Here is a word of warning to those who infiltrate the content pipeline with information that's not factual. There's heightened demand for new methods to distill the mountains of information we are presented with daily down to the unadulterated facts. People crave a way to cut through the opinions, marketing speak and propaganda to get to the truth. And technology just might be the solution we need to become data-driven decision makers to objectively understand the information. There are reasons why we struggle under the weight of fake or worthless content.

Wed 24 Jan 2018 14.02 EST Last modified on Wed 24 Jan 2018 14.15 EST The chief executive of Google has declared he is happy for his company to pay more tax, and called for the existing system to be reformed. Sundar Pichai told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the tax system needed to be reformed to address concerns that some companies were not paying their fair share. Speaking before the French president, Emmanuel Macron, challenged tech giants to pay more tax, Pichai said: "As a company we paid, over the last five years, close to 20% in tax. We are happy to pay a higher amount, whatever the world agrees on as the right framework. It's not an issue about the amount of tax we pay, as much as how you divide it among various countries."

Life is changing fast for manufacturing companies. Not only is the business of designing, making, shipping, distributing and selling finished goods becoming ever more global and competitive, but technology is ensuring that it is evolving at a pace that's tough to keep up with. Manufacturing companies need to be more agile, thoughtful and innovative than ever in how they do business. Manufacturing is a connected, but often global, distributed operation. Many of today's complex products use raw materials and components from all over the world in their manufacture.

See some shoes you like on a frenemy's Instagram? Search will pull up all the matching images on the web, including from sites that will sell you the same pair. In order to do that, Google's computer vision algorithms had to be trained to extract identifying features like colors, textures, and shapes from a vast catalogue of images. Luis Ceze, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, wants to encode that same process directly in DNA, making the molecules themselves carry out that computer vision work. And he wants to do it using your photos.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan on Wednesday condemned what it said was a U.S. military drone strike inside its territory, adding to already tense relations between the allies.

A new industrial revolution, largely based on automation, is around the corner and sooner or later will drastically change the way we live and organize ourselves. In future, artificial intelligence will increasingly contribute to this automation. Mr Verhofstadt warns us that we are already embarked on a biased one-way path where, either AI will make us superfluous or we find the means to collaboratively control its deployment and its social impact. The European Union took the initiative on this by adopting via its Parliament a resolution apparently following the South Korean model, and calling for rules governing AI and robotics. The paper could be an interesting read, especially those paragraphs about the dissolution of social ties (4.1.7) Nevertheless, they do not tackle the fundamental problem that concerns technological change, its impact on social classes and the concentration of capital it generates.

While it's likely AI will create new jobs, its more immediate (and lasting) potential is in helping advance the science that underlies new industries. If you were a brilliant artificial intelligence (AI) expert just graduating from a doctoral program at a prestigious school, would you pursue that startup you've been thinking about, join a company that wants to build cutting-edge AI applications, or use your expertise to help scientists in other fields conduct basic research? Admittedly, this is a bit of a silly question. The opportunities presented by the first two options are outrageous, and growing more outrageous by the day. With more than 2,000 startups absorbing much of the top-tier AI talent -- estimated by some to be just 10,000 individuals worldwide -- the combination of great scarcity and even greater demand for talent is driving salaries through industry roofs.

Artificial intelligence hit some key milestones in 2017. At Facebook, chat bots were able to negotiate as well as their human counterparts. A poker-playing system designed by Carnegie Mellon professors mopped the floor with live opponents. There were even some potentially life-saving breakthroughs, like the machine vision system that can determine whether a mole is cancerous with more than 90 percent accuracy--beating out a group of dermatologists. From agriculture to medicine and beyond, plenty of startups are using A.I. in innovative ways.

John Zysman (Zysman.john@gmail.com) is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, cofounder of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, and convener of the Berkeley Project Work in an Era of Intelligent Tools and Systems. Martin Kenney (mfkenney@ucdavis.edu) is Distinguished Professor of Human and Community Development at the University of California, Davis, and Senior Project Director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy; he is also an Affiliated Faculty at Instituto di Management at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy.

He also said AI could yet produce untrustworthy potentially dangerous devices and systems. Among the very human psychological factors driving human fear are being financially or medically dependent on others, the expectation of physical or mental pain, unintentionally hurting others (such as by causing a car crash), being irresponsible (such as by forgetting an infant left in a car on a hot day), or simply being embarrassed about some inappropriate social behavior. Many of us fear losing our privacy and jobs, thoughtlessly insulting colleagues, being overly controlled by governments and corporations, suffering injustice, or being victimized by violence, especially if avoidable. It is our darkest fears that actually protect us the most. Could AI intensify such fears to levels beyond what we already know?