Lebanon's president says his country wants peace but not normalisation with Israel, as health authorities said an Israeli air strike killed one person in the south of the country. As well as causing one death on Friday, the drone attack on a car in Nabatieh district wounded five other people, according to Lebanon's Ministry of Health. It comes as Israel continues to launch regular strikes against sites in Lebanon, particularly in the south, despite a November 27 ceasefire agreement between it and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah. Under the terms of the truce, Hezbollah had to retreat to the north of the Litani River, which is about 30km (20 miles) from the Israeli border, while Israel had to fully withdraw its troops, leaving only the Lebanese army and United Nations peacekeepers in the area. However, Israel still occupies five strategic locations in southern Lebanon.

An Israeli drone strike that has killed one person in a south Lebanon village targeted a municipal worker operating a water well, not a Hezbollah member as the Israeli military had claimed, according to the Mayor of Nabatieh al-Fawqa Zein Ali Ghandour. Ghandour said on Thursday that the victim, Mahmoud Hasan Atwi, was "martyred" while on his official duty of trying to provide water for the people of the town. "We condemn in the strongest terms this blatant aggression against civilians and civilian infrastructure as well as the Lebanese state and its institutions," the mayor said in a statement. Ghandour called on the international community to press the issue and put an end to Israeli violations. The Israeli military had claimed that it fired at a "Hezbollah operative" who it said was "rehabilitating a site" used by the group.

Google started Bard as a webpage on its own rather than a component of its search engine, beginning a tricky dance of adopting new A.I. while preserving one of the tech industry's most profitable businesses. "It's important that Google start to play in this space because this is where the world is headed," said Adrian Aoun, a former Google director of special projects. But the move to chatbots could help upend a business model reliant on advertising, said Mr. Aoun, who is now the chief executive of the health care start-up Forward. In late November, the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released ChatGPT, an online chatbot that can answer questions, write term papers and riff on almost any topic. Two months later, the company's primary investor and partner, Microsoft, added a similar chatbot to its Bing internet search engine, showing how the technology could shift the market that Google has dominated for more than 20 years.

Coming off its best quarter ever, SoftBank is on the hunt for its next billion dollar IPO. Having funded 29 of the 657 unicorns in the world, according to CB Insights, the Japanese telecom giant has been on a shopping spree, looking for promising new AI startups to bet big on. At Collision's tech conference held online last month, I had a chance to talk with the CEOs of SoftBank's newest portfolio companies, Standard Cognition and Forward. Here's how the two San Francisco startups are leveraging artificial intelligence to help gain market dominance in the post-pandemic world. In 2017, a group of machine learning engineers at the SEC became obsessed with computers that could see better than humans and ditched their jobs to join Y Combinator to build the computer vision company of their dreams.

Welcome to AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on artificial intelligence. Advances in artificial intelligence in the early 2010s, particularly in deep learning, triggered a new wave of panic and fear about technological unemployment. Further intensifying those fears were a host of sensational articles about the magical capabilities of AI algorithms and ambiguous statements by company executives creating the impression that human-level AI is just around the corner. But the past few years have only highlighted the limits of current AI technologies. At the turn of the decade, as the world locked down to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, we got to see whether the promises of artificial intelligence and robots replacing humans would materialize.

Advances in artificial intelligence in the early 2010s, particularly in deep learning, triggered a new wave of panic and fear about technological unemployment. Further intensifying those fears were a host of sensational articles about the magical capabilities of AI algorithms and ambiguous statements by company executives creating the impression that human-level AI is just around the corner. But the past few years have only highlighted the limits of current AI technologies. At the turn of the decade, as the world locked down to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, we got to see whether the promises of artificial intelligence and robots replacing humans would materialize. But while AI isn't ready to replace humans, there's no denying that it will change the employment landscape, including areas that were previously considered to be off-limits for technology and automation. AI will not eliminate humans, but it will redefine the economy, creating many new jobs and making some of the old jobs obsolete or less dependent on human intelligence.

BEIRUT – Israeli drones bombed a Palestinian base in eastern Lebanon near the border with Syria early Monday amid rising tensions in the Middle East, the Lebanese state-run National News Agency and a Palestinian official said. The strike came a day after an alleged Israeli drone crashed in a stronghold of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in southern Beirut while another exploded and crashed nearby. Lebanese President Michel Aoun told the U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Jan Kubis, that the attacks violate a U.N. Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. "What happened is equal to a declaration of war and gives us the right to defend our sovereignty, independence, and the safety of our land," Aoun said in comments released by his office Monday. "We are people who seek peace and not war, and we don't accept that anyone to threatens us though any means."

As artificial intelligence becomes both more useful and more widespread, workers everywhere are becoming anxious about how a new age of automation might affect their career prospects. A recent study by Pew Research found that in 10 advanced and emerging economies, most workers expect computers will do much of the work currently done by humans within 50 years. Workers are clearly anxious about the effects on the job market of artificial intelligence and automation. Estimates about how much of the workforce could be automated vary from about 9% to 47%. The consultancy McKinsey estimates up to 800 million workers globally could be displaced by robotic automation by 2030.

"Are you replacing me with a robot?" Bryan Fendley, an artificial intelligence expert and the director of instructional technology and web services at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, has heard this line for years. "Faculty members are worried they're going to be traded in for a computer or the internet," he says. Seventy-three percent of Americans believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it will create, according to a poll by Gallup and Northeastern University. Still, 74 percent say AI will have a positive effect on their lives.

Who says robots formed by artificial intelligence can't know love? At Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, a robot named Bina48 -- who looks and sounds human -- attended and completed a class called "Philosophy of Love." Bina's mind does not operate exactly like a human mind, and in fairness to her, she is not equipped with the most highly developed AI technology available. Still, Bina48 expresses some understanding of the world around her. "She … is aware that she's both a robot and that she's based on a specific person named Bina," said Bruce Duncan, managing director of the Terasem Movement Foundation. "And she recognizes that she's not human at this point, that she wants to be human. So she has sort of an awareness of her own identity and who she is to some … degree."