The UK's national security boss, Robert Hannigan, should come clean on surveillance and stop attacking technology companies, privacy experts have said. Intelligence agencies must use the debate sparked by Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations to overhaul their attitude to privacy and oversight, said the group speaking at Dublin's Web Summit in November. "What's urgently required is a real cultural shift amongst our politicians and among our civil servants in Whitehall as to the value of privacy: the fact that it's a public and social good, and it's a collective good as well," said Bella Sankey, policy director at civil liberties organisation Liberty. Sankey, speaking alongside the former MI5 intelligence officer and whistleblower Annie Machon, criticised Hannigan for his attack on technology companies, in which he claimed were "in denial" about the misuse of the internet by terrorists, and that "privacy has never been an absolute right". "Given everything we've learnt in the past 18 months, he chose not to address at all the very serious things that GCHQ stand accused of: blanket surveillance of the UK population with public knowledge and without parliamentary knowledge, [and] receiving warrantless bulk intercepts from the NSA on US and people around the world," said Machon.

The U.S. State Department generates some two billion e-mails every year. A significant fraction of these contain sensitive or secret information and so have to be classified, a process that is time-consuming and costly. In 2015 alone, it spent $16 billion to protect classified information. But the reliability of this process of classification is unclear. Nobody knows whether the rules for classifying information are applied consistently and reliably.

While reading about the City of L.A.'s Security Operations Center's use of artificial intelligence, I became intrigued by the beneficial analogs that sales organizations can derive by implementing chatbots. The ComputerWorld article that I reference is not directly sales and marketing related. However, it does demonstrate the value of having artificial intelligence ala chatbots when trying to meet customer demand at scale for your sales, support, and customer service inquiries. That seems like an overwhelmingly large number, especially when you read that their command center is staffed with only eight cyber threat analysts per shift in their around the clock operations to handle threats in realtime. While they don't go into detail about their A.I. system, I can appreciate the huge uplift that A.I. gives to their threat assessment and response in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

It seems like we've perennially been on the edge of major breakthroughs in AI (artificial intelligence), virtual reality, personal robots, and other such cool tech for the past two decades. The first set of science fiction imaginings came true rather rapidly -- think trans-continental air travel, space stations, even drone warfare -- but it appears that the emergence of next-gen tech wizardry has stalled. But while we still can't chat with the on-board computer on our personal spaceship, artificial intelligence is far more pervasive in our daily lives today than most of us realize. As anyone who has trained their mobile phone assistant can attest, years of painstaking research and investment in artificial intelligence technologies is starting to yield impressive results. Siri can predict our commute patterns, Microsoft Cortana warns us of bad weather, and the Google Assistant diligently sets calendar reminders with the impassive demeanor of an English butler of yore.

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.

Populism is sweeping the nation, but it's likely just getting started. Donald Trump's win is a wake-up call that voters are angry with a system that's made middle-class jobs tougher to come by, and increased inequality. As pronounced as the trend already is, it's only just the beginning, experts say. Looming technological advances will wipe out more jobs, broadening the base of disenfranchised, unemployable and frustrated citizens. Meanwhile, elites with the skills to flourish in the digital economy will get richer.

One major example of promising ‘smart’ technology in the public sector is the autonomous vehicle (AV). AVs are expected to yield numerous social benefits, such as increasing traffic efficiency, decreasing pollution, and decreasing traffic accidents by 90%. However, a recent 2016 study published by Bonnefon et al. argued that manufacturers and regulators face a major design challenge of balancing competing public preferences: a moral preference for “utilitarian” algorithms; a consumer preference for vehicles that prioritize passenger safety; and a policy preference for minimum government regulation of vehicle algorithm design. Our paper responds to the 2016 study, calling into question the importance of explicitly moral algorithms and the seriousness of the challenge identified by Bonnefon et al. We conclude that the ‘social dilemma’ is probably overstated. Given that attempts to resolve the ‘social dilemma’ are likely to delay the rollout of socially beneficial AVs, we implore the need for further research validating Bonnefon et al.’s conclusions and encourage manufacturers and regulators to commercialize AVs as soon as possible. We discuss the implications of this example for AV’s for the larger context of Cognitive Assistance in other application areas and the government and public policies that are being discussed.

Britain may be about to spend just over £800 million ($1 billion) on 26 Predator drones. The deadly drone, with a 79 feet (24 metres) wingspan, can fly for 40 hours at a time, carrying two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or other munitions. If the deal goes through, 26 Predator unmanned aircraft will be built as early as 2018. Britain is looking to spend £803.92 million (1 billion US dollars) on American Predator drones (pictured), equipment and training. The Predator was first conceived in the early 1990s as an aerial reconnaissance vehicle, and carries cameras and other sensors.

Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. FILE- In this file photo taken on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, with retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, obscured second right, attend an exhibition marking the 10th anniversary of RT (Russia Today) 24-hour English-language TV news channel in Moscow, Russia. Flynn is widely reported Thursday Nov. 17, 2016, to be a potential contender to become national security advisor to U.S. president elect Donald Trump, although his appointment may be controversial. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn walks through the lobby at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York.

The days of having to remember to your ID with you could soon be a thing of the past. The famous tourist town of Wuzhen, China, is now using face recognition technology to act as its entry pass through the gates of the attraction. The system uses cameras to spot people as they approach the entry, and checks these against a database of registered visitors within a few seconds. The facial recognition technology is thought to be up to 99.77 per cent accurate and able to distinguish people better than a human. Chinese web firm Baidu's system is based on neural networks, which can process huge amounts of data – more than one billion faces – with 99.8 per cent accuracy.