Artificial intelligence is no exception. Beijing laid out a timeline on Friday for when it expects the country to become a global leader in the frontier technology. By 2020, China's AI technologies and research facilities will match other leading countries, said Li Meng, the vice minister of science and technology. Five years later, he expects "a big breakthrough," and then China should finally become the global "innovation center for AI" by 2030. The remarks at a press conference expand on a policy statement released by China's State Council on Thursday, which set out goals to build a domestic artificial intelligence industry worth nearly $150 billion in the next few years.

CHINA has vowed to become a world leader in artificial intelligence within a decade. The People's Republic has revealed plans to spend billions on developing computers that are capable of thinking for themselves. However, experts believe an AI version of the space race could be disastrous for the world and even lead to the creation of a digital destroyer that ends up wiping out humanity. Yesterday, China released a "national AI development plan" which committed it to spending $22.15 billion (£17 billion) on AI research by 2020 and $59.07 billion (£45 billion) by 2025. China wants to square up to Western market leaders including Google and Microsoft, who are racing ahead in the development of smart computers.

China today announced plans to become the global leader in AI research and development. It will increase government spending on core AI programs to $22 billion in the next few years, with plans to spend nearly $60 billion per year by 2025. The announcement sends a clear message: this is the age of artificial intelligence. Reuters reports the Chinese government will soon put forth AI regulations in areas concerning safety, implementation, and control. The US issued a similar statement last year in a White House review of the future of AI.

Amazon is having a rough week. The e-commerce powerhouse has celebrated a string of victories this year. Its stock price broke above $1,000 for the first time; it is presiding over an unprecedented retrenchment within the retail space as more than 8,000 brick-and-mortar stores are expected to close in the US this year, and the company announced plans to acquire yuppie favorite Whole Foods Market, promising to transform the company's stores into laboratories for automation and AI where advanced sensors will perform tasks previously reserved for human cashiers. It also revealed that its "Prime Day" sale was the "Biggest Global Shopping Event in Amazon History", surpassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. But the string of good news came to an abrupt halt last week when Reuters reported that the top Democrat on the House antitrust subcommittee, David Civilline, has voiced concerns about Amazon's $13.7 billion plan to buy Whole Foods Market and requested in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee a hearing to examine the deal's potential impact on consumers – the first stirrings of what could metastasize into an anti-trust probe.

Consider two networks on overlapping, non-identical vertex sets. Given vertices of interest in the first network, we seek to identify the corresponding vertices, if any exist, in the second network. While in moderately sized networks graph matching methods can be applied directly to recover the missing correspondences, herein we present a principled methodology appropriate for situations in which the networks are too large for brute-force graph matching. Our methodology identifies vertices in a local neighborhood of the vertices of interest in the first network that have verifiable corresponding vertices in the second network. Leveraging these known correspondences, referred to as seeds, we match the induced subgraphs in each network generated by the neighborhoods of these verified seeds, and rank the vertices of the second network in terms of the most likely matches to the original vertices of interest. We demonstrate the applicability of our methodology through simulations and real data examples.

The UK government has announced plans to introduce drone registration and safety awareness courses for owners of the small unmanned aircraft. It will affect anyone who owns a drone which weighs more than 250 grams (8oz). Drone maker DJI said it was in favour of the measures. There is no time frame or firm plans as to how the new rules will be enforced and the Department of Transport admitted that "the nuts and bolts still have to be ironed out". The drone safety awareness test will involve potential flyers having to "prove that they understand UK safety, security and privacy regulations", it said.

This week's news is preliminary, but a U.S. house committee panel passed some new federal regulations which suggest sweeping change in the US regulatory approach to robocars. Today, all cars sold must comply with the Federal Motor Vehicles Safety Standards (FMVSS). This is a huge set of standards, and it's full of things written with human driven cars in mind, and making a radically different vehicle, like the Zoox, or the Waymo Firefly, or a delivery robot, is simply not going to happen under those standards. There is a provision where NHTSA can offer exemptions but it's in small volumes, for prototype and testing vehicles mostly. The new rules would allow a vendor to get an exemption to make 100,000 vehicles per year, which should be enough for the early years of robocar deployment.

Reinforcement learning algorithms that can reliably learn how to control robots, etc. Better generative models. Algorithms that can reliably learn how to generate images, speech and text that humans can't tell apart from the real thing. Learning to learn and ubiquitous deep learning. Right now it still takes a human expert to run the learning-to-learn algorithm, but in the future it will be easier to deploy, and all kinds of businesses that don't specialize in AI will be able to leverage deep learning. More cyberattacks will leverage machine learning to make more autonomous malware, more efficient fuzzing for vulnerabilities, etc. More cyberdefenses will leverage machine learning to respond faster than a human could, detect more subtle intrusions, etc. ML algorithms from opposing camps will fool each other to carry out both attacks and defensive actions.

Is the current level of excitement surrounding AI warranted? The UK's House of Lords wants you to come clean on the rise of the machines – with a call for feedback on the economic, ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence (AI). The House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is asking for contributions to its inquiry and is looking for pragmatic solutions to the issues presented, and questions raised by the development and use of AI in the present and the future. Some of its questions include the current state of AI; development over the next five to 20 years; regulations; and whether the current level of excitement surrounding AI is warranted. Lord Clement-Jones, chairman of the select committee, says AI is "increasingly seizing the attention of industry, policymakers and the general public" and its inquiry seeks to understand the opportunities and risks.

Comic-Con 2017 live updates: 'Robot Chicken' has a President Trump puppet, and a real life Iron Man takes off Day two of Comic-Con is all about TV. "Game of Thrones," "Twin Peaks," and "The Walking Dead" will all offer tributes to the throngs of Hall H. And we'll be there, bringing you all the intel and surprises. Stay tuned for interviews, panel updates and more. The can't miss panels at 2017 Comic-Con Inside Comic-Con's Hall H, the most important room in Hollywood Comic-Con through the years, a look back in one GIANT timeline The can't miss panels at 2017 Comic-Con'Robot Chicken's' ninth season will include President Trump: 'Just take a look at the puppet's hands' There is no pop culture or political figure safe from the claymation-style harpooning of Adult Swim's "Robot Chicken."