In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: "What are the contents of the'vague tech canon'? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?" He was using the term "canon" in the sense of "the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre", but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave. Greer's challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value 65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn't "the list of books that I think one ought to read – it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here".

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) will host the AI Insight Forum -- which is intended to serve as the bedrock for his "all hands on deck" plan to respond to recent AI advances -- in the grand Kennedy Caucus Room, the historic stage of Senate probes into the sinking of the Titanic, as well as Watergate. The more than 20 attendees include Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, among other top tech executives, civil rights leaders, labor chiefs and researchers.

Eugenia Kuyda defended AI companion bots during the interview with Fox News Digital and argued that dating app Replika is just one of many possible solutions to loneliness. Tech giants are ill-prepared to combat "hallucinations" generated by artificial intelligence platforms, industry experts warned in comments to Fox News Digital, but corporations themselves say they're taking steps to ensure accuracy within the platforms. AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Google's Bard, can at times spew inaccurate misinformation or nonsensical text, referred to as "hallucinations." "The short answer is no, corporation and institutions are not ready for the changes coming or challenges ahead," said AI expert Stephen Wu, chair of the American Bar Association Artificial Intelligence and Robotics National Institute, and a shareholder with Silicon Valley Law Group. Often, hallucinations are honest mistakes made by technology that, despite promises, still possess flaws.

For many tech companies, investors are applying a new valuation method that has caught our eye: AI proficiency. The current wave of AI hype has two main flavors that I'm interested in. First, the struggle between tech titans to create, or at least invest in and support, the latest and greatest in intelligent computing services. And the second, the startups levering the improving tool set to build and improve products, helping them grow quickly and attack new markets. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

"Rather than questioning the character of thinking machines, futurist Amy Webb turns a critical eye on the humans behind the computers. With AI's development overwhelmingly driven by nine tech powerhouses, she asks: Is it possible for the technology to serve the best interests of everyone?"―Wired "Webb's assessments are based on analyses of patent filings, policy briefings, interviews and other sources. She paints vivid pictures of how AI could benefit the average person, via precision medicine or smarter dating apps...Her forecasts are provocative and unsettlingly plausible."―Science News "Instead of predicting the future, Webb lays out scenarios for optimistic, pragmatic, and catastrophic outcomes -- all extrapolated from current facts. However impractical you may find the idea of a common Apple-Amazon operating system named Applezon, considering potential scenarios is a fantastically healthy exercise, because anyone who tells you they know how AI is going to turn out is lying."―VentureBeat

A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head. We like to think that we are in control of the future of "artificial" intelligence. The reality, though, is that we--the everyday people whose data powers AI--aren't actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can't see and have no input into--one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations--Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple--are the new gods of AI and are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain.

Google has been in hot water for the last month as details about its partnership with the US military revealed the tech titan's involvement in a clandestine, and potentially violent, program. After internal and external backlash, the company backed out of the project last week. Today, Google CEO Sundar PIchai published a new policy in response that lays out the company's ethos: From now on, it won't design or deploy AI for weapons, surveillance purposes or technology "whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights." Project Maven used Google's AI research to assist facial recognition, which may have been intended to help with military targeting. As a result, engineers petitioned the company and some reportedly quit before the tech titan announced it wouldn't renew their involvement in the project.

Elon Musk may have been film-maker Jon Favreau's reference point for Tony Stark in the Ironman films, but it is hard to know whether the guy is more superhero or super-villain. Blasting a Tesla car into space was a fun gimmick. But nevertheless, Musk has created the most powerful rocket in the world right now, and it won't be long until he's blasting things into space that aren't the billionaire's version of schoolyard fantasies. Space travel holds a remarkable fascination of some of the rich. Their wealth and ambition is too much for this planet, and so they must reach forth, with plans to colonise Mars, become a multi-planetary species, and utilise space as a new tourist destination (for those rich enough and sufficiently bored enough with Instagramming remote and hard to reach corners of the globe).

Artificial intelligence took center stage at Microsoft's AI Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. Aside from announcing AI smarts for a range of software -- from Bing to Office 365 -- the tech titan is also ramping up its Seeing AI app for iOS, which uses computer vision to audibly help blind and visually impaired people to see the world around them. According to Microsoft, it's nabbed 100,000 downloads since its launch in the US earlier this year, which convinced the tech titan to bring it to 35 countries in total, including the EU. The app now boasts more currency recognition, adding British pounds, US dollars, Canadian dollars, and Euros to its tally. Going beyond the color in a scene, it can also spot the color of specific objects, like clothes.

A lot of people quickly raised concerns about privacy and security the moment Apple revealed iPhone X and its Face ID feature. Edward Snowden, for instance, thinks it normalizes face scanning, "a tech certain to be abused." Now, US Senator Al Franken is pressing the tech titan for answers, penning a letter addressed to Apple chief Tim Cook with a list of questions concerning the technology's "eventual uses that may not be contemplated by" its customers. While Cupertino already said during its keynote that Face ID details will be saved on the phone itself, Franken wants to know whether it's currently possible for Apple or a third party to access (and then save) that data either remotely or through physical access to one's iPhone. He wants to know all the steps Apple has taken to ensure the tech can't be fooled by masks and photographs.