Larry Lewis, Director of CNA’s Center for Autonomy and AI, again sits in for Dave this week. He and Andy discuss: the recent passing of physicist Stephen Hawking (along with his “cautionary” views on AI); CNAS’s recent launch of a new Task Force on AI and National Security, Microsoft’s AI breakthrough in matching human performance translating news from Chinese to English; a report that looks at China’s “AI Dream” (and introduces an “AI Potential Index” to assess China’s AI capabilities compared to other nations); a second index, from a separate report, called the “Government AI Readiness Index,” which inexplicably excludes China from the top 35 ranked nations; and the issue of legal liability of AI systems. They conclude with call outs to a fun-to-read crowd-sourced paper written by researchers in artificial life, evolutionary computation, and AI that tells stories about the surprising creativity of digital evolution, and three videos: a free BBC-produced documentary on Stephen Hawking, a technical talk on deep learning, and a Q&A session with Elon Musk (that includes an exchange on AI).