BRUSSELS – The European Commission's strategy for artificial intelligence focuses on the need to establish "trust" and "excellence." Recently proposed AI regulation, the Commission argues, will create trust in this new technology by addressing its risks, while excellence will follow from EU member states investing and innovating. With these two factors accounted for, Europe's AI uptake supposedly will accelerate. Unfortunately, protecting EU citizens' fundamental rights, which should be the AI regulation's core objective, appears to be a secondary consideration; and protections for workers' rights don't seem to have been considered at all. AI is a flagship component of Europe's digital agenda, and the Commission's legislative package is fundamental to the proposed single market for data.

Responsible usage of AI is growing extensively since 2017 and 2021 will see expansion fully into the operationalization of AI ethical principles, frameworks, and policies. Operationalization defined as taking principles into useful practice and thus requiring prioritization for businesses. The challenge is focusing on the top initiatives which I will identify in this article. In my pro bono contributions across 100 global programs with non-profits, I am seeing businesses are still challenged in moving from proof-of-concept responsible AI applications, within one business unit, to scaling across the enterprise. With more than 300 AI principles, frameworks, policy, and regulatory initiatives--businesses must keep current of the top contenders as AI usage grows.

Sight is a miracle-- the relationship of reflection, refraction, and messages decoded by nerves within the brain. When you look at an object, you're staring at a reflection of light that enters your cornea in wavelengths. As it enters the cornea, the light is refracted, or bent, toward the thin, filmy crystalline lens that further refracts the light. The lens is a fine-tuner: it focuses the light more directly at the retina, forming a smaller, more focused beam. At the retina, the light stimulates photoreceptor cells called rods and cones.

As the surge of fraud and cybercrime during the pandemic has demonstrated, it's a very good time to be a bad actor. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies offer a great deal of promise in terms of combatting money laundering, but true AI is scarcely found in the financial institution space. To compound matters, an earlier wave of purported AI and machine learning applications often overpromised and undelivered, leaving firms skeptical and slower to adopt innovative tools. With the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 passed in the U.S., there's an increased imperative. This new package of laws has been the most consequential anti-money laundering legislation passed by Congress in decades.

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch's China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. A sexual assault case at Alibaba has sparked a new round of #MeToo reckoning in China. Industry observers believe this is a watershed moment for the fight against China's allegedly misogynist tech industry. Meanwhile, social media operators are still undecided on how to deal with the unprecedented public uproar against the powerful internet giant. In other news, more Chinese tech companies have delayed plans to go public overseas after Didi's fallout with Chinese regulators over its rushed IPO, including Tencent's music streaming empire and one of China's highest-valued autonomous driving startups.

Advocates of algorithmic justice have begun to see their proverbial "days in court" with legal investigations of enterprises like UHG and Apple Card. The Apple Card case is a strong example of how current anti-discrimination laws fall short of the fast pace of scientific research in the emerging field of quantifiable fairness. While it may be true that Apple and their underwriters were found innocent of fair lending violations, the ruling came with clear caveats that should be a warning sign to enterprises using machine learning within any regulated space. Unless executives begin to take algorithmic fairness more seriously, their days ahead will be full of legal challenges and reputational damage. In late 2019, startup leader and social media celebrity David Heinemeier Hansson raised an important issue on Twitter, to much fanfare and applause.

Deep in the heart of Appalachia, modern science and America's bucolic past meet at a unique crossroad of scientific discovery and luddite lifestyles. The Quiet Zone, by journalist Stephen Kurczy, is the story of a sleepy small town that hosts the Green Bank radio telescope. But the presence of this installation comes at a price: due to the telescope's exceeding sensitivity, virtually every device and appliance that emits radio waves, Wi-Fi signals, or microwave radiation is banned for square miles around. That means that Green Bank, West Virginia has about as much tech today as it did in the 1950's (maybe even a little less) -- and some people very much like it that way. In the excerpt below, Pocahontas County attorney, Robert Martin, recounts the challenges of attempting to modernize the region without loosing a horde of gentrifiers upon it as well.

Once upon a time, updates of computer operating systems were of interest only to geeks. You may recall how Version 14.5 of iOS, which required users to opt in to tracking, had the online advertising racketeers in a tizzy while their stout ally, Facebook, stood up for them. Now, the forthcoming version of iOS has libertarians, privacy campaigners and "thin-end-of-the-wedge" worriers in a spin. It also has busy mainstream journalists struggling to find headline-friendly summaries of what Apple has in store for us. "Apple is prying into iPhones to find sexual predators, but privacy activists worry governments could weaponise the feature" was how the venerable Washington Post initially reported it.

Last week, Apple announced two backdoors in the US into the encryption that protects its devices. One will monitor iMessages: if any photos sent by or to under-13s seem to contain nudity, the user may be challenged and their parents may be informed. The second will see Apple scan all the images on a phone's camera roll and if they're similar to known sex-abuse images flag them as suspect. If enough suspect images are backed up to an iCloud account, they'll be decrypted and inspected. If Apple thinks they're illegal, the user will be reported to the relevant authorities. Action on the circulation of child sexual abuse imagery is long overdue.

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