Tech Digest daily roundup: Alerts tell people NHS Covid-19 app has closed

People who installed the NHS Covid-19 app in England and Wales have been receiving alerts informing them the platform has now shut down. It was launched in 2020 as a tool to help fight the spread of Covid-19 by warning citizens if they had been near to someone who was infected. It was downloaded around 30 million times during the pandemic. Scotland and Northern Ireland had their own versions, which have also now closed. The England and Wales app stopped working on Thursday and will disappear from Apple and Google’s app stores in May. BBC 

A British scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence has told Sky News that powerful AI systems “can’t be controlled” and “are already causing harm”. Professor Stuart Russell was one of more than 1,000 experts who last month signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of systems even more capable than OpenAI’s newly-launched GPT-4 – the successor to its online chatbot ChatGPT which is powered by GPT-3.5. Sky News

Sweden is building the world’s first electric motorway which will allow cars and lorries to recharge will driving. The ‘e-motorway’ will be built along 13 miles of European route E20 which connects Hallsberg and Örebro, located between Sweden’s three major cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. It comes after the European Union passed a law last month requiring all new cars sold to have zero CO2 emissions from 2035. Daily Mail 

Doctors, scientists and researchers have built an artificial intelligence model that can accurately identify cancer, in a development they say could speed up diagnosis of the disease and fast-track patients to treatment. Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide. In many cases, however, the disease can be cured if detected early and treated swiftly. The AI tool designed by experts at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Imperial College London can identify whether abnormal growths found on CT scans are cancerous. Guardian 

It’s Apple’s big developer event WWDC 2023 in a few weeks, and that means we’ll get to see more of the operating system that’ll ship with the iPhone 15 and give existing iPhones an update too. While we’re not expecting a massive change to the look of iOS 17, there have been rumours of fairly significant changes to some key apps – and according to Analyst941 on Twitter, who seems to have the inside track on Apple apps, those apps include Wallet and Health. The image above is a render based on apparently solid information, and it shows the revamped Wallet app we can expect to see at WWDC and in the final iOS 17 release. T3.com

Microsoft has said that it will no longer manufacture mice, keyboards, and webcams under the Microsoft brand, instead, it will develop Surface-branded PC accessories, which include mice, keyboards, pens, and more, the media reported. According to The Verge, the move ends the legacy of Microsoft-branded PC hardware launched in 1983 with Word and Notepad bundled together. Economic Times