Some of the world's largest tech companies are coming together to form a partnership aimed at educating the public about the advancements of artificial intelligence and ensure they meet ethical standards. "We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people's lives and can be leveraged to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health, and education," the group stated in a series of "tenets." Another nexus of interest will be around ethics, with the group inviting academic experts to work with companies on AI for the best of humanity. But it's not clear whether this means opposing working with government surveillance authorities, or opposing forms of online censorship.

SoftBank Group Corp. 9984 -2.80 % Chief Executive Masayoshi Son on Friday said he intends to invest around five trillion won ( 4.5 billion) in South Korea's technology sector over the next decade. A SoftBank spokesman said that during a meeting with South Korean President Park Geun-hye in Seoul, the founder of the Japanese telecommunications and internet conglomerate said he intended to invest in fields including smart robots, the "Internet of Things" and artificial intelligence, areas Mr. Son has said would be a focus for his company over the next 30 years. It isn't the first time Mr. Son has shown interest in the South Korean tech sector. Last year SoftBank invested 1 billion in South Korea's largest mobile-commerce company, Coupang, which the companies said was the largest-ever internet investment in South Korea. Friday's meeting comes after SoftBank closed earlier this month its 32 billion deal to acquire U.K. chip maker ARM Holdings PLC in the largest acquisition of a European technology company.

The world's largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data's value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns AI. Right now that means companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft have a ton of power.

Artificial intelligence is quickly shaping up to be one of the key defining technology areas of our time. A day after announcing a new artificial intelligence partnership with IBM, Google, Facebook and Amazon, Microsoft is upping the ante within its own walls. The tech giant announced that it is creating a new AI business unit, the Microsoft AI and Research Group, which will be led by Microsoft Research EVP Harry Shum. Shum will oversee 5,000 computer scientists, engineers and others who will all be "focused on the company's AI product efforts," the company said in an announcement. The unit will be working on all aspects of AI and how it will be applied at the company, covering agents, apps, services and infrastructure.

The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, launched in the fall of 2014, is a long-term investigation of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its influences on people, their communities, and society. As its core activity, the Standing Committee that oversees the One Hundred Year Study forms a Study Panel every five years to assess the current state of AI. The first Study Panel report, published in September 2016, focusses on eight domains the panelists considered to be most salient: transportation service robots healthcare education low-resource communities public safety and security employment and workplace and entertainment. In each of these domains, the report both reflects on progress in the past fifteen years and anticipates developments in the coming fifteen years. The report also includes recommendations concerning AI-related policy.

Cortana has a new boss, and he has a problem: If Google's turning its Google Now digital assistant into a chatbot, should Microsoft do the same with Cortana? In 2014, Microsoft first unveiled Cortana, the digital assistant within Windows 10. Interacting with Cortana was simple: You asked a question, she responded. In the last few months, however, Google's Assistant has offered an alternative: a chatbot that interacts with users via an ongoing stream of text and images. In an interview with PCWorld, Shum said he hasn't ruled out adding a Cortana chatbot to its roster of digital assistants.

If you add them all up, Google actually makes a lot of gadgets. It sells Nexus phones, Chromebook Pixels, Pixel C tablets, Nest smart-home products, cardboard VR viewers, Chromecast and Chromecast Audio, pretty Wi-Fi routers, even weird custom phone cases. But you'd never think of Google as a hardware company, because there's no rhyme or reason to any of it. Some things are made for developers, others to show off how great a form factor or operating system could be. Some become really expensive doorstops. I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff, too--Google's made so many small-time moves in the gadget market that it's hard to track them all.

In the early 1990s, Iris Murdoch was writing a new novel, as she'd done 25 times before in her life. But this time something was terribly off. Her protagonist, Jackson, an English manservant who has a mysterious effect on a circle of friends, once meticulously realized in her head, had become a stranger to her. As Murdoch later told Joanna Coles, a Guardian journalist who visited her in her house in North Oxford in 1996, a year after the publication of the book, Jackson's Dilemma, she was suffering from a bad writer's block. It began with Jackson and now the shadows had suffused her life. "At the moment I'm just falling, falling … just falling as it were," Murdoch told Coles.

At the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome, in September of 1973, the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erd?s approached his friend Richard Guy with a request. He said, "Guy, veel you have a coffee?" It cost a dollar, a small fortune to a professor of mathematics at the hinterland University of Calgary who was not much of a coffee drinker. Yet, as Guy later recalled--during a memorial talk following Erd?s's death at age 83 two decades ago--he was curious why the great man had sought him out. Guy and Erd?s were in the Eternal City for an international colloquium on combinatorial theory, so Erd?s--who sustained himself with espresso and other stimulants, worked on math problems 19 hours a day, and in his lifetime published in excess of 1,500 papers with more than 500 collaborators--most likely had another problem on the go.

When robots fight, the least safe place to be is inside of one. When it comes to military tech, one major advantage of robots is the distance they put between their pilots and battle. When it comes to giant robot duels for sport, instead, the whole point is to make the machine a fancy, battle-ready exoskeleton for the human inside. To do that, the human needs to survive the fight. So MegaBots, the American team that built a giant human-carrying fighting robot and immediately challenged a Japanese robot to a fight, are working on making their machine safe for the human inside when the duel finally happens.