Kai-Fu Lee sees America as destined to lose to China in the race for leadership in AI. Kai-Fu Lee watched the U.S. beat China to global internet leadership during the dot-com bubble from the inside. Now with what he sees as an even greater technological revolution taking place in the fast-growing field of artificial intelligence, Lee doesn't expect China to take a backseat a second time. "China started slow, and American companies went international," Lee says during a May visit to Forbes Media's headquarters. "But simple math says China has a larger GDP. The market will be bigger."

Many government agencies are already capturing the potential of artificial intelligence technologies, using them to relieve, replace, and augment humans in completing job-related tasks. For many people, artificial intelligence (AI) conjures images of humanoid robots and talking computers straight out of a science fiction film. The phrase is less frequently associated with a government clerk. But the cognitive and automation technologies behind AI could fundamentally transform the way public-sector employees work--eliminating some jobs, redesigning countless others, and even creating entirely new professions within government.¹ AI is already supporting government efficiency, helping to reduce backlogs and costs for routine tasks, predict fraudulent transactions, and identify criminal suspects via facial recognition.

A.I. has no moral compass; at least not for the near future. The same algorithms and learning capability can be used for dark endeavors as easily as they can be for good. Dark A.I. may be equally as competent as its better-intentioned twin. All it will take to launch Dark A.I. will be to feed it some initial examples that focus on negative traits, let it collect from the same ocean of data available to good A.I., then turn it loose to learn and grow. A.I. algorithms will continue to be public information so there's no protection by limiting access to the algorithms themselves.

General Atomics' new predator drone has broken a company endurance record for non-stop hours in flight. The MQ-9B'SkyGuardian' drone flew for 48.2 hours in a row, with reserve fuel left. The company's previous record was held by the Predator XP drone, which flew 46.1 hours in 2015. The MQ-9B's test flight took off on May 16th, 2017 from Laguna Airfield at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona, with 6,065 pounds (2,750 kilograms) of fuel. It flew between 25,000 feet (7,620 meters) and 35,000 feet (10,668 meters) high and landed on May 18th, with 280 pounds (127 kilograms) of reserve fuel left.

It may be a common sight in the world of Star Wars, but so far laser weapons have struggled to make it onto a real battlefield. However, that could soon change as Department of Defense bosses have revealed a new $3.2m project with Clemson University engineers to investigate the science behind laser weapons. The military has already deployed some lasers as defensive weapons to shoot down incoming missiles and drones, but the two new projects will address underlying issues with making them more widespread. The two new projects are based on helping develop the fundamental technology that could see laser weapons such as those seen here in Star Wars: The Force Awakens become a reality. John Ballato and Lin Zhu are taking two different but complementary approaches to creating a high-energy laser that could be used as a weapon.

Deep beneath the ocean's surface, scientists exploring the Central Pacific Basin have spotted behaviour that's never been seen before outside of the fossil record. Among the many remarkable creatures observed during the mission, researchers with the NOAA's Okeanos Explorer witnessed the moment a snail appeared to be munching on the feces of a'sea lily.' Experts say this behaviour can be traced back hundreds of millions of years to the Palaeozoic Era. Among the many remarkable creatures observed during the mission, researchers with the NOAA's Okeanos Explorer witnessed the moment a snail appeared to be munching on the feces of a'sea lily' (pictured) The expedition kicked off on April 27, in effort to collect new data on the deep-water areas of the Pacific, beginning near the American Samoa capital Pago Pago, and ending near Honolulu, Hawaii. It comes as part of the three-year Campaign to Address the Pacific monument Science, Technology, and Ocean Needs, which aims to explore Pacific marine monuments sanctuaries, the'last relatively pristine marine ecosystems on the planet.' Over 23 days, researchers conducted remotely operated vehicle (ROV) dives in American Samoa, the high seas, and the Jarvis Island, Kingman Reef, and Palmyra Atoll Units of Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.

Inspite of all the current hype, AI is not a new field of study, but it has its ground in the fifties. If we exclude the pure philosophical reasoning path that goes from the Ancient Greek to Hobbes, Leibniz, and Pascal, AI as we know it has been officially started in 1956 at Dartmouth College, where the most eminent experts gathered to brainstorm on intelligence simulation. This happened only a few years after Asimov set his own three laws of robotics, but more relevantly after the famous paper published by Turing (1950), where he proposes for the first time the idea of a thinking machine and the more popular Turing test to assess whether such machine shows, in fact, any intelligence. As soon as the research group at Dartmouth publicly released the contents and ideas arisen from that summer meeting, a flow of government funding was reserved for the study of creating a nonbiological intelligence. Atthat time, AI seemed to be easily reachable, but it turned out that was not the case.

Uber has fired the head of its self-driving car unit, Anthony Levandowski, amid the continuing fallout from the engineer's alleged theft of trade secrets from his former employer, Google. The termination, which was first reported by the New York Times, comes three months after Levandowksi was accused of stealing 14,000 internal documents from Google's self-driving car spinoff, Waymo, and taking them to Uber. Waymo sued Uber in February, alleging that the ride-hail company was using the stolen documents to advance its lidar technology, and the case between the two Silicon Valley firms is set to go to trial in October. Uber has denied any wrongdoing, but Levandowski has invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. He has refused to turn over any documents or answer questions during a deposition.

Uber has followed through on threats to fire a star autonomous-car researcher whose hiring touched off a bitter legal fight with Waymo, the former self-driving car arm of Google. Waymo has alleged that Anthony Levandowski downloaded 14,000 documents containing trade secrets before he founded a startup that was purchased by Uber. A federal judge has ordered Uber to return the documents and referred the case to the U.S. Attorney's Office for possible criminal investigation. Uber said in a statement Tuesday that Levandowski missed a company deadline to help with an internal investigation in the case. A telephone message was left Tuesday afternoon for Levandowski.

Artificial intelligence is a technology that is already impacting how users interact with, and are affected by the Internet. In the near future, its impact is likely to only continue to grow. AI has the potential to vastly change the way that humans interact, not only with the digital world, but also with each other, through their work and through other socioeconomic institutions – for better or for worse. If we are to ensure that the impact of artificial intelligence will be positive, it will be essential that all stakeholders participate in the debates surrounding AI. In this paper, we seek to provide an introduction to AI to policymakers and other stakeholders in the wider Internet ecosystem. The paper explains the basics of the technology behind AI, identifies the key considerations and challenges surrounding the technology, and provides several high-level principles and recommendations to follow when dealing with the technology.