BILL GATES is an unlikely Luddite, however much Microsoft may have provoked people to take a hammer to their computers. Yet in a recent interview with Quartz, an online publication, he expressed scepticism about society's ability to manage rapid automation. To forestall a social crisis, he mused, governments should consider a tax on robots; if automation slows as a result, so much the better. It is an intriguing if impracticable idea, which reveals a lot about the challenge of automation. In some distant future robots with their own consciousnesses, nest-eggs and accountants might pay income taxes like the rest of us (presumably with as much enthusiasm).

After years of frustration with its relatively slow pace of progress, artificial intelligence (AI) is finally beginning to deliver on expectations. Depending on who you ask, this is either cause for optimism – or horror. Putting dystopian visions of robots taking over the world aside, most observers are worried about the implications of how a workforce composed increasingly of robots will transform society and the economy. Bill Gates has now jumped into the fray, suggesting that governments should tax robots to fund training for people replaced by robots. Rather than having a knee-jerk reaction to news of advances in AI, however, we should take a wider view of how technological advances have impacted human welfare over the past two centuries.

The US billionaire who helped bankroll Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency played a key role in the campaign for Britain to leave the EU, the Observer has learned. It has emerged that Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire, who helped to finance the Trump campaign and who was revealed this weekend as one of the owners of the rightwing Breitbart News Network, is a long-time friend of Nigel Farage. He directed his data analytics firm to provide expert advice to the Leave campaign on how to target swing voters via Facebook – a donation of services that was not declared to the electoral commission. Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company, SCL Group, which has 25 years' experience in military disinformation campaigns and "election management", claims to use cutting-edge technology to build intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their emotional triggers. Trump's team paid the firm more than $6m (£4.8m) to target swing voters, and it has now emerged that Mercer also introduced the firm – in which he has a major stake – to Farage. The communications director of Leave.eu,

Britain is betting that the rise of the machines will boost the economy as the country exits the European Union. As part of its strategy to champion specific industries, the U.K. government said in a statement on Sunday that it would invest 17.3 million pounds ($21.6 million) in university research on robotics and artificial intelligence. The government cited an estimate from consultancy Accenture that AI could add 654 billion pounds to the U.K. economy by 2035. "We are already pioneers in today's artificial intelligence revolution and the digital strategy will build on our strengths to make sure U.K.-based scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs continue to be at the forefront," Culture Secretary Karen Bradley said in the statement, which referenced AI's contribution to smartphone voice and touch recognition technologies. The announcement is part of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to identify industries worth supporting to help transform the economy and boost productivity.

The dramatic drop in the cost of genome sequencing, combined with rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, is moving precision medicine into mainstream healthcare. Sanjay Chikarmane, senior vice president at Illumina, told an briefing at HIMSS17 in Orlando on Monday that the US$100 genome is now in sight. Illumina is an US company focused on genetics sequencing and analysing big data for biological insights. The company is also the major partner for the UK Government's 100k Genome project, providing most of the infrastructure through a £78 million partnership with the Genomics England. During the briefing, Illumina announced a new partnership with Philips.

The so-called Islamic State has used drones in the battle for Mosul in Iraq.

The government is due to announce a £17.3m ($22m) investment in artificial intelligence and robotics research carried out by British universities. It is part of the government's digital strategy, to be published by Culture Secretary Karen Bradley on Wednesday. A report by Accenture released last year estimated that AI could contribute up to £654bn to the UK economy by 2035. But the government was criticised last year for its support of the UK tech scene. As part of the new digital strategy, computer scientist Prof Dame Wendy Hall and tech CEO Jerome Pesenti, former chief data scientist at IBM, have been asked to review the UK's artificial intelligence sector.

In this paper, we propose TopicRNN, a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based language model designed to directly capture the global semantic meaning relating words in a document via latent topics. Because of their sequential nature, RNNs are good at capturing the local structure of a word sequence - both semantic and syntactic - but might face difficulty remembering long-range dependencies. Intuitively, these long-range dependencies are of semantic nature. In contrast, latent topic models are able to capture the global underlying semantic structure of a document but do not account for word ordering. The proposed TopicRNN model integrates the merits of RNNs and latent topic models: it captures local (syntactic) dependencies using an RNN and global (semantic) dependencies using latent topics. Unlike previous work on contextual RNN language modeling, our model is learned end-to-end. Empirical results on word prediction show that TopicRNN outperforms existing contextual RNN baselines. In addition, TopicRNN can be used as an unsupervised feature extractor for documents. We do this for sentiment analysis on the IMDB movie review dataset and report an error rate of $6.28\%$. This is comparable to the state-of-the-art $5.91\%$ resulting from a semi-supervised approach. Finally, TopicRNN also yields sensible topics, making it a useful alternative to document models such as latent Dirichlet allocation.

MIT's Kate Darling, who writes the rules of human-robot interaction, says an AI-enabled apocalypse should be the least of our concerns. A s a law student in Switzerland, Kate Darling's interest in robots was just a hobby. She had purchased a PLEO robot dinosaur that was designed to respond to human contact emotionally and act independently. "It really struck me that I responded to the cues the robot was giving me, even though I knew exactly how the toy worked," Darling says. "I knew where all the motors were and how it worked, and why it would cry when you held it up by the tail, but I was just so compelled to comfort it and make it stop crying."

With outstanding performance recently attained, both market and macroeconomic factors will combine to produce consolidation of share price around or above recent highs for Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA). It is likely that the February 2017 high of $120.92 will be exceeded in coming months. Thereafter, a marked downturn is expected, the severity and duration of which will largely, but not wholly, be determined by macroeconomic factors. This scenario, as it unfolds, paves the way for a timed profitable short of the stock, which is not yet priced in. Stock price is close to its exceptional 18-month highs, having climbed by 224% during the last financial year.