Last month, while commuters suffered, Jeremy Hunt announced that the NHS will work with three artificial intelligence (AI) companies to deliver health advice over the telephone in London, Yorkshire and the West Midlands. AI is improving to the level that it can understand complex areas such as medical diagnosis as well as humans can. Meanwhile, HMRC has been able to reduce its administrative staff by a third over the past decade, with great savings to the taxpayer, thanks to its online self-assessment service. Crucially, this also means a better service: completing tax returns on the internet may not yet be exactly a joy, but it is still a huge advance on previous days of paper returns and letters lost in the post. My think tank, Reform, has just finished a study which suggests the wider public sector can follow suit.

The secret to Donald Trump's win: a masterful combination of big data-based manipulation of hapless users, combined with'weaponized' artificial intelligence (AI) which the Trump campaign used to mount a relentless misinformation machine. Or depending on your perspective, Trump's people simply leveraged the latest generation of software tools better than the Clinton campaign was able to manage, a carefully crafted turnabout after Obama's two campaigns successfully gained advantage on the McCain and Romney campaigns respectively by using the latest software of the day. Regardless of how you look at the situation, influencing public opinion is what political campaigns are all about, and successful ones leverage all the tools at their disposal. Increasingly, such tools are software-based – and where political campaigns forge the way, enterprises are sure to follow. While the inside story of the Trump campaign's use of cutting edge technology may have nefarious overtones for some, the reality is that it set the bar for both progressives as well as conservatives in the future – as well as anyone else seeking to gain a competitive advantage using AI and big data.

The British government is working on a new bill that would regulate insurance and liability for accidents involving cars operating in autonomous mode. When such a law is passed it would pioneer how authorities around the world should deal with new technologies in the motoring industry. One of the objectives of the new bill is to ensure accident victims can easily claim compensation if a crash occurs when a car is in autonomous mode. Insurers could still try to recover the costs from the vehicle's manufacturer. There will also be exceptions to full cover if, for example, a vehicle owner has made unauthorized changes to the car's software; and if he fails to install an update that his policy asks him to then the driver becomes liable.

A US drone strike killed two suspected members of al-Qaeda in southern Yemen, said a security official and residents. Saturday's raid in Ahwar, in the southern province of Abyan, killed two suspected fighters on a motorbike, the security official said. It came after two days of intensive air strikes by US warplanes on fighters in the war-torn country. Tribal sources and residents said another drone fired at a crowd of suspected al-Qaeda militants in al-Saeed, in the adjacent province of Shabwa, but there were no reports on casualties in that incident. On Friday, the Pentagon said it carried out "somewhere over 30" strikes against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in two days, conducted in partnership with the Yemeni government.

Artificial intelligence boosters predict a brave new world of flying cars and cancer cures. Detractors worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords. Veteran AI scientist Eric Horvitz and Doomsday Clock guru Lawrence Krauss, seeking a middle ground, gathered a group of experts in the Arizona desert to discuss the worst that could possibly happen - and how to stop it. Their workshop took place last weekend at Arizona State University (ASU) with funding from Tesla co-founder Elon Musk and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. Officially dubbed "Envisioning and Addressing Adverse AI Outcomes", it was a kind of AI doomsday games that organised some 40 scientists, cyber-security experts and policy wonks into groups of attackers - the red team - and defenders - blue team - playing out AI-gone-very-wrong scenarios, ranging from stock-market manipulation to global warfare.

The Washington fight over the future of Obamacare will have enormous repercussions for our health care system, which now accounts for nearly 18 percent of the U.S. economy. But that impact pales before the transformation already underway due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. AI and machine learning are forcing dramatic business model change for all the stakeholders in the health care system. What does AI (and machine learning) mean in the health care context? Simply put, it's the ability to aggregate newly available and vast amounts of disparate data from electronic health records, consumer media and purchasing trends, smart devices, the social sphere, and other sources to make predictions about patient outcomes.

More than two years after a multi-sided civil war erupted inside Yemen that allowed Al Qaeda's local franchise to amass power and seize territory, President Trump has directed the Pentagon to embark on a complicated counter-terrorism campaign. Trump's decision, just six weeks into his presidency, intends to reverse the largely unchecked expansion across southern Yemen of the group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The willingness to expand counter-terrorism operations inside war-torn Yemen was the latest signal that Trump is more willing to defer to military commanders on national security policy than President Obama, who was criticized publicly by three of his four Defense secretaries and privately by uniformed officers for micromanaging the military. Over two days this week, armed drones and warplanes conducted more than 30 airstrikes against suspected Al Qaeda positions in three Yemeni provinces, marking the first U.S. attacks in the country since an ill-fated Navy SEAL raid in January that killed two dozen civilians, including women and children, Al Qaeda militants and Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens. The aerial bombardment is expected to continue into the coming week.

Imagine you're an evil genius in the style of a James Bond villain. You've got a hundred million dollars or so burning a hole in your pocket, and you're looking to cause some destruction. You want to know your options. Greg Allen (@Gregory_C_Allen) is a George Leadership Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. He previously worked on space and robotics issues at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories about robots taking over our jobs or killing the humanity. In fact, famous physicist Professor Stephan Hawking agrees with researchers who claim AI robots will leave humanity ''Utterly Defenceless.'' Now, researchers at IOActive, a cyber security company has revealed that [Pdf] programs which "bring them (robots) to life" carry critical vulnerabilities which can be used by threat actors for negative purposes. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) robots is on the rise. Last year, IBM developed Ross – World's first AI lawyer and plans are to license it for being utilized in domains like bankruptcy, restructuring and creditors' rights team.

More than two years after a multi-sided civil war erupted inside Yemen that allowed Al Qaeda's local franchise to amass power and seize territory, President Trump has directed the Pentagon to embark on a complicated counter-terrorism campaign. Trump's decision, just six weeks into his presidency, intends to reverse the largely unchecked expansion across southern Yemen of the group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The willingness to expand counter-terrorism operations inside war-torn Yemen was the latest signal that Trump is more willing to defer to military commanders on national security policy than President Obama, who was criticized publicly by three of his four Defense secretaries and privately by uniformed officers for micromanaging the military. Over two days this week, armed drones and warplanes conducted more than 30 airstrikes against suspected Al Qaeda positions in three Yemeni provinces, marking the first U.S. attacks in the country since an ill-fated Navy SEAL raid in January that killed two dozen civilians, including women and children, Al Qaeda militants and Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens. The aerial bombardment is expected to continue into the coming week.