The European Union and the United States have urged allies of Ukraine to keep up with their funding as the war with Russia nears the two-year mark, with no resolution to the fighting in sight. Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised sustained US support for Ukraine in a meeting on Tuesday with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy despite a row in the US Congress on approving new funding. "We are determined to sustain our support for Ukraine and we're working very closely with Congress in order to work to do that. I know our European colleagues will do the same thing," Blinken told Zelenskyy at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Jake Sullivan, US President Joe Biden's national security adviser, joined the meeting and told Zelenskyy that the US and its allies were determined "to ensure that Russia fails and Ukraine wins". Zelenskyy thanked the Biden administration and the "bipartisan support" in the US Congress.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, United States senators are looking to the titans of Silicon Valley to fix a Senate problem--a problem today's political class perpetuates daily with their increasingly hyper-partisan ways, which generative AI now feeds off of as it helps rewrite our collective future. Today, the Senate is hosting a first-of-its-kind, closed-door AI forum led by the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and more than 17 others, including ethicists and academics. Even though they'll be on the senators' turf, for roughly six hours, they'll get microphones while the nation's elected leaders get muzzled. "All Senators are encouraged to attend to listen to this important discussion, but please note the format will not afford Senators the opportunity to provide remarks or to ask questions to the speakers," a notice from majority leader Chuck Schumer reads. As generative AI is poised to flood the internet with more--and more convincing--disinformation and misinformation, many AI experts say the top goal of the Senate should be restoring faith in, well, the Senate itself.

The US Congress is heading back into session, and they're hitting the ground running on AI. We're going to be hearing a lot about various plans and positions on AI regulation in the coming weeks, kicking off with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's first AI Insight Forum on Wednesday. This and planned future forums will bring together some of the top people in AI to discuss the risks and opportunities it poses and how Congress might write legislation to address them. Although the forums are closed to the public and press, our senior tech policy reporter Tate Ryan-Mosley has chatted with representatives from attendee AI company Hugging Face about what they are expecting, and what exactly these forums are hoping to achieve. Tate's story first appeared in The Technocrat, her weekly newsletter covering policy and Silicon Valley.

Schumer's plan is a culmination of many other, smaller policy actions. On June 14, Senators Josh Hawley (a Republican from Missouri) and Richard Blumenthal (a Democrat from Connecticut) introduced a bill that would exclude generative AI from Section 230 (the law that shields online platforms from liability for the content their users create). Last Thursday, the House science committee hosted a handful of AI companies to ask questions about the technology and the various risks and benefits it poses. House Democrats Ted Lieu and Anna Eshoo, with Republican Ken Buck, proposed a National AI Commission to manage AI policy, and a bipartisan group of senators suggested creating a federal office to encourage, among other things, competition with China. Though this flurry of activity is noteworthy, US lawmakers are not actually starting from scratch on AI policy.

In this third part of my series on the future of work, I want to deal with the impact of automation, in particular robots and artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs. I have covered this issue of the relationship between human labour and machines before, including robots and AI. But is there anything new that we can find after the COVID slump? The leading American mainstream expert on the impact of automation on future jobs is Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT. In testimony to the US Congress, Acemoglu started by reminding Congress that automation was not a recent phenomenon.

In the race to harness the power of cloud computing, and further develop artificial intelligence, academics have a new concern: falling behind a fast-moving tech industry. In the US, 22 higher education institutions, including Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, have signed up to a National Research Cloud initiative seeking access to the computational power they need to keep up. It is one of several cloud projects being called for by academics globally, and is being explored by the US Congress, given the potential of the technology to deliver breakthroughs in healthcare and climate change. Under the US proposal, authored by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, a national cloud platform would enable more academic and industry researchers to work at the leading edge of AI, and help train a new generation of experts. Li and Etchemendy's NRC proposal cautions about declining government funding for basic and foundational research and highlights the US's history of federally funding research into innovations -- from gene sequencing to the internet itself.

Regulation of the powerful and fast growing Technology Industry is fast becoming a hot topic of concern for government due to its many impacts upon nations and societies, both good and bad. In order to better shape those issues involving technology, it is important understand two basic conceptions which are pillars in the current technology deployment: Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The positive impacts of these technolgies are those related to the fact that technology can be very useful to help daily life. No one could deny that is easier and more comfortable being guided by algorithms and artificial Intelligence when we are driving, choosing prices and making shops. The negative aspects can be defined by the vulnerabilities that flow from the uses of these technologies.

Seven members of the US Congress have sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission (pdf), Federal Bureau of Investigation (pdf), and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (pdf) asking whether the agencies have vetted the potential biases of artificial intelligence algorithms being used for commerce, surveillance, and hiring. "We are concerned by the mounting evidence that these technologies can perpetuate gender, racial, age, and other biases," a letter to the FTC says. "As a result, their use may violate civil rights laws and could be unfair and deceptive." The letters request that the agencies respond by the end of September with complaints they've received of unfair use of facial recognition or artificial intelligence, as well as details on how these algorithms are tested for fairness before being implemented by the government. In the letter to the EEOC, senators Kamala Harris, Patty Murray, and Elizabeth Warren specifically ask the agency to determine whether this technology could violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

The financial services industry has unique explainability and fairness challenges arising from compliance and ethical considerations in credit decisioning. These challenges complicate the use of model machine learning and artificial intelligence methods in business decision processes.

A former employee of Cambridge Analytica who claims the firm used the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook profiles to allegedly help Donald Trump's election campaign, is to testify before US Congress. Christopher Wylie said he had accepted an invitation to give evidence to the US House Intelligence Committee and House Judiciary Committee this week. He disclosed last month that the political consultancy firm had harvested data from users of the social media site by using personality quizzes to build up psychological profiles. As the US election approached, he said it then used this data to target them with bespoke political advertising. His revelations triggered investigations in the UK and US.