On a Friday morning in October, in the lobby of a sleek San Francisco skyscraper, Matthew Butterick was headed toward the elevators when a security guard stopped him. Politely, the guard asked if he was lost. It was an honest mistake. He looked more like the type of guy who makes fun of the typical corporate warrior. He explained, equally politely, that he was in fact a lawyer with a legitimate reason to be in the building. His co-counsel, Joseph Saveri, leads an antitrust and class-action firm headquartered there.

In the global AI investment, innovation and implementation stakes, the UK lies in a creditable third place. Trailing the US and second-placed China, it holds a slight lead over Canada and South Korea, according to the Global AI Index published in December 2020 by Tortoise Media. The moral of Aesop's most famous fable involving a tortoise may be'more haste, less speed', but Westminster is seeking to hare ahead in this race over the coming decade. Its national AI strategy, published in September 2021, is a 10-year plan to make the country an "AI superpower". But what does that mean exactly?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is creating a great impact on the world by enabling computers to learn on their own. While in the real world AI is still focused on solving narrow problems, we see a whole different face of AI in the fictional world of science fiction movies -- which predominantly depict the rise of artificial general intelligence as a threat for human civilization. As a continuation of the trend, here we take a look at how artificial intelligence was depicted in 2019 movies. A warning in advance -- the following listicle is filled with SPOILERS. Terminator: Dark Fate -- the sixth film of the Terminator movie franchise, featured a super-intelligent Terminator named Gabriel designated as "Rev-9", and was sent from the future to kill a young woman (Dani) who is set to become an important figure in the Human Resistance against Skynet.

Robots may learn more effectively from human resistance than human cooperation. That's one possible inference from the results of a recently conducted experiment at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. A group of researchers examined how a robotic arm might learn to adapt its grip to objects of different sizes and weights. They compared the results from the robotic arm operating alone to how it would perform if there were a human present trying to pull the object out of the robot's grip. Surprisingly, the robots learned to adapt their grip much more quickly and effectively with an adversarial human in the picture than when they were left alone and had to figure things out with their own AI. The robots which had been exposed to human adversaries were also better able to generalize information about new and unfamiliar objects, researcher and co-author Stefanos Nikolaidis told Wired.

Slate is currently running a feature called "Future Tense," which claims to be the "citizens guide to the future." Two of their recent articles, however, are full of inaccuracies about AI safety and the researchers studying it. While this is disappointing, it also represents a good opportunity to clear up some misconceptions about why AI safety research is necessary. The first contested article was Let Artificial Intelligence Evolve, by Michael Chorost, which displays a poor understanding of the issues surrounding the evolution of artificial intelligence. The second, How to be Good, by Adam Elkus, got some of the concerns about developing safe AI correct, but, in the process, did great disservice to one of today's most prominent AI safety researchers, as well as to scientific research in general.