The space and renewable energy tycoon has launched yet another pioneer non-profit project which can change the world of robotics today. Elon Musk developed a 1 billion-program "Robot Gym" to train artificial intelligence. He says he wanted the robots to be as versatile as humans when it comes to thinking. Our reinforcement learning toolkit, OpenAI Gym, is now in public beta: https://t.co/8fMRLjSJQb. Tesla's CEO, together with Sam Altman, created the artificial intelligence non-profit research company.

It's no secret that Google has broad ambitions in healthcare. But a document obtained by New Scientist reveals that the tech giant's collaboration with the UK's National Health Service goes far beyond what has been publicly announced. The document – a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust – gives the clearest picture yet of what the company is doing and what sensitive data it now has access to. The agreement gives DeepMind access to a wide range of healthcare data on the 1.6 million patients who pass through three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – each year. This will include information about people who are HIV-positive, for instance, as well as details of drug overdoses and abortions.

When it was revealed that Google's London-based company DeepMind would be able to access the NHS records of 1.6 million patients who use three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – it rang alarm bells. Not just because Google, a sprawling octopus of a company with tentacles in all our lives, wishes to "organise the world's information". Not just because patients are unlikely to have consented to Google having this information. The issue for many is the intertwining of these concerns with the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). DeepMind is no ordinary company.

Google has been granted access to approximately 1.6 million NHS patient records so that its artificial intelligence company can develop an app-based healthcare warning system. According to New Scientist magazine, the data sharing agreement gives Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind access to patient data at the Royal Free, Barnet and Chase Farm hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust. The deal, which makes five years' worth of data available, will be used by DeepMind to build an app-based early warning system for patients at risk of acute kidney injuries. However, Google has not ruled out using the information for other purposes if it involved improving healthcare. The shared data includes full names and patient histories, as well as sensitive information on HIV testing, details of abortions, drug overdoses and real-time NHS data on admissions, discharges and patient transfers.

Concerns have been raised about the scope of a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned DeepMind and the UK's National Health Service (NHS) after it was revealed the agreement covers access to all patient data from the three London hospitals involved, rather than a more targeted subset of data relating to the specific medical condition the healthcare app in question (Streams) is focused on. Back in February DeepMind announced a collaboration with the NHS to build an app for clinicians treating kidney disease. The company also acquired an existing early stage clinical task management app, called Hark, built by a team from Imperial College London -- evidently with the intention of building on that base tech, but giving it a more specific medical focus in the first instance. The Streams app aims to streamline alerts and access to patient data for doctors and nurses working in the front-line of medical care. But it is not a general medical data alerts or messaging platform.

Google's DeepMind has hit back at criticism of its partnership with London's Royal Free hospital to develop an app that helps doctors and nurses rapidly identify and treat acute kidney injuries. DeepMind's co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, said the company was better placed than any other to handle sensitive medical data, given its long history of securing highly personal information from other fields. He said: "As Googlers, we have the very best privacy and secure infrastructure for managing the most sensitive data in the world. That's something we're able to draw upon as we're such a core part of Google." He added: "When we developed our information governance toolkit and we submitted that for assessment to the health and social care information centre (HSCIC), which approves these data-sharing agreements, we got 100% for our toolkit. There's pretty much nobody else who's been able to get a score as high as that."

Google has some of the most powerful computers and smartest algorithms in the world, has hired some of the best brains in computing, and through its purchase of British firm Deepmind has acquired AI expertise that recently saw an AI beat a human grandmaster at the game of go. Why then would we not want to apply this to potentially solving medical problems – something Google's grandiose, even hyperbolic statements suggest the company wishes to? The New Scientist recently revealed a data sharing agreement between the Royal Free London NHS trust and Google Deepmind. The trust released incorrect statements (since corrected) claiming Deepmind would not receive any patient-identifiable data (it will), leading to irrelevant confusion about what data encryption and anonymisation can and cannot achieve. As people have very strong feelings about third-party access to medical records, all of this has caused a bit of a scandal.

Sometimes I think Elon Musk may single-handedly be increasing the coolness quotient of the entire human race. I mean seriously, the man is running three companies poised to change the course of entire industries and he has time to take step back and think "alright, guess I'll save humanity while I'm at it too, I guess" Last week, OpenAI released OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. Today, with the power or control to develop the next generation of AI technology clearly in the hands of an elite group of companies whose motives may be driven by corporate interests and financial gains, I see the motive behind Elon Musk and Sam Altman's OpenAI venture. It is an attempt to put checks and bounds in place to "save us from ourselves", so to speak. Let's step back from the world of artificial intelligence for a second and think about a biological process we all are familiar with -- evolution.

THERE is an apocryphal story in technology circles: Google and Facebook could do things with our data that would make our heads spin, but they don't because it would freak everyone out. Apocryphal it may be, but data companies do not have to do much to freak us out. Some people will be extremely unnerved by our revelation that Google's subsidiary DeepMind has access to healthcare data from three UK National Health Service hospitals (see "Revealed: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data"). People who use the hospitals now know that DeepMind has intimate – albeit anonymised – details of their medical history, including HIV status, past drug overdoses and abortions. It doesn't help that DeepMind is very unwilling to talk about what it wants to do with this data.

Joab Rosenberg is the former deputy head analyst for the Israeli government and CEO of Epistema. Nature magazine announced in late January that a computer designed by Google's DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, "Go." This impressive achievement once again raised the expectations for a predicted future in which computers will have artificial intelligence, with major media outlets worldwide touting this anticipated future. One of the major questions raised in response to DeepMind's achievement is what are the outer limits, if any, of intelligent machines? In November of last year, Dr. Kira Radinsky, a computer scientist and "machine learning" expert, argued in the Israeli newspaper "Ha'aretz" that computers will be able to accurately predict the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.