High profile Australian business and technology leaders Genevieve Bell and David Thodey are backing a push to create a new organisation to lead the development of an ethical framework for artificial intelligence. In an open letter to be released on Friday, Ms Bell and Mr Thodey say there are significant challenges that need to be addressed as AI becomes more commonplace, be it the further entrenchment of discrimination on the basis of gender or "minority status", creating "ethical algorithms for autonomous vehicles, bias in AI-powered hiring processes" or "the impact of fake news bots". They are joined by other notable industry figures such as H2 Ventures founding partner Toby Heap, Fujitsu Australia chief executive Mike Foster and KPMG Innovate national leader James Mabbott as being signatories to the open letter. Genevieve Bell is one of the leaders pushing for an AI body. Mr Mabbott said while the opportunities and benefits of AI were unprecedented, there were very real community concerns about how AI is adopted, relating to privacy, sustainability and quality of life.

The power of AI to solve large-scale problems perhaps met no greater test than COVID-19. Around the world, medical experts have leveraged AI to drastically reduce the time scale of finding and developing a new vaccine to treat the pandemic. "One of the time-consuming pieces is really around the analysis of billions of different molecules and how those might be used to do chemical binding to the target protein that we're looking at," Dan Drapeau, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert and head of technology at Blue Fountain Media, told TechRepublic in August 2020. "Humans can't possibly do that. By November, two vaccines in the U.S. with 95% or greater efficacy were making their way through emergency approval processes. If the approval moves forward, the finding and development of a vaccine for COVID-19 will beat average vaccine development timelines by years. "The development of vaccines can take years," explains the Mayo Clinic website. "This is especially true when the vaccines ...

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Tomorrow, at a ridiculously early hour, we're flying to Chicago to cover the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). As we've mentioned, IROS 2014 is going to be unlike any IEEE conference that we've covered so far. Instead of eight or ten or twelve tracks of researchers giving PowerPoint presentations nearly non-stop, simultaneously, from what feels like 4 a.m. to 9 p.m., slowly killing us (with, um, happiness) over the course of three days, now everything is interactive sessions. This means that instead of relentless PowerPoint in overcrowded rooms, there will be a bunch of roboticists with tables, monitors, and (we hope) robots that we can actually, you know, interact with. It's a bit of a risk, since IROS has never tried this before, but we're hoping that it'll result in more time for us to talk to people, and more chances for the people actually doing the interesting robot stuff to tell us what they're up to directly.

Genevieve Bell is an Australian anthropologist who has been working at tech company Intel for 18 years, where she is currently head of sensing and insights. She has given numerous TED talks and in 2012 was inducted into the Women in Technology hall of fame. Between 2008 and 2010, she was also South Australia's thinker in residence. Why does a company such as Intel need an anthropologist? That is a question I've spent 18 years asking myself.

Last Friday, at NYU's Skirball Center, the White House hosted a symposium on Artificial Intelligence, ethics, health, and machine learning. Led by Kate Crawford, a prinicipal researcher at Microsoft Research, and Meredith Whittaker, lead for Google Open Source Research Group. The day time events (invitation only) consisted of lightening talks from researchers at IBM Watson, Microsoft, policy makers, lawyers, artists and data visualizers such as Jer Thorp (blprnt). It was an incredibly diverse crowd, from careers to gender to race, and was something that the organizers had intended and carefully curated for the event itself. To create and germinate better discussions around AI, and to make better artificial intelligence, the group better be diverse, and AINow beyond succeeded with that.

Last week New York University hosted the final workshop of a series sponsored by the White House on the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than focusing on the technical bits and bytes, the NYU-hosted schedule centered around the near-term social and economic impact of automation, mass data collection and new analytics. This leads directly into the White House's July 22nd deadline for its Request for Information on "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." While we often fantasize about the fallout from the coming robot apocalypse, that is simply not today's challenge. Today, we need to focus on the near-term impact of smart-er automation systems on labor and social structures.