Artificial intelligence experts are divided over the threat of superintelligent computers. One group argues that even though these machines may be decades or centuries away, the scale of the catastrophe they could cause is so great, we should take action now to prevent them from taking over the world and killing everyone. Another group dismisses the fear of superintelligent computers as speculative and premature, and prefers to focus on existing and near-future AI. In fact, though, these two sides may have more common ground than they think. It's not necessary to choose between focusing on long-term and short-term AI threats, when there are actions we can take now to simultaneously address both.

Washington: I read the news. Barely a day goes by when I don't read about some advance in cyborg technology. There's the Stanford engineer who's just invented a way to safely transfer energy to biomechanical implants. A University of California-San Francisco team won a grant to build brain implants to fight depression and PTSD. There's a man who can hear colours, thanks to a mechanical implant.

Under President Obama's leadership, America continues to be the world's most innovative country, with the greatest potential to develop the industries of the future and harness science and technology to help address important challenges. Over the past 8 years, President Obama has relentlessly focused on building U.S. capacity in science and technology. This Thursday, President Obama will host the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh to imagine the Nation and the world in 50 years and beyond, and to explore America's potential to advance towards the frontiers that will make the world healthier, more prosperous, more equitable, and more secure. Today, to ready the United States for a future in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a growing role, the White House is releasing a report on future directions and considerations for AI called Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. This report surveys the current state of AI, its existing and potential applications, and the questions that progress in AI raise for society and public policy.

A UK parliamentary committee has urged the government to act proactively -- and to act now -- to tackle "a host of social, ethical and legal questions" arising from the rise of autonomous technologies such as artificial intelligence. "While it is too soon to set down sector-wide regulations for this nascent field, it is vital that careful scrutiny of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions of artificially intelligent systems begins now," says the committee. "Not only would this help to ensure that the UK remains focused on developing'socially beneficial' AI systems, it would also represent an important step towards fostering public dialogue about, and trust in, such systems over time." The committee kicked off an enquiry into AI and robotics this March, going on to take 67 written submissions and hear from 12 witnesses in person, in addition to visiting Google DeepMind's London office. Publishing its report into robotics and AI today, the Science and Technology committee flags up several issues that it says need "serious, ongoing consideration" -- including: "[W]itnesses were clear that the ethical and legal matters raised by AI deserved attention now and that suitable governance frameworks were needed," it notes in the report.

After publishing my recent article, Must-read Articles on Artificial Intelligence, in which I've shared my thoughts and concerns about AI, some have asked for more.

As banking organisations, financial services providers and brands predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the business development strategy for 2016 and beyond. Gideon Hyde, co-founder of Market Gravity, proposition design consultancy, shares his thoughts on this emerging technology and explains how businesses can embrace AI to enhance their offerings, meet consumer demand for speed, personalisation and convenience, and launch new products and services to stand out in the competitive marketplace. Gideon Hyde is co-founder and CEO of Market Gravity, which has offices in London, Edinburgh and New York. It works with big businesses, including Boots, Barclaycard, HSBC, Aegon, Standard Life, RWE npower and The AA, to help them realise their innovation capabilities and release the start up within. AI is already around us and used everyday within payments, money management and for robo-advice, particularly in the area of intelligent digital assistants that handle regular customer service enquiries and tasks.

Building on the innovative thinking that jump-started three previous life-changing eras – steam-powered mechanised production, mass production assembly lines, and the first electronics and IT-based automations – we're about to find out how this latest evolution will take us places we can't begin to imagine. In the most disruptive industrial revolution yet, AI advancements are infiltrating our existence at every level, whether they're in the guise of IBM Watson's Jeopardy-playing prowess, or Uber's self-driving cars. The businesses we run, the jobs we perform and the lives we live will never be the same again. With every new era comes fresh concerns that the latest advancements will usurp our role as humans, and make our work redundant. From driving our cars to diagnosing the sick, if machines are being trained to do our thinking for us, will we still need to think for ourselves?

Today on In Case You Missed It: Robots have finally gotten around the'needing human assistance' thing when it comes to sewing clothing. The Sewbo is one such option, which can stitch together clothing as long as the garment is first dipped in a stiffening solution that makes it feel like cardboard. Meanwhile MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab created a computer program made to simplify the process of 3D-printing with different materials in the same object. News about the Foundry is here. The video we can't stop watching from Russia is here.

President Barack Obama envisions AI as the next Apollo program--an 80 billion effort shepherded by the US government. In his interview with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, President Obama said that the government should facilitate a range of research in artificial intelligence. "The way I've been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom," he says. "The government should add a relatively light touch, investing heavily in research and making sure there's a conversation between basic research and applied research." That means the government should help provide a path for getting AI into the real world.

Here I put together a number of new data science techniques to solve a real life problem: identifying good articles to write and publish (or to harvest and re-post) on a website, and re-tweet them with the optimum frequency, given a specific audience. The focus is on scoring articles based on selected features (keywords in subject line, author, channel and many more), feature selection, data generation and harvesting to solve the problem, automatically categorizing and tagging articles using indexation algorithms, and predicting the lifetime value and total page views of an article. We also discuss bucketisation, and use both hidden decision trees and jackknife regression for scoring articles. The methodology applies to many contexts, not just digital publishing. It applies to situations in which a lot of unstructured text data needs to be processed (categorized and scored using natural language processing methods).