The Bank of England's warning that the pace of artificial intelligence development now threatens 15m UK jobs has prompted calls for political intervention. According to scientists and legal experts, responding to the bank's warning this November, there is now an urgent need for the development of intelligent algorithms to be put on the political agenda. This is happening now and across the board and that's the difference. That's why a lot of us need to start talking about this now. The Government needs to pick up on this and put it on the political agenda and look at regulatory issues, said Chrissie Lightfoot, a patent lawyer and author, who debated fears over unemployment caused by AI at London's Science Museum last October.

A group of 26 international experts has warned that rogue states, criminals and terrorists could use artificial intelligence (AI) in crimes, terror attacks and to manipulate public opinion. The report suggests that unless preparations are made now to prevent the malicious use of the technology, cybercrime will rapidly increase in years to come. Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used positively for applications such as digital assistants, smartphones and autonomous vehicles. But this study, written by dozens of AI, cybersecurity and technology experts and academics, looks forward a decade to the threats AI could pose if certain potential risks are not addressed. Sounding an alarm the authors warn, for example, of a rapid growth in cybercrimes fuelled by the technology.

We propose strategies to estimate and make inference on key features of heterogeneous effects in randomized experiments. These key features include best linear predictors of the effects using machine learning proxies, average effects sorted by impact groups, and average characteristics of most and least impacted units. The approach is valid in high dimensional settings, where the effects are proxied by machine learning methods. We post-process these proxies into the estimates of the key features. Our approach is generic, it can be used in conjunction with penalized methods, deep and shallow neural networks, canonical and new random forests, boosted trees, and ensemble methods. Our approach is agnostic and does not make unrealistic or hard-to-check assumptions; we don't require conditions for consistency of the ML methods. Estimation and inference relies on repeated data splitting to avoid overfitting and achieve validity. For inference, we take medians of p-values and medians of confidence intervals, resulting from many different data splits, and then adjust their nominal level to guarantee uniform validity. This variational inference method is shown to be uniformly valid and quantifies the uncertainty coming from both parameter estimation and data splitting. The inference method could be of substantial independent interest in many machine learning applications. An empirical application to the impact of micro-credit on economic development illustrates the use of the approach in randomized experiments. An additional application to the impact of the gender discrimination on wages illustrates the potential use of the approach in observational studies, where machine learning methods can be used to condition flexibly on very high-dimensional controls.

As America looks for answers in the wake of the shooting massacre of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, some politicians have returned to the 1990s tactic of blaming video games for violence. Kentucky governor Matt Bevin started the show a couple of days after the shooting, and on Wednesday, Rhode Island state representative Bobby Nardolillo took it a step further. Nardolillo proposed legislation that would put a 10 percent tax on video games with an ESRB rating of Mature or higher, Rolling Stone reported. That tax revenue would be used to fund "counseling, mental health programs and other conflict resolution activities" in schools, according to the press release on Nardolillo's Facebook page. Both Nardolillo and Bevin have high ratings from the NRA. It is not controversial to say that many of the most popular video games are violent; five of the top 10 selling games of 2017 were about shooting guns and three of them would be taxed under Nardolillo's proposed regulations.

Diversified software company Adobe Systems Inc. has said it will set up an artificial intelligence (AI) centre in Hyderabad, according to a media report. The announcement came during a meeting of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Telangana information technology minister Kalvakuntla Taraka Rama Rao, according to a report in The Economic Times. The meeting was organised on the sidelines of a three-day Nasscom India leadership forum that started this week. The event is also playing host to the World Congress on Information Technology being held in India for the first time. "As a global leader providing content creation and enterprise experience software solutions, driving innovative products is the core essence of Adobe. Hyderabad has an abundance of tech talent and a pro-business stance," Narayen was quoted as saying in the report.

It appears that, just like their flesh and blood counterparts, you just can't put a good robot dog down, even if you're a human fighting it for control of a door. Boston Dynamics' well-mannered four-legged machine SpotMini has already proved that it can easily open a door and walk through unchallenged, but now the former Google turned SoftBank robotics firm is teaching its robo-canines to fight back. A newly released video shows SpotMini approaching the door as before, but this time it's joined by a pesky human with an ice hockey stick. Unperturbed by his distractions, SpotMini continues to grab the handle and turn it even after its creepy fifth arm with a claw on the front is pushed away. If that assault wasn't enough, the human's robot bullying continues, shutting the door on Spot, which counterbalances and fights back against the pressure.

Last month, I wrote a blog post warning about how, if you follow popular trends in NLP, you can easily accidentally make a classifier that is pretty racist. To demonstrate this, I included the very simple code, as a "cautionary tutorial". The post got a fair amount of reaction. But eventually I heard from some detractors. Of course there were the fully expected "I'm not racist but what if racism is correct" retorts that I knew I'd have to face.

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will come into force on May 25, 2018, redefines how organizations are required to handle the collection and use of EU citizens' personal data. Debates around the GDPR focus mostly on the global reach of this legislation, the draconian fines it introduces, or its stricter rules for "informed consent" as a condition for processing personal data. However, one challenge the GDPR brings to companies is often overlooked: the citizens' right to explanation. Legal details aside, the GDPR mandates that citizens are entitled to be given sufficient information about the automated systems used for processing their personal data in order to be able to make an informed decision as to whether to opt out from such data processing. The right to explanation has long been overlooked.

FRANKFURT, Germany - Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are raising risks that malicious users will soon exploit the technology to mount automated hacking attacks, cause driverless car crashes or turn commercial drones into targeted weapons, a new report warns. The study, published on Wednesday by 25 technical and public policy researchers from Cambridge, Oxford and Yale universities along with privacy and military experts, sounded the alarm for the potential misuse of AI by rogue states, criminals and lone-wolf attackers. The researchers said the malicious use of AI poses imminent threats to digital, physical and political security by allowing for large-scale, finely targeted, highly efficient attacks. The study focuses on plausible developments within five years. "We all agree there are a lot of positive applications of AI," Miles Brundage, a research fellow at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. "There was a gap in the literature around the issue of malicious use."

"For many decades hype outstripped fact in terms of AI and machine learning. "This report looks at the practices that just don't work anymore and suggests broad approaches that might help: for example, how to design software and hardware to make it less hackable - and what type of laws and international regulations might work in tandem with this." The report urges policy makers and researchers to work together to understand and prepare for how the technology could be used maliciously, and calls for developers to be proactive and mindful of how it could be misused. Those who contributed to the study include the Elon Musk-founded non-profit research firm OpenAI and international digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation.