Around midnight on April 16, 2025, after Chen Zimo learned that the Department of Homeland Security had threatened to revoke Harvard University's certification to enroll international students, he began communicating with a trusted source about possible legal scenarios. Chen, a Chinese citizen, still needed a number of courses before he could complete his degree in computer science at Harvard, and he felt panicked about the possibility of having his visa revoked. For him, the Harvard experience had been transformative. Chen--not his real name--had grown up in provincial China, where his family had modest resources and sent him to public schools. He could never have afforded Harvard without the university's generous financial support, and he had also received funding for summer language study.

The UK needs to support the creation of a British version of ChatGPT, MPs were told on Wednesday, or the country would further lose the ability to determine its own fate. Speaking to the Commons science and technology committee, Adrian Joseph, BT's chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said the government needed to have a national investment in "large language models", the AI that underpins services such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Google's Bard. Without such technology, the nation would struggle to compete internationally in future, he said. "We think there's a risk that we in the UK, lose out to the the large tech companies, and possibly China, and get left behind … in areas of cybersecurity, of healthcare, and so on. It is a massive arms race that has been around for some time, but the heat has certainly been turned up most recently."

On a Thursday morning in early February, Kartik Sivakumar realized that he would have to leave America. He was sitting in his dorm room, at the University of Iowa, where he was a senior majoring in neuroscience. He was also a resident adviser, a leader of the university's hospital student-volunteer corps, and an organizer of the Indian Student Alliance's annual dance competition. Sivakumar had lived in Iowa for half his life. That morning, he received an e-mail from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (U.S.C.I.S.), saying that action had been taken on his change-of-status application for a student visa.

In a live interview with the Washington Post last week, New York-based Clearview AI's co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That addressed questions about the ethical and legal implications of his software, which became first known to many Americans when a billionaire used it to identify his daughter's dinner date, and for the involvement of far-right individuals in the creation of the company. Pressed on questions about the legal and ethical choices his firm has made while creating a searchable database of 20 billion facial images, Ton-That repeatedly brought up examples where the use cases of Clearview AI's technology would look better in the public eye, mentioning its use in helping catch criminals in child pornography and child abuse cases. Ton-That also pointed to the use of Clearview AI's technology by the Ukrainian government to identify dead Russian soldiers, for notifying their families of their passing.

In March 2020, market research firm IDC forecasted 2020 artificial intelligence (AI) spending to range from $48 billion, a 25% increase from 2019, to $50.7 billion, a 32% increase. While the second half of this year remains uncertain due to COVID-19, demand for AI seems to be showing resilience compared to other technologies. As businesses work to identify the best approaches for how they can operate and succeed in a new reality, AI continues to play a critical role. By automating repetitive tasks and finding patterns in large quantities of data, AI services have the potential to help organizations with everything from enhancing remote work and data processing to advancing patient care and powering workforce analytics. But an area where the technology promises an even broader impact is in the customer experience (CX).

One of the biggest impacts may be on jobs, not only on the nature of work itself, but on the availability of work. Some crystal ball gazers are predicting that AI (working in concert with its older sibling, automation) will trigger massive job losses; others see AI producing a net gain in employment . Both views can be supported both logically and empirically; but they both can't be right. As Andy Kessler put it in a June 17 Wall Street Journal column, "The future happens, just not the way most people think." Kessler then walked readers through a shopping list of past predictions that turned out to be way off the mark: "megamistakes," he called them.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the many ways in which artificial intelligence may change our lives. One of the biggest impacts may be on jobs, not only on the nature of work itself, but on the availability of work. Some crystal ball gazers are predicting that AI (working in concert with its older sibling, automation) will trigger massive job losses; others see AI producing a net gain in employment. Both views can be supported both logically and empirically; but they both can't be right. As Andy Kessler put it in a June 17 Wall Street Journal column, "The future happens, just not the way most people think."

When BMW and Daimler announced a €1bn (£880m) partnership last week to develop a suite of "mobility services" together, it was a clear sign of how the auto industry had changed. For one thing, the German giants - who plan to work on driverless vehicles, ride-hailing and pay-per-use cars together - are normally fierce rivals who would never dream of teaming up. For another, their pact was just the latest in a growing line of partnerships between traditional carmakers who are preparing for an uncertain future, in which next-generation technology could upend the industry and Silicon Valley could hold more sway than Detroit or Wolfsburg. Just recently Ford and Volkswagen agreed to "investigate" ways of working on electric and autonomous vehicles together, while Honda invested $2.75bn (£2.1bn) in rival General Motors' driverless unit with a view to launching a fleet of unmanned taxis. There have been similar tie-ups between Tesla and Daimler, and Volvo and PSA, as well as a host of pacts between carmakers and tech firms.

Deepfakes are videos that have been constructed to make a person appear to say or do something that they never said or did. With artificial intelligence-based methods for creating deepfakes becoming increasingly sophisticated and accessible, deepfakes are raising a set of challenging policy, technology, and legal issues. Deepfakes can be used in ways that are highly disturbing. Candidates in a political campaign can be targeted by manipulated videos in which they appear to say things that could harm their chances for election.

In the previous article, I had outlined the rising anxieties with regard to the rise of A.I. and automation in various sectors of employment. As discussed earlier, there are various jobs that may get redefined in the wake of the automation revolution. But what are the jobs that will remain safe? Also, what are the new skills you may need to acquire to get you ready for an uncertain future? In this article, I will try to answer your questions.