The machine learning community has coalesced around Google's TensorFlow library. Interestingly, one major holdout was DeepMind, which did most of its research on the Torch7 library. Then, late last month, DeepMind announced it was moving to TensorFlow as well -- it was already using it for portions of AlphaGo. Why does any of this matter? Well, with standardization comes the opportunity for optimization, and Google has gone wild with optimization in this case.

Pure and simple, this is hubris. And, I am sorry to say, it is reflected in how DeepMind has acted in acquiring the NHS medical data: not bothering to ask for people's consent and not following ethics rules and regulations. What these actions communicate is that DeepMind views people's medical histories merely as a bunch of data it wants to feed into a learning algorithm, in the same way as it used the old Go games for training the AlphaGo algorithm. And if a company treats people as pieces in a board game, why would it care about privacy and ethics? Well, that is precisely why we shouldn't give DeepMind and its parent company a free hand in using our private data without proper supervision.

Neuroscientists at DeepMind, a Google-owned AI lab in London, have teamed up with academics at Oxford University and UCL to try and determine how the human brain navigates an underground train network. The group -- whose work was published in the journal Neuron this week -- asked humans to plan a journey in a virtual subway network. Participants were tasked with getting from A to B while MRI scans of their brain were taken. These scans showed which parts of the brain are involved in planning and making decisions. The group, which included Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, concluded that the brain splits the task of completing a journey into different jobs, with different parts of the brain handling different elements of the task.

The predictive powers of computers will work nicely in cases where reality does not change dramatically. However, it will fail in any case where there are dramatic, unpredictable, changes in the future. The authoritative science journal Nature announced recently 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?

An app being made by DeepMind, the Google-owned AI company, working in collaboration with the NHS Royal Free Trust in London and being used to help identify hospital patients who might be at risk of acute kidney disease (AKI) is not currently in use, TechCrunch has learned. The collaboration between the tech giant and a portion of the UK's publicly funded health service has drawn criticism for the breadth of patient data being used to power an app which targets a single medical condition. DeepMind and the Royal Free have also been criticized for not approaching the UK's medicines and healthcare devices regulator, the MHRA, prior to using the Streams app in hospitals. The MHRA is responsible for standards of safety, quality and efficacy for healthcare products, which can include software apps. It has emerged that DeepMind and the Royal Free Trust are now in discussions with the MHRA over whether the Streams app needs to be registered as a medical device.

As a taxi driver, you need to pick up and drop off passengers as fast as possible.

Update, 16 May 2016: We have received more information from DeepMind and the Royal Free on this story, and are considering their response.

A company owned by Google has been given access to the healthcare data of up to 1.6 million patients from three hospitals run by a major London NHS Trust. DeepMind, the tech giant's London-based company most famous for its innovative use of artificial intelligence, is being provided with the patient information as part of an agreement with the Royal Free NHS trust, which runs the Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free hospitals. It includes information about people who are HIV-positive as well as details of drug overdoses, abortions and patient data from the last five years, according to a report by the New Scientist. DeepMind announced in February that it was developing a software in partnership with NHS hospitals to alert staff to patients at risk of deterioration and death through kidney failure. The technology, which is run through a smartphone app, has the support of Lord Darzi, a surgeon and former health minister who is director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London.

Right on cue, this past week heralded in an announcement of OpenAI, a new non-profit started by a number of tech luminaries to spearhead AI research that is publicly accessible. The motivation is that apparently these scions of capitalism lose faith in Adam Smith's invisible hand when it comes to AI R&D. Musk continues to promote the idea that AI will be humanity's largest existential threat. Challenging this view, the HBR asks if "OpenAI [is] Solving the Wrong Problem", pointing to the implied lack of trust in capitalism. This is similar to my own parry: that the biggest existential threat to humanity is humanity.

Google does not have regulatory approval for its NHS healthcare deal. Two weeks ago, New Scientist revealed that Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind has access to the personal medical information of millions of UK patients through a data-sharing agreement with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. A New Scientist investigation has found that the project is being carried out without the ethical and regulatory approval that experts say are required. Google and the Royal Free both claim to be acting in compliance with the rules as they interpret them. A collaboration between DeepMind and the NHS has the potential to do great things.