Plus, A.I. that detects drowsy drivers, algorithmic artists, and more A.I. news from the week

A growing number of classrooms in China are equipped with artificial-intelligence cameras and brain-wave trackers. While many parents and teachers see them as tools to improve grades, they’ve become some children’s worst nightmare.

As you may have already realized, there are numerous discussions taking place about the ethics of artificial intelligence - in governmental forums, in the industry, in academia and in the media.

No one seems to be able to figure out if what Clearview AI is doing is legal, a quandary that has exposed the messy patchwork of laws that allow exploitation of people’s personal data to profligate.

Fear that the impact of militarised artificial intelligence (AI) on war and international relations could be more deadly than the nuclear arms race is both an exaggeration and an underestimation of the threat this represents.

Israeli writer Yuval Harari claims that the world is in the middle of an artificial intelligence war led by the USA and China. According to Harari, countries that cannot keep up with the race will either go bankrupt or become colonial.

Meet the xenobots: Tiny living robots have been created using cells taken from frog embryos. Each so-called xenobot is less than a millimeter across, but one can propel itself through water using two stumpy limbs, while another has a kind of pouch that it could use to carry a small load.

Google chief Sundar Pichai has called for ‘international alignment’ and ‘an agreement on core values’ in the future regulation of Artificial Intelligence. But positions of the EU and the US on the issue diverge, following the recent leak of European Commission papers detailing a crackdown on facial recognition technologies.

Discussions on the negative impact of Artificial Intelligence in society include horror stories plucked from either China’s high-tech surveillance state and its use of the controversial social credit system, or from the US and its use of recidivism algorithms and predictive policing.

SpaceX has a plan to launch 42,000 Starlink satellites into orbit, but the first 120 are already blocking astronomers' view of space

The US administration has urged European lawmakers to avoid heavy regulation frameworks in the future rollout of Artificial Intelligence technologies on the continent. The call comes ahead of the European Commission’s planned presentation of its AI strategy, set to be announced early this year.

The results aren’t perfect, but you can sort of hear how Google’s translator was able to retain the voice and tone of the original speaker. It can do this because it converts audio input directly to audio output without any intermediary steps. In contrast, traditional translational systems convert audio into text, translate the text, and then resynthesize the audio, losing the characteristics of the original voice along the way.The new system, dubbed the Translatotron, has three components, all of which look at the speaker’s audio spectrogram—a visual snapshot of the frequencies used when the sound is playing, often called a voiceprint.  The first component uses a neural network trained to map the audio spectrogram in the input language to the audio spectrogram in the output language. The second converts the spectrogram into an audio wave that can be played. The third component can then layer the original speaker’s vocal characteristics back into the final audio output.

John Giannandrea, who leads AI at Google, is worried about intelligent systems learning human prejudices.

Bias can creep in at many stages of the deep-learning process, and the standard practices in computer science aren’t designed to detect it.

Opioid addiction is easily one of the top widespread healthcare issues facing the U.S., and research indicates we’re nowhere near achieving any kind of significant mitigating solution. But a team of medical researchers working at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute (RNI) and West Virginia University Medicine (WVU) are beginning a new clinical trial of a solution that uses brain-embedded technology to potentially curb opioid addiction in cases that have resisted other methods of treatment.

Voice AI systems will be everywhere around us within the next decade, meaning we only have to speak to get what we want, an AI expert has claimed.

The global market for connected cars is forecast to grow significantly over the next few years as innovations in connectivity transform the automotive industry.

Smart technology is making Europe’s cities more sustainable, but privacy and hacking risks are also growing.