But last Monday he broke the habit of a lifetime in a speech delivered at University College London. It was about AI, which he sees as "the defining opportunity of our generation". The UK, he declared "is the nation of Babbage, Lovelace and Turing", not to mention the country "that gave birth to the modern computer and the world wide web. So mark my words – Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers." Within days of taking office, the PM had invited Matt Clifford, a smart tech bro from central casting, to think about "how we seize the opportunities of AI".

Today, national security is defined by tech superiority – but despite Britain's best efforts, our adversaries are seizing the edge. Imagine the threats we could face if adversarial states managed to take advantage of emerging "metaverse" technologies: from disinformation, political subversion, money laundering, fraud and extortion, to surveillance, industrial espionage, the exploitation of vulnerable people and cyber attacks. China has already developed a deliberate strategy to employ artificial intelligence to increase the pace and potency of these threats. There is now evidence that China is harnessing various emerging technologies centred around the metaverse (a network of increasingly realistic online worlds), such as simulation, artificial intelligence, blockchain, social media and virtual reality – to further enhance its technological arsenal and develop a metaverse for war. Imagine if a nation state could faithfully recreate reality in a virtual world; where detailed computer models of the physical, human, information, economic and industrial domains are brought together, made available to up to thousands of interested stakeholders from scientists to government officials to military leaders in the same persistent, immersive and secure virtual space, to collaborate and ask important "what if" questions.

The relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and defence is a longstanding one. The first "AI winter" of the 1970s, when interest in the subject evaporated and research work all but ceased, was due to Anglosphere government and defence bodies pulling the plug on funding. It's still widely believed that telephone conversations intercepted by Five Eyes intelligance agencies under the secret Echelon initiative are scanned in bulk for keywords of interest, allowing conversations of significance to be picked out from among millions of innocuous ones: but in fact, the problem of speech recognition, one of the main applications foreseen for AI, has yet to be completely solved even today. Back in the '70s a lack of tangible results led to an exhaustion of goodwill towards AI. It's common knowledge that military and intelligence interest can propel new technologies forward, and for a long while AI was without that safety net. But the story couldn't be more different today.

In the online world known as the "metaverse," there are many lines to be drawn and rules to be set. Continue reading to find out how humans and all of our flaws will fit into this new world. I was brought up and trained in the Internet Age by people who really believed that nation states were on the verge of crumbling…and we could geek around it. These people [and their nation states] were irrelevant. Ms. Crawford had a key tech role in the Obama Administration and is now a law professor.

Service members at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii recently tested a prototype DARPA system designed to help military analysts and planners determine if observed events – such as increased force movements, cyber intrusions, and civil unrest – are unconnected occurrences, or if they're part of an adversary's coordinated campaign to achieve strategic objectives in a geographic region. Operational representatives from the command's intelligence and operations divisions spent three days in December trying out DARPA's COMPASS tool suite. COMPASS, which stands for Collection and Monitoring via Planning for Active Situational Scenarios, analyzes large streams of data to uncover competition campaigns, and displays results that represent the evidence and the analysis behind each hypothesis. COMPASS seeks to leverage advanced AI and other technologies to help commanders make more effective decisions regarding a competitor's complex, multi-layered competition activity. Competition refers to actions – both non-violent and violent – designed to achieve geopolitical goals without provoking full-blown armed conflict.

It's not often you can put nuclear weapons, terrorism and climate change on the same list as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, but the U.S. government believes all pose an "emerging threat" to its national security. Several key agencies in the U.S. intelligence community were asked what they saw as long-term threats faced by the country in the next decade and beyond, and the future of "dual-use technologies" took center stage. Agnostic technologies like encryption, autonomous and unmanned systems, AI and quantum computing rank at the top of the agencies' "worry list" for fears that they could be used to cause harm, rather than advance society. While all can be used for good -- to secure data, to survey a dangerous area or simply to save time and effort -- the government says that all can have disastrous effects if used by an adversary. For example, the government says that, "adversaries could gain increased access to AI through affordable designs used in the commercial industry, and could apply AI to areas such as weapons and technology," and that "quantum communications could enable adversaries to develop secure communications that U.S. personnel would not be able to intercept or decrypt."

More times than almost any other field of innovation, artificial intelligence has weathered recurring cycles of overinflated hope, followed by disappointment, pessimism, and funding cutbacks. But Sophie Vandebroek, IBM's vice president of emerging technology partnerships, thinks the AI winters are truly a thing of the past, thanks to the huge amounts of computing power and data now available to train neural networks. In this episode Vandebroek shares examples of real-world applications enabled by this shift, from image recognition to chatbots. And she describes the mission of the new MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a $240 million, 10-year collaboration between IBM researchers and MIT faculty and students to focus on the core advances that will make AI more useful and reliable across industries from healthcare to finance to security. This episode is brought to you by Darktrace, the world leader in AI technology for cyber defense. Darktrace is headquartered in San Francisco and Cambridge, UK, and has nearly 2,500 customers around the world who use its software to detect and respond to cyber threats to their businesses, users, and devices. Darktrace has built innovative machine learning technology can spot unusual activity using an approach modeled on the human immune system. In the second half of the show, Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan explains how Darktrace's technology works and why companies need to bring new defenses to today's cyber arms race. Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau: From MIT Technology Review, I'm Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace. This episode is brought to you by Darktrace, the world leader in AI technology for cyber defense. Later in the program I'll speak with the CEO of Darktrace, Nicole Eagan.

See what was stolen from all those Facebook accounts. SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook believes spammers, not a nation state, were behind the data breach of 30 million accounts, according to a published report. The spammers aimed to make money through deceptive advertising and masqueraded as a digital marketing company, people familiar with the company's internal investigation told the Wall Street Journal. Facebook has declined to say who was behind the hack, which was the worst security breach in its history. Reached for comment by USA TODAY on Wednesday night, Facebook pointed to last week's statement from Guy Rosen, vice president of product management.

"All you have to do is look at the attacks that have taken place recently--WannaCry, NotPetya and others--and see how quickly the industry and government is coming out and assigning responsibility to nation states such as North Korea, Russia and Iran," said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike Inc., a cybersecurity company that has investigated a number of state-sponsored hacks. The White House and other countries took roughly six months to blame North Korea and Russia for the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks, respectively, while it took about three years for U.S. authorities to indict a North Korean hacker for the 2014 attack against Sony . Forensic systems are gathering and analyzing vast amounts of data from digital databases and registries to glean clues about an attacker's infrastructure. These clues, which may include obfuscation techniques and domain names used for hacking, can add up to what amounts to a unique footprint, said Chris Bell, chief executive of Diskin Advanced Technologies, a startup that uses machine learning to attribute cyberattacks. Additionally, the increasing amount of data related to cyberattacks--including virus signatures, the time of day the attack took place, IP addresses and domain names--makes it easier for investigators to track organized hacking groups and draw conclusions about them.

Hey, did my congressman really say that? Is that really President Donald Trump on that video, or am I being duped? New technology on the internet lets anyone make videos of real people appearing to say things they've never said. Republicans and Democrats predict this high-tech way of putting words in someone's mouth will become the latest weapon in disinformation wars against the United States and other Western democracies. This technology uses facial mapping and artificial intelligence to produce videos that appear so genuine it's hard to spot the phonies.