The Pentagon is adopting new ethical principles as it prepares to accelerate its use of artificial intelligence technology on the battlefield

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that a cache of leaked documents proves that Chinese authorities are engaged in massive and systemic repression of Muslims and other minorities in western China, as a number of foreign governments expressed serious concern about the scale of the campaign. Pompeo said the documents underscored “an overwhelming and growing body of evidence” that...

The next time you get sick, your care may involve a form of the technology people use to navigate road trips or pick the right vacuum cleaner online. Artificial intelligence is spreading into health care, often as software or a computer program capable of learning from large amounts of data and making predictions to guide care or help patients. It...

President Xi Jinping said Friday that Beijing wants to work for a trade deal with the United States but is not afraid to “fight back” to protect its own interests. Echoing the upbeat tone adopted by other Chinese officials in recent days, Xi told a visiting U.S. business delegation that China holds a “positive attitude” about the trade talks. “As...

Exposing yourself on the street is a crime, but the law is less clear when it happens in the digital realm. Earlier this year, Texas outlawed sending unwanted nude photos to people through dating apps or other digital means, making it a Class C misdemeanor with a fine of up to $500. Now Chang, who has since been elected to...

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday he was certain that the awarding of a $10 billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft instead of Amazon was done fairly. The Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft in late October, and Amazon said there was “unmistakable bias” on the government’s part and it intended to challenge the decision in court. Esper recused himself...

Three universities and a health care institution are sharing a gift of more than $1 billion that’s one of the largest in the history of higher education, they announced Wednesday. Receiving $260 million apiece will be Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, and the Cleveland Clinic. The institutions are free to use the money...

Allegations that two former Twitter employees spied on users for the Saudi government have spotlighted the threat posed by insiders who exploit their access to the mountains of sensitive data held by tech companies.

Apple is resuming the use of humans to review Siri commands and dictation with the latest iPhone software update. In August, Apple suspended the practice and apologized for the way it used people, rather than just machines, to review the audio. While common in the tech industry, the practice undermined Apple’s attempts to position itself as a trusted steward of...

Google announced Wednesday it has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing, saying it has developed an experimental processor that took just minutes to complete a calculation that would take the world’s best supercomputer thousands of years. The feat could open the door someday to machines so blazingly fast that they could revolutionize such tasks as finding new medicines, developing vastly...

Pope Francis on Friday warned tech company executives, diplomats and financiers that the race to create artificial intelligence and other forms of digital development pose the risk of increasing social inequality unless the work is accompanied by an ethical evaluation of the common good.

Google is restarting a practice in which human contractors listen to and transcribe some voice commands people give to the company’s artificial intelligence system, Assistant. But this time Google is taking steps to make sure people know what they are agreeing to.

Every few months, social media lights up with a story or viral video about discrimination in home-sharing: A host kicks out a black guest or cancels a gay couple’s booking or doesn’t respond to a Muslim woman’s inquiry. The dominant brands — Airbnb, Booking.com and VRBO — work quickly to contain the damage. They may ban the host, find new...

The United States and China on Sunday put in place their latest tariff increases on each other’s goods, potentially raising prices Americans pay for some clothes, shoes, sporting goods and other consumer items before the holiday shopping season. President Donald Trump said U.S.-China trade talks were still on for September. “We’ll see what happens,” he told reporters as he returned...

Netflix’s first original series from Russia explores the good and bad possibilities of artificial intelligence in the near future.

For tens of thousands of years, humans have reigned as our planet’s only intelligent, self-aware species. But the rise of intelligent machines means that could change soon, perhaps in our own lifetimes. Not long after that, Homo sapiens could vanish from Earth entirely, NBC News reports. That’s the jarring message of a new book by James Lovelock, the famed British...

When Liz O’Sullivan was hired at the New York City-based artificial intelligence company Clarifai in 2017, she felt lucky to find work at the intersection of two of her main interests: technology and ethics. Two years later, she found herself facing a moral dilemma. Clarifai was developing aerial photography and object detection tools as one of several companies working on...

If you’ve used Facebook’s popular Messenger app, there’s a chance that someone working for Facebook has listened to recordings of your audio chats. A report by Bloomberg found that Facebook has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from its users, citing “people with knowledge of the work” who were told to transcribe the audio without...

Responding to pressure from businesses and growing fears that a trade war is threatening the U.S. economy, the Trump administration is delaying most of the import taxes it planned to impose on Chinese goods and is dropping others altogether. The announcement Tuesday from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative was greeted with relief on Wall Street and by retailers...