In a book that's become the darling of many a Silicon Valley billionaire -- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind -- the historian Yuval Harari paints a picture of humanity's inexorable march towards ever greater forms of collectivization. From the tribal clans of pre-history, people gathered to create city-states, then nations, and finally empires. While certain recent political trends, namely Brexit and the nativism of Donald Trump would seem to belie this trend, now another luminary of academia has added his voice to the chorus calling for stronger forms of world government. Far from citing some ancient historical trends though, Stephen Hawking points to artificial intelligence as a defining reason for needing stronger forms of globally enforced cooperation. It's facile to dismiss Stephen Hawking as another scientist poking his nose into problems more germane to politics than physics.

The present wave of automation, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) – the development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence – is creating a gap between current legislation and new laws necessary for an emerging workplace reality, states a report published in April 2017 by the International Bar Association Global Employment Institute (IBA GEI). Gerlind Wisskirchen, IBA GEI Vice Chair for Multinationals and coordinator of the report, commented: 'Certainly, technological revolution is not new, but in past times it has been gradual. What is new about the present revolution is the alacrity with which change is occurring, and the broadness of impact being brought about by AI and robotics. Jobs at all levels in society presently undertaken by humans are at risk of being reassigned to robots or AI, and the legislation once in place to protect the rights of human workers may be no longer fit for purpose, in some cases.' The International Bar Association Global Employment Institute (IBA GEI) was formed in early 2010 for the purpose of developing a global and strategic approach to the main legal issues in the human resources and human capital fields for multinationals and worldwide institutions.

The first week of April is always a frantic time for technology companies. It marks the start of the hyper-competitive period when firms seeking to hire foreign workers can apply for the limited number of H-1B visas, which are awarded to high-skilled applicants in fields such as software development, architecture and academia. But this last week was more frantic than usual after federal agencies signaled they would place increased scrutiny on the visa program and the companies that utilize it. The Department of Homeland Security and its immigration processing branch issued a memo establishing a more rigorous vetting process for computer programmers. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it will conduct more site visits to catch H-1B visa fraud, while the Justice Department warned employers seeking visas to not discriminate against American workers.

In a world where globalization makes it possible for adversaries to compete with American technologies, the United States must consistently innovate and adopt new tools and methods to stay ahead in the national security space. That was the message at a special panel held at Georgetown University on Monday, called "The Future of Innovation in National Security." It featured five panelists across the security space from the Pentagon, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector. The panel discussion was an extension of a course at Georgetown University called "Hacking 4 Defense" – for which The Cipher Brief is a media sponsor – which aims to use new methodology to find solutions to real national security challenges identified by U.S. government agencies. The key question of this endeavor was: "how we do gain advantage by not playing the same game that has been played before" and "force [the enemy] to engage with a different set of rules," said Milo Medin, Vice President of Access Services at Google and a member of the Defense Innovation Board, an initiative set up by former Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2016.

Comment on Biologically inspired protection of deep networks from adversarial attacks Wieland Brendel 1,3 and Matthias Bethge 1,2,3,4 1 Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of T ubingen, Germany 2 Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, T ubingen, Germany 3 Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, T ubingen, Germany 4 Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of T ubingen, Germany Dated: October 29, 2017 A recent paper [1] suggests that Deep Neural Networks can be protected from gradient-based adversarial perturbations by driving the network activations into a highly saturated regime. Here we analyse such saturated networks and show that the attacks fail due to numerical limitations in the gradient computations. A simple stabilisation of the gradient estimates enables successful and efficient attacks. Thus, it has yet to be shown that the robustness observed in [1] is not simply due to numerical limitations. Evaluating the robustness of neural networks is difficult.

The coming era of artificial intelligence and automation will drastically change the workplace, and new laws need to exist to keep up with impending changes, an international group of lawyers said Tuesday. The Global Employment Institute of the International Bar Association released a 120-page report Tuesday, titled "Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and Their Impact on the Workplace." In the report, the legal group warned technological change is outpacing our ability to pass new legislation and install legal frameworks, which means our laws won't reflect the workforce realities they govern if countries don't move quickly to keep up. "The AI phenomenon is on an exponential curve, while legislation is doing its best on an incremental basis," Gerlind Wisskirchen, one of the report's authors, said in a statement. "New labor and employment legislation is urgently needed to keep pace with increased automation."

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Two-thirds of large UK firms were targeted by cybercriminals in 2016. As the number of attacks continues to rise, what skills will the next generation of professionals need to protect us from AI hackers, rogue self-driving cars and financial ruin? The global cost of cybercrime is predicted to reach £4.9 trillion annually by 2021 and new cybersecurity trends are emerging. To fight future threats, society must develop the next generation of cyber skills. But how do businesses identify weaknesses in their cybersecurity before they're hacked?

Canada's federal government has set up a CAD$125 million (US$93 million) fund to support academic and research activities in artificial intelligence (AI). The investment will put the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in charge of bolstering the country's resources in AI. The institute will use the money to increase the number of post-graduate trainees and researchers studying artificial intelligence, and promote collaboration between the country's major technology research universities in Montreal, Toronto-Waterloo, and Edmonton. "The Canadian government clearly recognizes the importance of artificial intelligence," said Dr. Alan Bernstein, President and CEO of CIFAR. "It will help build a stronger and more innovative economy, create high value jobs, improve transportation, and lead to better and more efficient healthcare and social services."

Hundreds of companies are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their technologies to predict, prevent and defeat the next major cyber attack. At RSA last month IBM joined the pack, announcing Watson for Cyber Security and demonstrating the huge potential for artificial intelligence to support the infosec community. With internet crime growing at the rate it is, businesses need all the help they can get. According to PwC, the number of security incidents across all industries rose by 38% in 2015. See also: Where does machine learning fit in the education sector?