Artificial Intelligence has another champion and watchdog. Four months after its formation, the Partnership on AI, a group dedicated to tackling AI opportunities and challenges finally, officially welcomed Apple as a member. Tom Gruber, Apple's head of advanced development for Apple's digital assistant, Siri, joined the Partnership on AI's board of Trustees on Friday. Gruber joins science, research and AI leaders from a disparate group of companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and DeepMind (part of Google), along with leaders from the ACLU, UC Berkeley and the Association for the Advancement of AI. "We're glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI. We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers." said Gruber on the Partnership on AI site.

A fleet of autonomous trucks is joining all the self-driving taxis and buses Singapore is testing on its streets. Toyota and Volkswagen subsidiary Scania will begin the first full-scale autonomous truck platooning trial in the country this month. For the next three years, the two companies will operate a fleet of trucks composed of three autonomous vehicles following a manned one to transport cargo between ports. Singapore's authorities organized the project, because aside from its desire to become the world's first smart city, it's also seeking to optimize road capacity. It's a relatively tiny city-state, after all, and the number of vehicles on its roads keep on growing along with its population.

Anti-virus software has a hard time keeping up. Piles of new viruses come out each week, so cybersecurity unicorn Cylance is taking what it claims to be a completely new approach: artificial intelligence that learns to recognize malicious code based on an analysis of viruses from the past. It calls the new product CylancePROTECT. In an AMA on Reddit today, the company's head of reseach, Jon Miller, wrote: "Cylance was the first AI built to statically analyze and convict malware pre-execution. We definitely didn't invent AI, but we were the first to use it this way to deliver pre-execution protection. Many other products have been using machine learning, it's just that it was used to support legacy methodologies of protection/detection, using ML to identify trends so static signatures could be built, which in a world where attackers are creating individual pieces of malware to avoid signatures, results in a severe lack of efficacy, thats the problem Cylance was built to solve."

With advances in information technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence developing at a rapid rate, workforce dislocations are happening now and are here to stay. As existing trends accelerate and irreversibly change the workforce as we know it, the question to be answered is–what will we do to broadly share the gains and alleviate the challenges? Cities often lead trend cycles for mass adoption of new technologies. We all know that technological unemployment is as old as technological innovation. However, American cities are entering a period where the maturation of certain technologies will serve as a force multiplier–affecting every sector of the local economy, every worker, and every job. Automation helps innovation flourish and brings cost savings for businesses, but also displaces jobs.

Tax season is around the corner, and for most Americans, it involves dealing with the complex tax code, an accountant, and maybe friends who claim to be tax experts. According to IRS statistics, there were 507 million visitors to the irs.gov website in 2016, a 3 percent increase when compared to 2015. Furthermore, Americans spend 6.1 billion hours and $233.8 billion complying with the tax code. With complexity comes confusion and frustration, leading many taxpayers to turn to tax preparers or tax preparation software. Those who don't are at a disadvantage because most Americans are unaware of which deductions to consider, dependents to claims, student loan amounts to deduct, or where to file.

They are wise-cracking companions, able to communicate in more than six million languages. Others are bent on enslaving or destroying humanity, deeming themselves better, more rational caretakers of the Earth in light of our irrational behaviors. Pilot or garbage man, soldier or slave, hero or villain--robots have played every role imaginable in popular science fiction for nearly a century. In the 21st century, real-life robots inspired by their fictional counterparts are beginning to take starring roles in everyday life. Several companies, Google among them, are testing autonomous cars (unfortunately, there is no indication that they will be able to travel into the past or future anytime soon).

The merging of machine capability and human consciousness is already happening. Peter Sorger and Ben Gyori are brainstorming with a computer in a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Their goal is to figure out why a powerful melanoma drug stops helping patients after a few months. But if their approach to human-computer collaboration is successful, it could generate a new approach to fundamentally understanding complexities that may change not only how cancer patients are treated, but also how innovation and discovery are pursued in countless other domains. At the heart of their challenge is the crazily complicated hairball of activity going on inside a cancer cell - or in any cell.

A week after President Donald Trump's inauguration, George Orwell's '1984' is the best-selling book on Amazon.com. The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment. Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. A week after President Donald Trump's inauguration, George Orwell's '1984' is the best-selling book on Amazon.com, as many are comparing it to today's America. Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich talks about the state's efforts to get in on self-driving cars (Photo: Chrissie Thompson/Cincinnati Enquirer) COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Add the Buckeye State to the list of those getting serious about self-driving cars. An automotive test track and proving ground in central Ohio –- the country's largest not owned by an automaker -– will update to allow the testing of self-driving vehicles using $45 million in state grants. With the investment, the Transportation Research Center in East Liberty, which partners with Ohio State University, aligns itself with the auto industry's thrust to bring autonomous vehicles to mainstream car buyers. The TRC plans to build the industry's largest high-speed intersection, where connected vehicles can approach at full speed while relying on technology to allow them to pass within seconds of each other. The facility will also feature an urban network with traffic lights and roundabouts, plus a rural section with wooded roads.

An artificial intelligence watchdog should be set up to make sure people are not discriminated against by the automated computer systems making important decisions about their lives, say experts. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to an explosion in the number of algorithms that are used by employers, banks, police forces and others, but the systems can, and do, make bad decisions that seriously impact people's lives. But because technology companies are so secretive about how their algorithms work – to prevent other firms from copying them – they rarely disclose any detailed information about how AIs have made particular decisions. In a new report, Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Luciano Floridi, a research team at the Alan Turing Institute in London and the University of Oxford, call for a trusted third party body that can investigate AI decisions for people who believe they have been discriminated against. "What we'd like to see is a trusted third party, perhaps a regulatory or supervisory body, that would have the power to scrutinise and audit algorithms, so they could go in and see whether the system is actually transparent and fair," said Wachter.