President-elect Trump has met with leaders in technology in an effort to open lines of communication and discuss business after months of two-way criticism. It's no secret that Silicon Valley was largely in support of Hillary Clinton, who had aligned herself with the technology community, while over the last few years Mr. Trump has criticized Apple's iPhones, accused Facebook, Google, and Twitter of burying negative news about Democrats, and picked a fight with Jeff Bezos on Twitter insinuating his purchase of the Washington Post was for political influence to help Amazon's business. While this meeting simply serves to smooth over relations with the technology community, there is a longer conversation needed with President-elect Trump, who's presidency sits at a tipping point in technology. In the next four years we will see an explosion of AI technology that further delivers on the promise of driverless cars, intelligent robots, and other societal and job-impacting advancements. The conversation needed is how to, or more precisely, how not to regulate AI.

Jack Clark and I are both lapsed technology journalists, and he writes one of my favorite new newsletters of this year, Import AI, which summarizes major research, hires and products in the space. He now works for OpenAI, alongside a team of researchers, where he handles policy, communications and partnerships. OpenAI is an AI research lab set up by former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Its mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Q: Before you joined OpenAI, you were a journalist -- like me. In fact, you called yourself the world's first and "only neural network reporter" while you were at Bloomberg. What made you decide to cross over? I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence.

Neural networks, machine-learning systems, predictive analytics, speech recognition, natural-language understanding and other components of what's broadly defined as'artificial intelligence' (AI) are currently undergoing a boom: research is progressing apace, media attention is at an all-time high, and organisations are increasingly implementing AI solutions in pursuit of automation-driven efficiencies. The first thing to establish is what we're not talking about, which is human-level AI -- often termed'strong AI' or'artificial general intelligence' (AGI). A survey conducted among four groups of experts in 2012/13 by AI researchers Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom reported a 50 percent chance that AGI would be developed between 2040 and 2050, rising to 90 percent by 2075; so-called'superintelligence' -- which Bostrom defines as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest" -- was expected some 30 years after the achievement of AGI (Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence, Chapter 33). This stuff will happen, and it certainly needs careful consideration, but it's not happening right now. What is happening right now, at an increasing pace, is the application of AI algorithms to all manner of processes that can significantly affect peoples' lives -- at work, at home and as they travel around. Although hype around these technologies is approaching the'peak of expectation' (sensu Gartner), there's a potential fly in the AI ointment: the workings of many of these algorithms are not open to scrutiny -- either because they are the proprietary assets of an organisation or because they are opaque by their very nature.

It seems that just about everyone wants to get into the AI assistant game. Nokia (the networking giant, not HMD Global's brand) has applied for a trademark on "Viki," a chat- and voice-based helper for smartphones and the web. Details are scarce -- this is a trademark, not a patent -- but there's little doubt as to what it's for. The question is, what will Nokia do with it? "Nokia registers trademarks from time to time," a spokesperson tells us, "but we don't comment on how, whether or when they may be used for Nokia products or services."

Whenever one separates sociology and technology, one misses the point.

Nokia's trademark application for Viki comes just as the new Android-powered 5.5-inch Nokia 6 launches. A new trademark application by Nokia suggests the former mobile-device giant could be building a phone-based digital assistant called Viki. Nokia filed the European trademark application for the name Viki just ahead last week's launch of the new Android-powered 5.5-inch Nokia 6 from HMD Global, the sole licensee of Nokia handsets, which plans to sell its first Nokia mobile exclusively in China this year for around $250. Nokia's involvement in the new phones is limited to branding and IP. However, the new trademark application could suggest it still may be eyeing a prominent place on Nokia-branded Android devices via Viki, which could be its answer to artificial intelligence-powered digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana.

President-elect Trump has met with leaders in technology in an effort to open lines of communication and discuss business after months of two-way criticism. It's no secret that Silicon Valley was largely in support of Hillary Clinton, who had aligned herself with the technology community, while over the last few years Mr. Trump has criticized Apple's iPhones, accused Facebook, Google, and Twitter of burying negative news about Democrats, and picked a fight with Jeff Bezos on Twitter insinuating his purchase of the Washington Post was for political influence to help Amazon's business. While this meeting simply serves to smooth over relations with the technology community, there is a longer conversation needed with President-elect Trump, who's presidency sits at a tipping point in technology. In the next four years we will see an explosion of AI technology that further delivers on the promise of driverless cars, intelligent robots, and other societal and job-impacting advancements. The conversation needed is how to, or more precisely, how not to regulate AI.

Is Nokia the latest tech company to join the growing niche of companies investing in AI voice assistants? By the looks of things, it could be so. The Finnish company has even filed for a trademark that would name its own virtual assistant as "Viki." Just this Sunday, GSMinfo revealed that Nokia has applied for a trademark in the European Union for its very own AI assistant. The EU reportedly received the application a few days ago and per the document, Nokia described its new technology as a "software for the creation and monitoring of mobile and web assistants working with digital knowledge and combining all data sources into a single chat and voice-based interface."

OXFORD – Galileo viewed nature as a book written in the language of mathematics and decipherable through physics. His metaphor may have been a stretch for his milieu, but not for ours. Ours is a world of digits that must be read through computer science. It is a world in which artificial-intelligence (AI) applications perform many tasks better than we can. Like fish in water, digital technologies are our infosphere's true natives, while we analog organisms try to adapt to a new habitat, one that has come to include a mix of analog and digital components.

Alexa, the voice assistant built into the Amazon Echo, is one of many artificially intelligent (AI) personal assistants being deployed by technology companies to help consumers manage their homes and schedules. Amazon's gadget, which is quickly emerging as a strong rival to Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant, was a big hit at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Yet as a recent murder case illustrates, AI assistants are creating thorny legal and privacy questions that legal and cybersecurity experts are scrambling to understand. Because virtual assistants rely on microphones that, in some cases, may be continuously recording and sending information, that trove of information creates a delicate balance between law enforcement requests, corporate strategy and individual privacy rights. In 2015, an Arkansas man was found dead in a hot tub, and investigators issued a warrant to Amazon, requesting the company turn over audio recordings and information captured by an Echo smart speaker owned by the suspect.