"Researchers at Stanford have developed face-capture technology that can alter pre-recorded videos in real-time on low cost computers. In other words, you can make George W Bush or Donald Trump appear intelligent. "

"Uber knows when your phone battery is running low because its app collects that information in order to switch into power-saving mode. But Chen swears Uber would never use that knowledge to gouge you out of more money. "We absolutely don't use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it's an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behavior," Chen said. Uber's surge pricing uses a proprietary algorithm that accounts for how many users are hailing rides in an area at a given time. Customers are apparently less willing to believe that when the multiplier is a round number like 2.0 or 3.0, which seems more like it could have been arbitrarily made up by a human."

"AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. "Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.""

"The Chinese government is fabricating almost 490m social media posts a year in order to distract the public from criticising or questioning its rule, according to a study. China's "Fifty Cent Party" - a legion of freelance online trolls so-named because they are believed to be paid 50 cents a post - has long been blamed for flooding the Chinese internet with pro-regime messages designed to defend and promote the ruling Communist party."

"A hacker is advertising what he says is more than one hundred million LinkedIn logins for sale. The IDs were reportedly sourced from a breach four years ago, which had previously been thought to have included a fraction of that number. At the time, the business-focused social network said it had reset the accounts of those it thought had been compromised."

"So over the weekend, when protesters were expected to rally for the third time, Facebook was inaccessible to locals, who had been using the platform to organise. People also had problems accessing Facebook's Instagram service. Israeli VPN service Hola posted a statement saying it saw a surge of about 200,000 users from Vietnam on its system over the weekend, using it to access Facebook."

"The blackouts coincided with exams for secondary and high-school students and were implemented as the ultimate step in the country's battle to stop students cheating using smuggled mobile phones and internet-connected devices in exam halls. While attempting to ban mobile phones from exams or setting up local jamming equipment might be a less draconian measure, shutting off the internet is undoubtedly efficient. However, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government, causing human rights campaigners, including Access Now, to condemn the move."

"Unlike other face recognition technology, their algorithm allows quick searches in big data sets. "Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that's hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers. With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer," said Kabakov, during an interview at the company's modest central Moscow office. The app will give you the most likely match to the face that is uploaded, as well as 10 people it thinks look similar."

"It's not that Google wants to do this, it's that they didn't anticipate this outcome, and compounded that omission by likewise omitting a way to overrule the algorithm's judgment. As with other examples of algorithmic cruelty, it's not so much this specific example as was it presages for a future in which more and more of our external reality is determined by models derived from machine learning systems whose workings we're not privy to and have no say in. "

"Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate. Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction - and the results were unexpectedly haunting."

"Meanwhile, Goel plans on bringing the chatbot to more schools and classes. While he doesn't see Jill completely replacing professors and assistants, he thinks giving more students the opportunity for one-on-one interactions - even if with an AI - will help keep them engaged in the coursework."

"But the documents show that the company relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team to determine what makes its "trending module" headlines - the list of news topics that shows up on the side of the browser window on Facebook's desktop version. The company backed away from a pure-algorithm approach in 2014 after criticism that it had not included enough coverage of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in users' feeds."

"An investigation into the death of a 19-year-old French woman who reportedly live-streamed herself taking her own life has opened in France. The woman, who had been using the smartphone app Periscope, reportedly jumped under a train at a station about 25 miles (40 km) south of Paris on Tuesday."

"When Google's algorithms result in men on the Internet seeing better-paying job advertisements than women, it's worth looking under the hood at the assumptions that the algorithms, and the people behind it, have made. "

"A report from the Oxford Martin School's Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology said that 47 percent of all jobs in the U.S. are likely to be replaced by automated systems. Among the jobs soon to be replaced by machines are real estate brokers, animal breeders, tax advisers, data entry workers, receptionists and various personal assistants."

"A company owned by Google has been given access to the healthcare data of up to 1.6 million patients from three hospitals run by a major London NHS trust. DeepMind, the tech giant's London-based company most famous for its innovative use of artificial intelligence, is being provided with the patient information as part of an agreement with the Royal Free NHS trust, which runs the Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free hospitals. It includes information about people who are HIV-positive as well as details of drug overdoses, abortions and patient data from the past five years, according to a report by the New Scientist."

"A state judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe has ordered all mobile phone operators in the country to block Facebook-owned WhatsApp for 72 hours, nationwide. Those five telecom providers put the ban into effect today, and it affects about 100 million people. In Brazil, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app."

"Security Analysis of Emerging Smart Home Applications demonstrates how Samsung's SmartThings platform may be especially vulnerable to hackers. "

""The human can provide the robot with intuition, expertise and cognitive abilities. The robot can do things in areas too dangerous for a human, while the human is still there," he told Stanford News last week."

""Self-driving vehicle technology will make America's roadways safer and less congested," Strickland said in a release. "The best path for this innovation is to have one clear set of federal standards, and the Coalition will work with policymakers to find the right solutions that will facilitate the deployment of self-driving vehicles.""