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Doctors are licensed. Some construction engineers are licensed. Health departments can pull the permit of an unsafe restaurant to operate. It’s all for public safety. The same goes for AI. This article discusses how “Using artificial intelligence in sensitive areas like criminal justice and healthcare should be regulated.” It goes further.

For instance, workers at Google criticized the search giant’s executives for considering signing a Defense Department contract that involved helping the government use image-recognition technology for military-purposes. Amid the backlash, Google dropped out of a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the agency, citing its internal policies against using machine learning for warfare and surveillance.

Microsoft has urged “thoughtful government regulation” of facial recognition technology. All this is something to watch.

Apple has received an A+ rating by the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families organization for its efforts to reduce its use of toxic chemicals. AppleInsider reported that despite being found to have some room for improvement, Apple was the only firm given the top rating this year. It builds on last year when it received an A rating from the same organization.  Retailer Target was the only firm to receive an A rating this year. Best Buy and Amazon were only awarded a C rating.

Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families is a body comprised of 450 businesses which has been issuing annual report cards called Mind the Store for three years. Each report awards a point score as well as an overall grade and this year Apple earned 106.25 out of a possible 135 points. Part of that point score was 15 out of 15 for what Mind the Store calls continuous improvement in a steadily expanding safer chemicals policy. It also scored 9 out of 15 for public disclosure and transparency. Other scores included 7.5/7.5 for establishing management responsibilities and 10/10 for supply chain accountability.