The White House has announced measures to address the risks of an artificial intelligence arms race, as the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, met chief executives at the forefront of the industry's rapid advances. In a statement released as Harris prepared to meet the leaders of ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft, the US government said firms developing the technology had a "fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public". Concerns are mounting that if AI is allowed to develop unchecked, its application by private companies could threaten jobs, increase the risk of fraud and infringe data privacy. The US government said on Thursday it would invest $140m (£111m) in seven new National AI Research Institutes, to pursue AI advances that are "ethical, trustworthy, responsible, and serve the public good". AI development is dominated by the private sector, with the tech industry producing 32 significant machine-learning models last year, compared with three produced by academia.

Stone once described arms races as the inevitable product of there being "no limit to the ingenuity of science and no limit to the deviltry of human beings." This dark truth about the era of human-controlled "kinetic" weapons of mass destruction that so concerned Stone remains true today of the emerging range of increasingly automated systems that may now be fusing scientific ingenuity with a silicon-based deviltry of all its own. For most of history, from stones to siege guns, warfare consisted of hurling some amount of mass with sufficient energy to do serious harm. The general trend has been toward increasing mass and energy, giving weapons greater range. Yet, until the first automated guidance systems came into play during World War II, the "information content" of weaponry was quite small, reducing accuracy.

Two of the world's superpowers are working to amass arsenals of weaponry. No, it's not conventional arms that these countries are seeking but technological. China and the United States are engaged in a race to see which one can dominate the field of artificial intelligence. So who's winning? A new report released this week urges the U.S. to invest more in tech skills so Americans can retain a competitive advantage both in research and development.. Explore this storyboard about Technology, Eric Schmidt, China by Tech on Flipboard.

Though artificial intelligence is changing how businesses work, there are concerns about how it may influence our lives. This is not just an academic or a societal concern but a reputational risk for companies, no company wants to be marred with data or AI ethics scandals that impacted companies like Amazon. For example, there was significant backlash due to the sale of Rekognition to law enforcement. This was followed by Amazon's decision to stop providing this technology to law enforcement for a year since they anticipate the proper legal framework to be in place by then. Al algorithms and training data may contain biases as humans do since those are also generated by humans.

James Johnson (The Conversation) The U.S. government, long a proponent of advancing technology for military purposes, sees artificial intelligence as key to the next generation of fighting tools. Several recent investments and Pentagon initiatives show that military leaders are concerned about keeping up with – and ahead of – China and Russia, two countries that have made big gains in developing artificial-intelligence systems. AI-powered weapons include target recognition systems, weapons guided by AI, and cyberattack and cyberdefense software that runs without human intervention. The U.S. defense community is coming to understand that AI will significantly transform, if not completely reinvent, the world's military power balance. The concern is more than military.

The U.S. government, long a proponent of advancing technology for military purposes, sees artificial intelligence as key to the next generation of fighting tools. Several recent investments and Pentagon initiatives show that military leaders are concerned about keeping up with – and ahead of – China and Russia, two countries that have made big gains in developing artificial-intelligence systems. AI-powered weapons include target recognition systems, weapons guided by AI, and cyberattack and cyberdefense software that runs without human intervention. The U.S. defense community is coming to understand that AI will significantly transform, if not completely reinvent, the world's military power balance. The concern is more than military.

The U.S. government, long a proponent of advancing technology for military purposes, sees artificial intelligence as key to the next generation of fighting tools. Several recent investments and Pentagon initiatives show that military leaders are concerned about keeping up with – and ahead of – China and Russia, two countries that have made big gains in developing artificial-intelligence systems. AI-powered weapons include target recognition systems, weapons guided by AI, and cyberattack and cyberdefense software that runs without human intervention. The U.S. defense community is coming to understand that AI will significantly transform, if not completely reinvent, the world's military power balance. The concern is more than military.

Several recent investments and Pentagon initiatives show that military leaders are concerned about keeping up with – and ahead of – China and Russia, two countries that have made big gains in developing artificial-intelligence systems. AI-powered weapons include target recognition systems, weapons guided by AI, and cyberattack and cyberdefense software that runs without human intervention. The U.S. defense community is coming to understand that AI will significantly transform, if not completely reinvent, the world's military power balance. The concern is more than military. As Chinese and Russian technologies become more sophisticated, they threaten U.S. domination of technological innovation and development, as well as global economic power and influence.

Autonomous weapons technologies, which rely on artificial intelligence, are advancing rapidly and without sufficient public debate or accountability. Oversight of increased autonomy in warfare is critically important because this deadly technology is likely to proliferate rapidly, enhance terrorist tactics, empower authoritarian rulers, undermine democratic peace, and is vulnerable to bias, hacking, and malfunction. The top competitors in this arms race are the United States, China, Russia, South Korea, and the European Union.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming the defining technology of our age. As with any new technology however, bad actors are equally adept at harnessing its power for their own nefarious ends. The power of AI has seen fraudsters increasingly able to penetrate banking and payment systems. As in any conflict, there is an arms race between the defenders and attackers developing. In the case of card fraud, fortunately the defenders are winning.