Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes. "Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things," he said. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think that we'd tax the robot at a similar level." Gates made the remark during an interview with Quartz. He said robot taxes could help fund projects like caring for the elderly or working with children in school.

A panel of esteemed cryptographers at RSA 2017 expressed doubt over artificial intelligence's applicability in the cybersecurity space, tossing cold water on what otherwise appeared to be a hot technology at the conference. "The real problem is that what AI and machine learning is great at is lots of data and dealing with it effectively and what we're dealing with, with the serious attacks are anomalous situations and AI does not look like it's going to be useful there," said Susan Landau, professor of cybersecurity policy and professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, during the session earlier this week. Adi Shamir, Borman professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, said that AI would likely be helpful in defending against attacks when they happen, but not sniffing out threats before they materialize. "I think that AI can be very helpful on the defensive side," said Shamir, who earlier this month was named a recipient of the 2017 Japan Prize. "I doubt it would be so helpful for new zero days because this requires more ingenuity and originality. But when you talk about finding deviations from normal behavior, I think that AI systems are going to be very useful... Ronald Rivest, a professor at the MIT Institute, said that he was "skeptical" that AI would have a significant impact on security. He did, however, acknowledge that AI played an important role in spreading fake news and propaganda during the U.S. election. "There are AI bots talking on chat rooms... adding misinformation and disinformation," said Rivest. "I can imagine 10 or 15 years from now, we're going to find ourselves competing to find the humans among just a sea of bots talking to each other intelligently." But Shamir had a different vision for AI as it becomes super intelligent in the next 15 years: I can foresee a situation which we'll give all of the available data about cybersecurity to this program and it will think for a long time and then say in a calm voice, 'In order to save the Internet I'll have to kill it,'" said Shamir, facetiously.

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies' use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. It's a striking position from the world's richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology. In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes.

It takes bravery nowadays to predict the future. Indeed, if the events of 2016 have taught us anything, it's that unlikely outcomes can easily become a reality. This year marks the 20th year of our CEO Survey and it's been fascinating to look back over the surveys to see how the thinking of CEOs has developed, reflecting the environment around them. To their credit, CEOs saw a lot of the turmoil coming; back in 2009, 76% predicted a rise in political and religious tension and even then 46% believed that governments would become more protectionist. But successful predictions are relatively rare - and that's a salient lesson for people strategy. In 2015, our CEO survey showed that a third of business leaders were increasing their reliance on contractors and freelancers – signalling the emergence of the'gig economy'.

The Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has been at the forefront of accelerated computing, and well before GPUs came along and made acceleration not only cool but affordable and normal. But its latest system, Tsubame 3.0, being installed later this year, the Japanese supercomputing center is going to lay the hardware foundation for a new kind of HPC application that brings together simulation and modeling and machine learning workloads. The hot new idea in HPC circles is not just being able to run machine learning workloads side by side with simulations, but to use machine learning to further accelerate the simulation, and we have a future feature story underway, based on conversations with researchers at TiTech and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the "Summit" hybrid CPU-GPU system is being built for the US Department of Energy, about this very topic. Suffice it to say, the idea is to integrate machine learning into the simulation, to do some of the computationally intensive stuff in a new way. So, as part of a climate model, you teach the system using machine learning to predict the weather by watching movies of the weather, or in astronomy, you use machine learning to remove the noise from the signal to find the interesting bits of a star field.

A new fertility technique allows doctors to replace defective DNA found within a mother's egg with the DNA from another female donor. The result is a baby born with the DNA of two mothers. The first three-parent baby may potentially be born around Christmas of 2017. A new fertility technique allows doctors to replace defective DNA found within a mother's egg with the DNA Scientists will discover the truth behind "dark matter" Dark matter, a mysterious type of matter that makes up a little more than a quarter of the universe, is several experiments away from being detected. Dr. Katherine Freese, an expert in the field of dark matter, says 2017 may be the year "the 80-year-old dark matter puzzle will finally be solved."

Yes, after pulling herself out of her 1950's rut as a swimsuit model to become everything from a doctor, lawyer, computer scientist, astronaut and even the president of the United States, Barbie has now become a 3D-animated hologram that can serve up the weather on command. As first reported in Wired, The Hello Barbie Hologram debuted at the New York Toy Fair this week. And like the original Hello Barbie doll, her laser-beamed character combines motion-capture animation with peppy, Amazon Echo-like answers to your child's questions. Want to remind your child to brush their teeth? Hello Barbie Hologram does that, too.

The XPrize Foundation has named 21 semifinalists for its $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize contest to advance technologies for deep water exploration, including San Diego's Orca Robotics. The semifinalists were announced at the Catch the Next Wave conference in San Diego on Thursday, with teams from 13 countries making the cut. Several teams affiliated with U.S. universities are among the semifinalists, including Duke, Rutgers, Texas A&M, Lehigh University, Virginia Tech and Old Dominion. "These semifinalist teams are on the cutting-edge, pushing the boundaries in developing deep-sea underwater technologies that will work in the lightless, cold depths to fully map one of our world's final frontiers like never before," said Jyotika Virmani, who is overseeing the contest as head of XPrize's Energy and Environment Group. Teams have tapped technologies ranging from underwater gliders to robotic swarms and autonomous vehicles.

Bill Gates thinks robots should get taxed just like humans, he said in a recent interview with Quartz. "Right now if a human worker does you know, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed," the billionaire said. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think we would tax the robot at a similar level." Gates said robots can be good thing by doing certain types of labor done by humans so that people can focus in other fields where there is a shortage of workers. "If you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then you're net ahead," Gates explained, "But you can't just give up that income tax, because that's part of how you've been funding that level of human workers."

As the Trump administration struggles to determine the future of a controversial executive order banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, the futures of international students from those countries hang in the balance. Even though the ban was struck down by a federal court and travel has resumed, the students still face uncertainty, especially since President Trump says he may issue a new version of the executive order. Not only are many indefinitely separated from their families, but their professional opportunities are also at risk. For students who have already achieved success in research or entrepreneurship during their time in the United States, the executive order is particularly troubling. One of the seven countries named in the executive order, Iran has long contributed to American intellectual advancement.