artificial intelligence". Last week, Big Tech ramped up a campaign intended to convince people that robots will not take their jobs. Executives from Intel and Tesla testified in a US House subcommittee meeting on the challenges of AI, dismissing many public concerns. Others including Google chief economist Hal Varian gave interviews pushing the idea that AI is the labour solution to shrinking birth rates in rich countries. Yet, this charm offensive coincided with a series of events that cast a different light on the tech industry.

Residents complain that mail carriers have failed to deliver prescription drugs and pension checks. Some also say their mailboxes have been damaged or destroyed by carriers' trucks, that telephone complaint lines were never answered and that postal managers were rude when residents visited the post office in person.

Visitors walk past a 5G logo during the Mobile World Congress on the third day of the MWC in Barcelona, on March 1, 2017. The new year for smartphones is about to dawn. The South Korean electronics giant is is the headline exhibitor at the Mobile World Congress trade show that commences over the weekend, drawing some 108,000 attendees to the mobile industry's annual signature shindig. The S9 represents Samsung's turn to try and leapfrog Apple's most recent iPhones, as the rivals resume their bottomless battle for smartphone supremacy. Leaks point to a Galaxy phone with, among other features, an improved camera system.

Rollin' Justin is the name of an AI humanoid bot that was developed by the German space agency DLR. It was created for future Mars missions, and will both aid astronauts as well as perform various household tasks. Standing 1.9m tall and weighing 200kg, Rollin' Justin features 51 degrees of freedom and a 20kg loading capacity. In addition to the four-finger hands and compliant light-weight arms, it is equipped with four main design features: mechatronic design, compliant whole-body manipulation, mobile manipulation and autonomous task planning and execution. The bot can even achieve independent thinking using advanced AI technology, allowing its to inspect its surroundings, and take on jobs as detailed as cleaning solar panels.

With Donald Trump, everything old is new again, it seems. His latest effort to grapple with the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, sees him joining his fellow Republicans, such as the Kentucky governor, Matt Bevin, in resuscitating a long-dormant culture war, blaming video games for mass shootings. "I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts," Bevin said this week at a White House meeting on school security, where he also launched into a tirade about violent films. This echoes the thoughts of Wayne LaPierre, the president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), in 2012 when he tried to pin the Sandy Hook shooting on "vicious violent video games, with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse". It's a remarkable series of logic leaps that allows a person to scorn a simulator while holding the actual gun whose use is seen as blameless, but here we are again.

Malicious code hidden inside neural networks could hijack things like image recognition algorithms long after people start using them. The situation: Image recognition AIs can be tricked quite easily, which raises the specter of, say, a cyberattack convincing a self-driving car to ignore a stop sign. But what if malware could be woven into algorithms so that they were, in effect, programmed to mess up? The fear: A new paper shows how certain neural networks could be tainted by sneaking in malicious code. The nefarious program then sits there, waiting for a trigger that activates it to hijack the system and force it to start falsely predicting or classifying data. Why it matters: The US government already worries that hardware built in other countries could have back doors that allow foreign agents to spy on or take control of computerized systems.

Twenty-six experts on the security implications of emerging technologies have jointly authored a ground-breaking report--sounding the alarm about the potential malicious use of artificial intelligence (AI) by rogue states, criminals, and terrorists. Forecasting rapid growth in cyber-crime and the misuse of drones during the next decade--as well as an unprecedented rise in the use of'bots' to manipulate everything from elections to the news agenda and social media--the report is a clarion call for governments and corporations worldwide to address the clear and present danger inherent in the myriad applications of AI. However, the report--"The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation"--also recommends interventions to mitigate the threats posed by the malicious use of AI: The co-authors come from a wide range of organizations and disciplines, including Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute; Cambridge University's Center for the Study of Existential Risk; OpenAI, a leading non-profit AI research company; the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit digital rights group; the Center for a New American Security, a U.S.-based bipartisan national security think-tank; and other organizations. The 100-page report identifies three security domains (digital, physical, and political security) as particularly relevant to the malicious use of AI. It suggests that AI will disrupt the trade-off between scale and efficiency and allow large-scale, finely-targeted, and highly-efficient attacks.

The 100 startups on our list have raised $11.7B in aggregate funding across 367 deals. Today, CB Insights unveiled the second annual AI 100 -- a list of 100 of the most promising private companies applying artificial intelligence algorithms across 25 industries, from healthcare to cybersecurity -- at the A-Ha! conference in San Francisco. The companies were selected from a pool of 2,000 startups based on several criteria, including investor profile, tech innovation, team strength, patent activity, mosaic score, funding history, valuation, and business model. The market map below categorizes the AI 100 companies based on their industry focus. Please click on the image to enlarge.

In the last few years, many law enforcement agencies have adopted body worn cameras. In this blog post, I will provide some background on what is driving the growth and will talk about how AI can help law enforcement agencies with the processing of videos captured by body-worn cameras. A body worn camera is a wearable audio, video or photographic recording system. Law enforcement agencies are not the only consumers of body-worn cameras. Other consumers include journalists, medical professionals, athletes, and so on.