Civil liberties campaigners have said that a proposal made by Keir Starmer on Thursday to expand the use of live facial recognition technology would amount to the effective introduction of a national ID card system based on people's faces. Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said it was ironic the new prime minister was suggesting a greater use of facial matching on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force. "Expanding live facial recognition means millions of innocent Britons being subjected to automated ID checks," said Carlo. "These are the surveillance tactics of China and Russia and Starmer seems ignorant of the civil liberties implications." Live facial recognition has, until now, largely been used in the UK by the Metropolitan police and South Wales police, as a real-time aid to help officers to detect and prevent crime, including at public events such as last year's coronation.

But the news item that really stood out to me was one that didn't get as much attention as it should have. It has the potential to usher in more powerful AI and scientific discovery than previously possible. Last Thursday, Google DeepMind announced it had built AI systems that can solve complex math problems. The systems--called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2--worked together to successfully solve four out of six problems from this year's International Mathematical Olympiad, a prestigious competition for high school students. Their performance was the equivalent of winning a silver medal.

Michael Sayman has worked at Facebook, Google, Roblox, and Twitter. At 26, the software engineer has already published a memoir, App Kid. But until he began work on his latest project, he'd never built a website. "I made it in five hours over the weekend, out of frustration that there wasn't anything like this," he says. Sayman's site is AI Hits.

You know something strange is afoot when Elon Musk comes out in favor of tech regulation. Or when Kevin McCarthy and a left-wing Joe Biden appointee agree that one particular issue is a priority. These are not people who tend to agree on, well, anything. But such are the nascent, topsy-turvy politics of artificial intelligence. AI is not really a single issue you can be for or against the way you can with, say, guns or abortion.

Some of the world's biggest academic journal publishers have banned or curbed their authors from using the advanced chatbot ChatGPT. Because the bot uses information from the internet to produce highly readable answers to questions, the publishers are worried that inaccurate or plagiarised work could enter the pages of academic literature. Several researchers have already listed the chatbot as a co-author in academic studies, and some publishers have moved to ban this practice. But the editor-in-chief of Science, one of the top scientific journals in the world, has gone a step further and forbidden any use of text from the program in submitted papers. It's not surprising the use of such chatbots is of interest to academic publishers. Our recent study, published in Finance Research Letters, showed ChatGPT could be used to write a finance paper that would be accepted for an academic journal.

Keelvar, a global pioneer of intelligent sourcing and automation solutions, announced it has raised $24 million in Series B funding to simplify and radically improve procurement, the world's most inefficient trillion-dollar marketplace. Keelvar's sourcing technology – which leverages AI, data science and smart sourcing bots that run on autopilot – empowers customers to make crucial supply chain decisions quickly and confidently amidst ongoing change and disruption. Costs are out of control, capacity is scarce and disruptions are everywhere. This dynamic makes it incredibly difficult for buyers and suppliers to remain agile, manage risk and strike deals" The investment – which brings Keelvar's total capital raised to $43 million – was led by 83North. Series A investors Elephant, Mosaic and Paua doubled down on their investment. Bastian Nomichacher, the co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis, also joined as a minority investor. Keelvar's Series B builds off a period of rapid growth and expansion for the company, which increased its headcount by 200% since the start of 2021 and grew ARR by 113% last year. Costs are out of control, capacity is scarce and disruptions are everywhere. This dynamic makes it incredibly difficult for buyers and suppliers to remain agile, manage risk and strike deals," said Alan Holland, founder and CEO of Keelvar.

Microsoft has completed its acquisition of Siri backend creator Nuance in a bumper deal that it says will usher in a "new era of outcomes-based AI". "Completion of this significant and strategic acquisition brings together Nuance's best-in-class conversational AI and ambient intelligence with Microsoft's secure and trusted industry cloud offerings," said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud AI Group at Microsoft. "This powerful combination will help providers offer more affordable, effective, and accessible healthcare, and help organisations in every industry create more personalised and meaningful customer experiences. I couldn't be more pleased to welcome the Nuance team to our Microsoft family." Nuance became a household name (in techie households, anyway) for creating the speech recognition engine that powers Apple's smart assistant, Siri.

A new MIT research center promises to accelerate our journey to a future in which bionics help people everywhere overcome the challenges of disabilities -- and even enhance human potential. The future is near: Bionics replace or restore the function of missing or damaged body parts with electronic devices -- examples include leg exoskeletons and mind-controlled prosthetic arms. These devices can be life-changing, but many are still unique and experimental, meaning the only people to benefit from them are a handful of study participants. The faster we can advance bionics research, the sooner they'll be available to everyone who needs them. "We must continually strive towards a technological future in which disability is no longer a common life experience," MIT professor Hugh Herr, himself a double amputee, told MIT News.

At the start of the first Terminator movie, Sarah Connor, unknowingly the future mother of Earth's resistance movement, is working as a waitress when Arnold Schwarzenegger's Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Terminator is sent back through time to kill her. But what if, instead of attempting to murder her, Skynet's android assassin instead approached the owner of Big Jeff's family restaurant, where Sarah worked, and offered to do her shifts for lower wages, while working faster and making fewer mistakes? The newly jobless Sarah, unable to support herself, drops out of college and decides that maybe starting a family in this economic climate just isn't smart. This, in a somewhat cyberbolic nutshell, is the biggest immediate threat many fear when it comes to automation: Not a robopocalypse brought on by superintelligence, but rather one that ushers in an age of technological unemployment. Some very smart people have been sounding the alarm for years. A 2013 study carried out by the Oxford Martin School suggested that some 47% of jobs in the U.S. could be automated within the next two decades -- only 12 years of which now remain following the publishing of the study.

Infectious diseases don't get much more personalized than covid-19. No one can explain with any certainty why seemingly similar individuals respond so differently to exactly the same pathogen. Why do some of us get a case of the sniffles, and others end up on a ventilator? Why are so-called long-haulers left with lingering problems, yet other people recover fully? Why do some never show symptoms at all?