Artificial intelligence plays a role in nearly everyone's life now, so it only seems fair that everyone should also have the opportunity to learn exactly what it is and how it functions. At least, that's what Helsinki University in Finland thinks. The school is offering the world's first online artificial intelligence course geared towards beginners, as Engadget reports. Not only can anyone with web access enroll, but it's also free. Because the course only takes about 30 hours to complete, it's possible it might help people get to know--and form opinions on--artificial intelligence.

When it comes to developing artificial intelligence, President Trump may want a free-market approach. But a number of experts disagree -- we need guidelines to protect people from discriminatory algorithms. Today, a group of humans rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, The Wikimedia Foundation, Access Now, and others called on governments and technology companies to adopt guiding principles to protect human rights. As part of today's RightsCon Toronto symposium, the organizations joined to pen the Toronto Declaration on Machine Learning, which can be found in full on Access Now's website. The declaration calls for engineers to develop and revisit algorithms with the explicit goal of promoting transparency and equality while working to end algorithm-propagated racism and discrimination.

You might be tempted to put these pieces together and assume that AI might autonomously start a nuclear war. This is the subject of a new paper and article published today by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit thinktank that researches national security as part of its Security 2040 initiative. But AI won't necessarily cause a nuclear war; no matter what AI fear-mongerer Elon Musk tweets out, artificial intelligence will only trigger a nuclear war if we decide to build artificial intelligence that can start nuclear wars. The RAND Corporation hosted a series of panels with mysterious, unnamed experts in the realms of national security, nuclear weaponry, and artificial intelligence to speculate and theorize on how AI might advance in the coming years and what that means for nuclear war. Much of the article talks about hyper-intelligent computers that would transform when a nation decides to launch its nuclear missiles.