Italy is accelerating on artificial intelligence (AI). The government is set to publish its new strategy: on October 11th a meeting of the Interministerial Committee for Digital Transition (made up by the Ministries for the Digital Transition, Economic Development and Education) approved a draft of the final document. Prime Minister Mario Draghi himself announced the turning point to the Senate. This strategy, he said on Wednesday, will be "the framework for improving the country's competitive positioning." The 27-page document outlines a roadmap from 2022 to 2024 and is divided in two parts: an assessment of the Italian public-private ecosystem and an indication of the sectors requiring urgent intervention.

Last year, China unveiled its development of a new artificial intelligence system for its foreign policy. It's called a "geopolitical environment simulation and prediction platform," and it works by crunching huge amounts of data and then providing foreign policy suggestions to Chinese diplomats. According to one source, China has already used a similar AI system to vet almost every foreign investment project in the past few years. Consider what this development means: Slowly, foreign policy is moving away from diplomats, political-risk firms and think tanks, the "go-to" organizations of the past. Slowly, foreign policy is moving toward advanced algorithms whose primary objective is to analyze data, predict events and advise governments on what to do.

If European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi appears slightly more downbeat at his regular news conference than before, it could foreshadow a possible move by the bank to trim its monetary policy stimulus. That's the conclusion of two Japanese researchers who have used artificial intelligence software to analyze split-second changes in Draghi's facial expressions at his news conferences following policy meetings. The findings follow a similar analysis by the same researchers of Draghi's Japanese counterpart, Haruhiko Kuroda, last year, which claimed to have identified a correlation between patterns in his facial expressions and subsequent policy changes. Yoshiyuki Suimon and Daichi Isami, the paper's authors, think that subtle changes in Draghi's facial expressions could reflect a sense of frustration Draghi might have been feeling before making policy adjustments. Their study covered Draghi's news conference from June 2016 to December 2017 and found signs of "sadness" preceding two recent major policy changes -- when the central bank announced a dovish tapering in December 2016 and another quantitative easing cutback in October last year.

The rise of robots has long been a topic for sci-fi best sellers and video games and, as of this week, a threat officially taken seriously by central bankers. The bankers are not yet ready to buy into dystopian visions in which robots render humans superfluous. But, at an exclusive gathering at a golf resort near Lisbon, the big minds of monetary policy were seriously discussing the risk that artificial intelligence could eliminate jobs on a scale that would dwarf previous waves of technological change. "There is no question we are in an era of people asking, 'Is the Robocalypse upon us?'" David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told an audience on Tuesday that included Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and dozens of other top central bankers and economists. The discussion occurred as economists were more optimistic than they had been for a decade about growth.