Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has the potential to boost productivity but increase wealth inequality and wipe out millions of jobs, a research report by the White House claimed on Tuesday. An increasing number of industries are set to be impacted by automation technology over the coming years which could displace jobs, a fear that has been voiced by academics and business leaders. Auto companies are developing driverless cars while factories could are seeing the increased use of robotics, which has the ability to eat into jobs. But many developments are at the early stage and the impact of automation technology could affect different industries are varying speeds. "Because AI is not a single technology, but rather a collection of technologies that are applied to specific tasks, the effects of AI will be felt unevenly through the economy. Some tasks will be more easily automated than others, and some jobs will be affected more than others--both negatively and positively," the White House report said.

The manufacturing hub for the electronics industry, Kunshan, in Jiangsu province, is seeking a drastic reduction in labour costs as it undergoes a makeover after an industrial explosion killed 146 people in 2014. The county, one-seventh the size of neighbouring Shanghai and the mainland's first county to achieve US$4,000 per capita income, was adjudged the best county for its economic performance by Forbes for seven years in a row. However, the blaze, blamed on poor safety standards and haphazard industrialisation, dented Kunshan's pride. More than a year on, the county, which attracts much of its investment from Taiwan, is trying to reinvent its growth strategy. It is accelerating growth by replacing humans with robots and encouraging start-ups.

With an increase in automation and the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), there are expected to be significant changes in the job market. The White House has released a report in the ways AI will affect the economy over the coming years and decades. The pace and direction of the development of AI will decide what sectors are affected and how soon. At a minimum, and in the near term future, drivers and cashiers are going to be replaced by machines. AI is going to sooner or later replace millions of jobs, and affect the livelihoods of these workers.

Uber's showdown with California regulators is over, and the regulators won. After a week of legal threats, meetings, and very official letters, Uber announced late Wednesday that it would park the self-driving vehicles that have been providing rides in San Francisco. Legally, the company had little choice, because the state Department of Motor Vehicles officially revoked the registration on each of the 16 robo-cars after Uber brazenly refused to apply for an autonomous testing permit. Tough tactics aside, regulators did extend a hand in friendship. "I want to reassure you that the California Department of Motor Vehicles stands ready to work with you collaboratively," DMV Director Jean Shiomoto wrote in a letter to Uber public affairs head Davis White. Shiomoto said her agency "dedicated a team to work with you to expedite the [testing permit] approval process."

Imagine being trapped on a spaceship with only your lover and a robot bartender for nearly a century -- there isn't a spaceship big enough or a bar that well-stocked to make that sound appealing. This is the issue at the center of the ostensibly "romantic" sci-fi drama "Passengers," directed by Morten Tyldum from a script by Jon Spaihts. While romance is the intended effect, the film's real premise -- concealed by the glossy trailers -- is imbued with some seriously creepy undercurrents about bodily autonomy, consent and stalking. Instead of turning it into a horror movie, these issues are all breezily glossed over with the sex appeal of stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The spaceship is the Avalon, 30 years into a 120-year autopilot journey to the planet colony Homestead II with 5,000 passengers on board, encased in pods that keep them in a state of suspended animation.

The report anticipates economic effects across several fronts. AI, like any new technology, is key to growth because it increases output without requiring increases in labor or capital. "In the last decade, despite technology's positive push, measured productivity growth has slowed in 30 of the 31 advanced economies, slowing in the United States from an average annual growth rate of 2.5% in the decade after 1995 to only 1.0% growth in the decade after 2005," the report states. Any increase in aggregate productivity from adopting artificial intelligence would be a welcomed change. But the resultant job automation is causing alarm.

California has forced Uber to remove its self-driving vehicles from the road, canceling the company's controversial pilot program in San Francisco after a week of embarrassing reports of traffic violations and repeated legal threats from state officials. The department of motor vehicles (DMV) announced late Wednesday that it had revoked the registration of 16 autonomous Uber cars, which the corporation deployed without proper permits last week and which were caught on numerous occasions running red lights. Uber, which had previously declared that its rejection of government regulations was an "important issue of principle", confirmed that it has stopped its pilot in a statement, adding: "We're now looking at where we can redeploy these cars but remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules." DMV officials and state attorney attorney general Kamala Harris have noted that Uber must get a testing permit to test its Volvo XC90s, which are navigated by a computer system but have a driver in the front seat who can intervene when needed. "It was determined that the registrations were improperly issued for these vehicles because they were not properly marked as test vehicles," the DMV said in a statement.

Representation of human actions as a sequence of human body movements or action attributes enables the development of models for human activity recognition and summarization. We present an extension of the low-rank representation (LRR) model, termed the clustering-aware structure-constrained low-rank representation (CS-LRR) model, for unsupervised learning of human action attributes from video data. Our model is based on the union-of-subspaces (UoS) framework, and integrates spectral clustering into the LRR optimization problem for better subspace clustering results. We lay out an efficient linear alternating direction method to solve the CS-LRR optimization problem. We also introduce a hierarchical subspace clustering approach, termed hierarchical CS-LRR, to learn the attributes without the need for a priori specification of their number. By visualizing and labeling these action attributes, the hierarchical model can be used to semantically summarize long video sequences of human actions at multiple resolutions. A human action or activity can also be uniquely represented as a sequence of transitions from one action attribute to another, which can then be used for human action recognition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for semantic summarization and action recognition through comprehensive experiments on five real-world human action datasets.

A new report from the White House warns that millions of jobs could be automated out of existence in coming years. But it cautions against one much discussed solution: giving away free money. The report, published this week by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, joins a growing body of work forecasting massive jobs losses due to automation and artificial intelligence. A paper published in 2013 by Oxford University researchers, for example, estimated that as many as 47 percent of all jobs could eventually be automated. The new report, likewise, forecasts millions of job losses in careers such as truck driving, as self-driving vehicles hit the roads, as well as low-skilled jobs.

"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the extraordinary projects -- a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, and, well, the internet -- that her agency has created by not worrying that they might fail.