WASHINGTON – The United States has concluded Russia knew in advance of Syria's chemical weapons attack last week, a senior U.S. official said Monday. The official said a drone operated by Russians was flying over a hospital as victims of the attack were rushing to get treatment. Hours after the drone left, a Russian-made fighter jet bombed the hospital in what American officials believe was an attempt to cover up the usage of chemical weapons. The official said the presence of the surveillance drone over the hospital couldn't have been a coincidence, and that Russia must have known the chemical weapons attack was coming and that victims were seeking treatment. The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on intelligence matters and demanded anonymity, didn't give precise timing for when the drone was above the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhtoun, where more than 80 people were killed.

November 8, 2016 was a memorably tumultuous night for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but it was also one in which the stock market showcased how sensitive it was to surprises and the political temperature of the country by nosediving dramatically. Since then, the market has recovered. But on Monday, a simple artificial intelligence program -- a bot -- began tracking Trump's personal Twitter account to see if the president's tweets are a reliable predictor of stock prices in the American economy. NPR's Planet Money -- the organization's bi-weekly economics podcast -- wondered if it could take Trump's volatile tweeting and use it to its advantage to make investment decisions. When he tweets about a company, I trade stocks.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has concluded Russia knew in advance of Syria's chemical weapons attack last week, a senior U.S. official said Monday.

The growth of businesses centered on artificial intelligence and machine learning make it clear: automation will fundamentally reshape industry and society. But this will only happen after a broader sweep and scrutiny of AI and its economic, social, and political influence, from scholars and policymakers alike. This report adds to this discussion through interviews with the entrepreneurs and executives on the front lines of AI, machine learning, and industry.

Tens of thousands of fake listings are added to Google Maps each month that scam consumers into employing unaccredited contractors, a new study has found. The search giant, in collaboration with the University of California, San Diego, has discovered scammers are a setting up their business location at a specific address, but are listing a fake suite number that the U.S. Postal Service has verified. When a potential victim calls the'contractors' for a service, a fraud representative gives them a cheap price quote - but the contractor coerces them into paying more on site. Google teamed up with the University of California over a year ago to'research the actors behind fake listings'. Google and the university found that the fraudsters would use an existing location and then setup a fake suit number that they would verify with the Postal Service.

Strictly speaking, every single week is Robotics Week around here, but this week (or, technically, April 8-16), also happens to be U.S. National Robotics Week. This is an Official Thing--the U.S. House of Representatives declared the second week in April to be National Robotics Week starting back in 2010 and continuing until the End of Time. There are hundreds of events going on all over the country for the eighth edition of this event, ensuring that you'll be able to find something awesome and roboty to do near you. There's a list of everything (organized by state) at the official website here. IEEE Spectrum is a big supporter of National Robotics Week, and like in previous years, we teamed up with iRobot and Georgia Tech to put together a new set of robot trading cards for 2017, which is obviously by far the most exciting thing about NRW every year, and you can see those here.

The evidence that Russia hacked the US to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election continues to grow. The latest comes from AFP, which says that that a Russian "computer expert" was arrested in Spain today at the Barcelona airport on suspicions of hacking the US presidential election campaigns. Furthermore, the US has already put in an extradition request so that the subject Piotr Levashov would have to stand trial here for his alleged crimes. The US has 40 days to present its extradition request to Spain; given that Levashov's arrest reportedly was the result of an "international complaint," it's reasonable to guess that the US is the one who asked the arrest to be made. Indeed, Piotr Levashov's wife Maria told Russian TV that her husband was detained at the request of American authorities.

The next 20 years will see a significant departure from what we currently call cognitive and deep AI technologies and progress toward what would arguably be called conscious machine intelligence. There will be a dichotomy in commercial efforts, the former concentrating on rivalling human intelligence, the biggest moneymakers being forms of AI broader than those currently used in cybersecurity, medicine, and financial modeling. The latter breakaway effort would concentrate on artificial neural architectures emulating all aspects of brain function, allowing researchers to better understand mind and consciousness, the most lucrative venture therein being the creation of the necessary download vessels for the preservation of human consciousness. On the military front, generals and admirals will abandon the concept of one-to-many control and embrace a zero-to-many tack that allows sufficiently'indoctrinated' AI to autonomously make and act upon its own ideologically-based battlefield decisions, with or without a declaration of war.

Enjoy it while it lasts. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin may think artificial intelligence (AI) isn't going to start taking humans' jobs for 50 to 100 years, but most experts believe a revolution in automation is coming far sooner, promising massive increases in efficiency -- and job losses on a huge scale. A recent study put out by PwC estimated that as many as 30% of UK jobs could be "susceptible to automation by robots and AI" by the early 2030s -- with 38% in the US at risk, 35% in Germany, and 21% in Japan -- although it believes jobs will be created elsewhere in the economy to help offset this. Are we doing enough to prepare? Absolutely not, says Bob Moritz, global chairman of consultancy firm PwC.

At a demonstration of Amazon Web Services' new artificial intelligence image recognition tool last week, the deep learning analysis calculated with near certainty that a photo of speaker Glenn Gore depicted a potted plant. "It is very clever, it can do some amazing things but it needs a lot of hand holding still. AI is almost like a toddler. They can do some pretty cool things, sometimes they can cause a fair bit of trouble," said AWS' chief architect in his day two keynote at the company's summit in Sydney. Where the toddler analogy falls short, however, is that a parent can make a reasonable guess as to, say, what led to their child drawing all over the walls, and ask them why.