A US intelligence director says a lot of espionage is more boring than you might think, and much of it could be handed over to artificial intelligence. "A significant chunk of the time, I will send [my employees] to a dark room to look at TV monitors to do national security essential work," Robert Cardillo, head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency told reporters including Foreign Policy. "But boy is it inefficient." Cardillo calls out recent advances in artificial intelligence, giving algorithms the ability to analyze vast amounts of images and video to find patterns, give data about the landscape, and identify unusual objects. This kind of work is critical for assessing national security concerns like foreign missile-silo activity, or even just to check in on North Korean volleyball games.

Beijing is backing its artificial intelligence push with vast sums of money. Having already spent billions on research programs, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups and academic research, all with the aim of growing China's AI capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan. China's private companies are pushing deeply into the field as well, although the line between government and private in China sometimes blurs. China is spending more just as the United States is cutting back. This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research.

NZTech CEO Graeme Muller says New Zealanders are engaging with artificial intelligence (AI) everyday, probably without even realising it. Muller made the comments on the eve of the launch of the New Zealand AI Forum in Wellington, describing AI as "the fastest growing impactful technology spreading the globe." The forum was announced in February with further details being provided in late May, including the naming of Stu Christie, investment manager at the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, as its chairman. NZTech says dozens of New Zealand's leading tech companies are joining the forum, which has been initiated via a collaboration between NZTech, the government and AI tech leaders. According to Muller, one of the most recent examples of AI in New Zealand is the chat function on the Air New Zealand website that helps with ticket bookings: users of that function are chatting with AI not a human, Muller said.

Connecting the human brain to computers is quickly becoming one of the hottest ideas in Silicon Valley, with Tesla's Elon Musk and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg among the many top tech entrepreneurs leading the charge. In March, Musk launched Neuralink, a medical research company that creates brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Musk has previously expressed the importance of upgrading human cognition in order to ensure people are not made obsolete by artificial intelligence. BCIs would initially be used for medical research, with the ultimate goal being to blur the lines between people and artificial intelligence. Read: Will Robots Take Your Job? Elon Musk Thinks We Have 30 Years Until AI Is Better Than Us At Everything Neuralink has been registered as a medical research company, and Musk said they will produce a product to help people with severe brain injuries within four years, the Washington Post reports.

Roaming charges are finally being killed off, after the EU forced phone companies to stop hitting people with massive, shock bills. But customers have been warned that they might still have to pay more than they expect and should continue to be vigilant. The roaming charges will come to an end after 15 June. That will mean that people in the UK can take their normal contract – with all its free calls, texts and data – anywhere in the EU, for no extra cost. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

In 1950, Alan Turing, already famous for helping to crack the German Enigma code during World War II, devised the Turing test to define intelligence in machines. Could a computer, Turing asked, fool a human into thinking he was interacting with another person, or imitate human responses so well that it would be impossible for a person to tell the difference? If the machine could, Turing proposed, it could be considered intelligent. Turing's thought experiment spawned scores of science-fiction tales, such as the 2015 hit movie Ex Machina. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous algorithms are not only passing the Turing test every day but, more importantly, are making and saving money for the businesses that deploy them.

The cheetah can accelerate from zero to 96.6 kph in under three seconds. These cases show where the Google approach gives inferior answers. If you type the first question into Google, you get a "Popular on the web" snippet with photos of several candidates. Google just reads this, even omitting any kind of pause after "web" and before "cheetah." To top it off, the correct answer isn't even in the list it reads, and appears 10th in the list of animals. In the second question, you also don't get the correct answer from Google.

Identity theft is often a multi-layered process. Once a thief gets one bit of your information, they try to use it to get more. The hackers behind the 2015 data breach of the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), for example, used personal information they'd previously stolen from thousands of Americans to answer security questions on the IRS website, and in turn get access to their tax returns. The security questions asked about personal details, like, "On which of the following streets have you lived?" and, "What is your total scheduled monthly mortgage payment?" The hackers in the IRS case successfully got through that security measure, but what if the agency had a system in place that could detect whether the person answering the questions really was who they claimed to be?

If Robert Cardillo has his way, robots will perform 75 percent of the tasks currently done by American intelligence analysts who collect, analyze, and interpret images beamed from drones, satellites, and other feeds around the globe. Cardillo, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, known by the acronym NGA, announced his push toward "automation" and artificial intelligence at a conference this week in San Antonio. The annual conference, hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, brings together technologists, soldiers, and intelligence professionals to discuss national security threats, changes in technology, and data collection and processing. Artificial intelligence is on the rise; former President Barack Obama's White House released a white paper on its potential future impacts in the final months of the administration. Police officers are using preliminary programs to predict the likelihood someone will commit a crime in a specific neighborhood based on crime statistics data.

He is the star of the Daily Telegraph's splash, which sees his unexpected comeback as Theresa May's attempt to avoid a leadership challenge. The newspaper thinks the prime minister is addressing complaints that she is too autocratic and unwilling to work with her critics. It also expects Mr Gove to become a key adviser on Brexit and a powerful ally in getting any deal through the Commons. The Sun says he is the biggest winner in the "post-election disaster shake-up". The Times interprets the limited reshuffle as a signal that Mrs May will go for a so-called soft Brexit. The newspaper says she faces overwhelming pressure to go for looser controls on immigration, a re-think on leaving the customs union, and a more flexible approach to the European Court of Justice.