Dubai will soon be introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its government sectors, a media report said. A new Artificial Intelligence (AI) smart lab will soon begin training government officials to implement AI in a wide variety of tasks that will make lives easier, reported Khaleej Times. The lab, launched during a workshop by the Smart Dubai Office (SDO) and Smart Dubai Government Establishment, will begin training a batch of 200 persons next month, but will later on be open to researchers, students and the general public, said the report. "To move towards the future, we have to redefine government and embed AI in our services. We have no choice but to embrace technology," said Aisha Bint Butti Bin Bishr, Director-General of Smart Dubai Office.

America's manufacturing heyday is gone, and so are millions of jobs, lost to modernization. Despite what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin might think, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Silicon Valley executives, among many others, know it's already happening. And a new report from PwC estimates that 38 percent of American jobs are at "high risk" of being replaced by technology within the next 15 years. But how soon automation will replace workers is not the real problem. The real threat to American jobs will come if China does it first.

According to a report from The Toronto Star, a new institute is launching in Toronto with the goal of commercializing AI research. The non-profit Vector Institute, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto, will hire approximately 25 new faculty and research scientists. The federal government is providing at least $40 million from its $125 million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy announced as part of the federal budget. Reportedly, two dozen companies have committed millions in funding over 10 years, including $5 million each from companies like Google, Air Canada, Loblaws, and Canada's five biggest banks. It will be backed by over $150 million in combined public and corporate funding.

Developing new drugs is notoriously inefficient. Fewer than 12 percent of all drugs entering clinical trials end up in pharmacies, and it costs about $2.6 billion to bring a drug to market. There are so many molecules to test that pharmaceutical researchers use pipetting robots to test a few thousand variants all at once. The best candidates then go into animal models or cell cultures, where hopefully a few will go on to bigger animal and human clinical trials. Which is why more and more drug developers are turning to computers and artificial intelligence to narrow down the list of potential drug molecules--saving time and money on those downstream tests.

TODAY, IN 2017, the president's top economic advisor said he had no worries about robots putting people out of work. "In terms of artificial intelligence taking over the jobs, I think we're so far away from that that it's not even on my radar screen," Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told an audience in Washington. "I think it's 50 or 100 more years." Mnuchin has made similarly confounding statements about AI before. "Not even on my radar screen," he said breezily during an Axios interview.

Thirty-five years ago, while Martin Amis was writing "Money," one of the novels that defined the nineteen-eighties, he admitted to a distracting dalliance with another contemporary icon. "I have spent weeks in a PacMan-fed stupor, unwilling and unable to think about anything else," he wrote in "Invasion of the Space Invaders," his "addict's guide" to the nascent arcade. Amis was not alone in his obsession. The Japanese-made game, in which players guide an auto-munching yellow head through a Daedalian maze, consuming a trail of pellets while fleeing four candy-tone ghosts, earned more than a billion dollars in quarters in its first year, surpassing the highest-grossing "Star Wars" film at the time. Pac-Man towered, Amis wrote, over "a vast garbage dump of rocky romances and wrecked careers."

Could artificial intelligence make devices easier to use? According to Samsung, it sure can, and that's what it the company out to prove with its Bixby AI service. Bixby is being loaded on the Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones, which were announced on Tuesday. Bixby is an agent that can help the smartphones talk, recommend, and remind, said Mok Oh, vice president of service strategy at Samsung. The AI service is being positioned as a more intuitive way to use and interact with smartphones.

People have been losing jobs to robots since the 1990's, a new report has revealed. When one or more robots was introduced into the workforce between 1990 and 2007, it led to the elimination of an average of six jobs. During those years, robots accounted for the loss of about 670,000 manufacturing jobs, and this is expected to rise in the coming years as robots continue to take over tasks previously performed by people. The effects of automation on employment for men are about 1.5-2 times large than those for women The report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, estimated that one more robot per thousand workers reduces wages by 0.25-0.5 per cent. Between 1993 and 2007, the authors of the report wrote that'the stock of robots in the United States and Western Europe increased fourfold'.

NASA may have equipped its Mars Curiosity rover with an impressive array of scientific instruments, but the robot attaché's size and $2.5-billion price tag give its operators ample reason to steer clear of terrain that could jeopardize its mission. Which is a shame, because much of Mars' craggy, cave-ridden, boulder-strewn landscape is so treacherous (planetary geologists literally call it chaos terrain), that big, expensive robots like Curiosity can't risk accessing it. That's why NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built Puffer. Short for Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot, Puffer is the agency's latest origami-inspired device. JPL has experimented previously with collapsible solar panels based on the Japanese art of folding paper.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable?