The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics. Geopolitical actors have always used technology to further their goals. Unlike other technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) is far more than a mere tool. We do not want to anthropomorphize AI or suggest that it has intentions of its own. It is not -- yet -- a moral agent.

Pricing decisions are increasingly made by AI. Thanks to their ability to train with live market data while making decisions on the fly, deep reinforcement learning algorithms are especially effective in taking such pricing decisions. In e-commerce scenarios, multiple reinforcement learning agents can set prices based on their competitor's prices. Therefore, research states that agents might end up in a state of collusion in the long run. To further analyze this issue, we build a scenario that is based on a modified version of a prisoner's dilemma where three agents play the game of rock paper scissors. Our results indicate that the action selection can be dissected into specific stages, establishing the possibility to develop collusion prevention systems that are able to recognize situations which might lead to a collusion between competitors. We furthermore provide evidence for a situation where agents are capable of performing a tacit cooperation strategy without being explicitly trained to do so.

In March this year, PWC released a report saying that 10 million UK jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI within 15 years. Insurance companies are already dinosaurs and while we will still need insurance, we don't need our current insurance companies. Those expensive on-site skilled jobs are gone forever, replaced by massive automation and AI from mining operations to plant operations to administration. Australia, as a home of the corporate oligopoly, suffers the associated elitism, complacency, lack of innovation and resistance to change which are characteristics of all oligopolies.

In March this year, PWC released a report saying that 10 million UK jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI within 15 years. Prior to this in November 2016, the Bank of England said that AI posed a risk to almost half those employed in the UK and that a "third machine age" would hollow out the labour market, widening the gap between rich and poor. In a recent report the McKinsey Global Institute said that by 2025 AI will do the jobs of 140m knowledgeable and skilled workers globally. Let's not forget the truck drivers. In his speech at Harvard University recently, Mark Zuckerberg said that his generation will have to deal with "tens of millions" of jobs replaced by self-driving cars and trucks. In late May 2017, the International Transport Forum published a report warning that of the 6.4 million professional drivers that are projected to be needed in the US and Europe by 2030, that 4.4 million will be replaced by self-driving trucks.