Artificial intelligence is changing the world. At least, the White House thinks so. Last week, the Obama administration released a 60-page report titled Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. It paints with a broad stroke the current state of A.I. in several different fields -- health, education, the environment -- and proposes ways in which industry and government can work together to advance the public good. It's a remarkable document, if only for the fact that it's being issued by an outgoing administration in its final months in office.

To cite this article: Gina Neff. The biggest challenge for the use of "big data" in health care is social, not technical. Data-intensive approaches to medicine based on predictive modeling hold enormous potential for solving some of the biggest and most intractable problems of health care. The challenge now is figuring out how people, both patients and providers, will actually use data in practice. "I FOUND THE BUZZ AS FEVERISHLY LOUD AROUND HEALTH INFORMATION INNOVATION AS IT WAS DURING MY RESEARCH ON THE FIRST DOT-COM BOOM." To understand how data-intensive solutions could have an impact on health care, our research team talked to frontline providers in impoverished and rural areas, technology enthusiasts in mobile health and health IT startups, clinicians and researchers in major research hospitals, Quantified Self members at data-driven meetup presentations of massive amounts of tracking data, and attendees at the growing number of conferences for health technology and innovation up and down both coasts. I found the buzz as feverishly loud around health information innovation as it was during my research on the first dot-com boom. One of our findings from this research seems at first blush so obvious that it is hard to believe it has been overlooked in the design and implementation of health-care innovation technologies.

I had the honor to be one of the warmup acts for President Obama at the White House Frontiers Conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here is the prepared text and slides from the talk I delivered there. As you'll see if you watch the video, what I ended up saying isn't exactly what I had written out in advance, but it is reasonably close. Hearing that Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, how could I not begin this talk with his famous line, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" The future is full of amazing things.

Predicting the future is fraught with challenges, but when it comes to technological advances and forward thinking, experts working at the Pentagon's research agency may be the best people to ask. Launched in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is behind some of the biggest innovations in the military - many of which have crossed over to the civilian technology market. These include things like advanced robotics, global-positioning systems, and the internet. It's pretty likely that robots and artificial technology will transform a bunch of industries, drone aircraft will continue their leap from the military to the civilian market, and self-driving cars will make your commute a lot more bearable. But Darpa scientists have even bigger ideas.

Picture a self-driving car that sees a pedestrian in the road and has to swerve to avoid them. Now imagine there are cyclists on both sides of the car – and only the one on the right is wearing a helmet. Should the car veer right, to avoid killing the unprotected rider, even if that means punishing safer cycling? "At least since Socrates we've been worrying about moral philosophy and how to describe what's right and what's wrong," he says. "Now suddenly we've got to programme this into artificial systems and it's like, damn, we haven't got very far."

In recent years, Hawking has issued some rather apocalyptic warnings about artificial intelligence. "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," he told the BBC in 2014. So when the world's most famous scientist praised the opening of a new A.I. research center earlier this week, the Earth wobbled slightly as a million heads turned at once. On Wednesday, Hawking spoke at the official opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at Cambridge University. While Hawking tempered the rather dire tone of his previous conjecture on A.I., he didn't mince his words, either.

These days you tend to hear about Russia in terms of its government hacking the US election. But some canny Russian developers have put their skills to something more productive: monitoring the TV appearances of world leaders. A team of Russian developers have released an AI powered algorithm that tracks all world leaders activities in all media. Based on the information the Verso service analyzes the impact of each President/Prime Minister and shows a rating for them in real-time. Once a second the Verso platform takes a screenshot of a set of monitored TC channels.

Machines have never replaced humans before, and they probably aren't doing so right now, argues Noah Smith Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is, "Will the robots take our jobs?" This nightmare scenario comes in several flavors. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call "skill-biased technological change" -- people who are technically savvy, mentally flexible and educated will reap greater and greater rewards, while everyone else sees their wages decline. These two scenarios might look different on paper, but the net result is largely the same -- a very big portion of humanity would be either be impoverished or reduced to living off of the government dole.

On this week's Tech Tent - your weekly status update on the technology business - we have three stories reflecting our current anxieties about the nature of our digital world. We'll discuss the biggest cybersecurity threat of the moment, the use of bots in the fight to get the upper hand on social media during the US elections and the ongoing debate about the risks of artificial intelligence. This week, producer Jat Gill and I attended a demo by security firm Sophos which left us both rather scared. James Lyne from the firm played a bad guy launching an attack on a company, while two colleagues played the increasingly confused system administrators trying to work out what was going on as chaos engulfed the network. We then heard that the principle weapon in the attackers' armoury was now ransomware.

"We need you to get out there and -- for once in your life -- focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction." Oliver's urging of viewers to exercise their civic rights came during the Federal Communication Commission's public comment period for the pending Net Neutrality rules in 2014, which would have a profound impact on the future development of the Internet. Within hours of the TV show host's rant, the FCC's capacity to accept public comments online crashed, highlighting just how ill-prepared the system was to handle any meaningful level of civic participation. The FCC's comment consideration schedule for Net Neutrality rules consequently was seriously delayed. Six hundred staff lawyers at the Commission subsequently spent nearly nine months to gather, divvy up, read, and categorize what eventually totaled 4 million public responses to the proposed rules, costing taxpayers an estimated 4 million.