Lapses such as racially biased facial recognition or apparently sexist credit card approval algorithms have thankfully left companies asking how to build AI ethically. Many companies have released "ethical AI" guidelines, such as Microsoft's Responsible AI principles, which requires that AI systems be fair, inclusive, reliable and safe, transparent, respect privacy and security, and be accountable. These are laudable, and will help prevent the harms listed above. Harm can result from what a system is used for, not from unfairness, black-boxyness, or other implementation details. Consider an autonomous Uber: if they are able to recognize people using wheelchairs less accurately than people walking, this can be fixed by using training data reflective of the many ways people traverse a city to build a more fair system.

We know computers can beat the best human chess players. But what happens when the best algorithms battle each other? Well, I've seen what happens: If both algorithms are equally strong, for example, Google's AlphaZero versus AlphaZero, the games become wars of attrition. Since neither player will make any critical mistake, the games slowly wind down to a stalemate or a checkmate. The most important lesson learned from such games, however, is that the player that begins usually wins.

U.S. military commanders covered up an air strike over Syria that killed several dozen civilians, dishonestly portraying it as a successful attack against ISIS fighters and ignoring firm recommendations--filed by military lawyers--to investigate the strike as a war crime. The attack and subsequent cover-up--revealed in a long, extensively documented story in this weekend's New York Times--took place in 2019, during the final phase of the U.S. and allied campaign to oust the Islamic State from its self-declared caliphate in Syria. The Times report comes a few months after the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan in August, which Pentagon officials touted as halting a terrorist attack--but which in fact, as another Times investigation soon revealed, killed 10 civilians, none of whom had any connection to terrorists. Together, the two reports raise questions about the moral and strategic wisdom of launching airstrikes in areas where civilians and fighters routinely mix. These questions have been raised many times in the course of America's 20-year "global war on terror."

An army of microscopic robots thinner than a human hair have been created that can be injected into the body to wage war on disease, researchers claim. It resembles the plot of sixties film Fantastic Voyage in which a vehicle was injected into a patient. Scientists inside destroyed his blood clot - with a laser gun. The new real-world micro-bots could monitor nerve impulses in the heart or brain, according to scientists from Cornell University who created the machines. The minute four-legged machines will also be able to move through tissue and blood after entering the body via a hypodermic needle.

Trigo Vision, an AI startup founded by former members of the Israeli army's special forces and intelligence community, just came out of stealth mode with a target in its sights: Amazon's Go store. When Amazon opened its cashier-less store in Seattle earlier this year, it was hailed as the future of brick-and-mortar shops. And even if the company follows through on plans to open half a dozen more, the locations will be little more than a novelty. There are more than 150,000 convenience stores and 40,000 grocery markets in the US alone. Amazon may have enough money to build sophisticated storefronts full of expensive hardware from the ground up with no regard for profits – the marketing alone is worth it for the juggernaut worth $900 billion – but most other retail chains don't.