The list of companies working with Apple Pay continues to grow.

On Tuesday, Apple announced that in recent weeks the company had signed up dozens more banks, retail stores and start-ups to adopt Apple Pay, the company’s new e-commerce product, which allows customers to buy things with little more than a wave of their iPhone. 

The new companies that recently agreed to work with the service include SunTrust, Barclaycard and USAA. Ten more banks, including TD Bank North America and Commerce Bank, will back the new form of payment on Tuesday. With the new additions, Apple says it supports the cards that represent about 90 percent of the credit card purchase volume in the United States.

Staples, the big-box office supplies retailer, now accepts Apple Pay at its 1,400 United States locations. Chain grocers like Winn-Dixie and Albertsons take it, too. And on Friday, Amway Center, the home to the Orlando Magic basketball team, will accept Apple Pay at many of its retail and food and beverage stands during games.

Other companies have given hints that the service has legs. Whole Foods, the high-end grocery chain that has accepted Apple Pay since the service was released in October, said it had processed more than 150,000 Apple Pay transactions in the early days after the product’s release. McDonald’s, another original participating company, said Apple Pay accounted for 50 percent of its tap-to-pay transactions in November.

Other big companies that accept Apple Pay, like Disney, Lyft, Uber and Airbnb, did not respond with data before this article was published.

While Apple Pay still accounts for a tiny fraction of total transactions, the new additions suggest that Apple has generated more traction for the service than any competing service. Others giant companies like Google, Verizon and AT&T have offered similar takes on a smartphone-based e-commerce product, though to little avail.

“Retailers and payment companies see Apple Pay as the implementation that has the best chance at mass consumer adoption, which has eluded prior attempts,” said Patrick Moorhead, president of Moor Insights & Strategy, a research firm. “They believe it will solve many of the problems they had before with electronic payments.”

Alex Martins, chief executive of the Orlando Magic, said he thought Apple Pay would play a part in bringing other industries into a new digital age.

“One of the biggest pieces of feedback we get from our fans is that the food and beverage lines are too long,” Mr. Martins said in an interview. “It keeps them from going to the concession stand because they don’t want to miss the action. This, and technologies like Apple Pay, will speed up our service.”

Some industry watchers are bullish on what Apple may do for the mobile payments industry overall. One estimate sees United States mobile payments volume reaching $142 billion by 2019, according to Forrester Research. Much of that will be a result of Apple Pay’s effect on the industry, Denée Carrington, a Forrester analyst, said. Ms. Carrington expects Apple Pay to reach $34 billion in e-commerce volume in the United States by 2019.

OAKLAND, Calif. — After 10 years, a class-action antitrust lawsuit involving iPods is finally in the hands of a jury.

In a federal trial more noteworthy for legal wrangling than evidence presented in a courtroom, Apple is accused of blocking the music of competitive services from playing on Apple’s iPods. But in the course of the trial, which lasted a week and a half, both plaintiffs named in the suit dropped out after lawyers discovered they did not buy iPods in the time period in which Apple is accused of wrongdoing.

A new plaintiff was appointed Monday, and lawyers on both sides wrapped up their arguments with closing statements.

First filed in January 2005, the case, in its present form, comes down to an update to iTunes that Apple issued in September 2006: Was it an actual software improvement or an intentional roadblock for competitors?

Patrick Coughlin, one of the lawyers suing Apple, told jurors that once iPod owners downloaded the Apple software update, songs sold by competitors were gone. “Your iPod is basically a paperweight at that point,” he said.

Apple’s lawyers argued that iTunes software improved security and added features. They added that the plaintiffs’ side lacked actual people to say they were harmed.

“There’s not one piece of evidence of a single individual who lost a single song, not even a complaint about it,” said William Isaacson, Apple’s lead lawyer in the case. “This is all made up at this point.”

The lawsuit involves iPods sold between 2006 and 2009, which played only songs sold in the iTunes Store, or those downloaded from CDs — not music from some competing stores. Apple is accused of violating antitrust law because to keep their music, people had to buy iPods rather than cheaper, alternative music players.

Apple could pay more than $350 million in damages.

In a 2005 email shown in the trial, Steven P. Jobs, who died in 2011, reacted to a web article about a tech start-up that had devised technologies for music companies to sell music playable on iPods without going through Apple.

Mr. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, wrote in November 2005 to Jeffrey L. Robbin, the head of Apple’s iTunes software, “Jeff, we may need to change things here. …” The lawyers showed subsequent electronic conversations suggesting that Mr. Robbin acted on Mr. Jobs’s request within days to develop a stronger security system to prevent unauthorized third parties from injecting content into iPods.

Apple’s lawyer, Mr. Isaacson, said there was no evidence to suggest that the software update was not a product improvement. The iTunes software in question, version 7.0, added the capability to play movies, as well as stronger security to protect content from hackers, he said.

“We now have a plaintiff in a case that is asking to hold Apple liable” for providing security, Mr. Isaacson said. “That is not the instruction.”

Apple executives testified that hackers were constantly trying to hack iTunes, so Apple was continually improving the security of the software. Mr. Jobs said in videotaped testimony that the hacks could have subjected Apple to violations of its agreements with record labels, which could result in their withholding music from iTunes.

Apple’s lawyers successfully argued that the two plaintiffs representing the class action did not buy the iPods in the relevant time period. Both were removed from the case.

On Monday morning, hours before lawyers on both sides were to give closing remarks, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers appointed a new plaintiff: Barbara Bennett, a Massachusetts resident with an iPod Nano bought in 2006. She was not given time to testify.

Over the weekend, in court filings, the lawyers suing Apple added another accusation: that Apple and Amazon had colluded to make their products successful, while blocking their competitors.

“Apparently Apple and Amazon had worked out an agreement and Amazon put Apple front and center in Amazon’s new service,” the plaintiff lawyers wrote in their filing.

Notably, in a separate antitrust case, a federal judge found Apple liable last year for colluding with book publishers to help them fight Amazon and its uniform pricing of $9.99 for new e-books.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers called the collusion assertion a “Hail Mary, last-ditch effort.”

“I find it offensive, frankly,” she said. She forbade the lawyers from presenting the idea of Apple and Amazon being in collusion to the jury.

The eight-member jury is expected to deliver a verdict in the coming days.

Scientists have begun what they say will be a century-long study of the effects of artificial intelligence on society, including on the economy, war and crime, officials at Stanford University announced Monday.

The project, hosted by the university, is unusual not just because of its duration but because it seeks to track the effects of these technologies as they reshape the roles played by human beings in a broad range of endeavors.

“My take is that A.I. is taking over,” said Sebastian Thrun, a well-known roboticist who led the development of Google’s self-driving car. “A few humans might still be ‘in charge,’ but less and less so.”

Artificial intelligence describes computer systems that perform tasks traditionally requiring human intelligence and perception. In 2009, the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Eric Horvitz, organized a meeting of computer scientists in California to discuss the possible ramifications of A.I. advances. The group concluded that the advances were largely positive and lauded the “relatively graceful” progress.

But now, in the wake of recent technological advances in computer vision, speech recognition and robotics, scientists say they are increasingly concerned that artificial intelligence technologies may permanently displace human workers, roboticize warfare and make of Orwellian surveillance techniques easier to develop, among other disastrous effects.

Dr. Horvitz, now the managing director of the Redmond, Wash., campus of Microsoft Research, last year approached John Hennessy, a computer scientist and president of Stanford University, about the idea of a long-term study that would chart the progress of artificial intelligence and its effect on society. Dr. Horvitz and his wife, Mary Horvitz, agreed to fund the initiative, called the “One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence.”

In an interview, Dr. Horvitz said he was unconvinced by recent warnings that superintelligent machines were poised to outstrip human control and abilities. Instead, he believes these technologies will have positive and negative effects on society.

“Loss of control of A.I. systems has become a big concern,” he said. “It scares people.” Rather than simply dismiss these dystopian claims, he said, scientists instead must monitor and continually evaluate the technologies.

“Even if the anxieties are unwarranted, they need to be addressed,” Dr. Horvitz said.

He declined to divulge the size of his gift to Stanford, but said it was sufficient to fund the study for a century and suggested the amount might be increased in the future.

Dr. Horvitz will lead a committee with Russ Altman, a Stanford professor of bioengineering and computer science. The committee will include Barbara J. Grosz, a Harvard University computer scientist; Deirdre K. Mulligan, a lawyer and a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley; Yoav Shoham, a professor of computer science at Stanford; Tom Mitchell, the chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University; and Alan Mackworth, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia.

The committee will choose a panel of specialists who will produce a report on artificial intelligence and its effects that is to be published late in 2015.In a white paper outlining the project, Dr. Horvitz described 18 areas that might be considered, including law, ethics, the economy, war and crime. Future reports will be produced at regular intervals.

Dr. Horvitz said that progress in the field of artificial intelligence had consistently been overestimated.

Indeed, news accounts in 1958 described a neural network circuit designed by Frank Rosenblatt, a psychologist at Cornell University. The Navy enthusiastically announced plans to build a “thinking machine” based on the circuits within a year for $100,000. It never happened.

Still, Dr. Horvitz acknowledged, the pace of technological change has accelerated, as has the reach of artificial intelligence. He cited Stuxnet, the malicious program developed by intelligence agencies to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, as an example.

“My grandmother would tell me stories about people running outside when they saw a plane fly over, it was so unusual,” he said. “Now, in a relatively few decades, our worry is about whether we are getting a salt-free meal when we take off from J.F.K. in a jumbo jet.”

Seattle — Inside the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, known as AI2, everything is a gleaming architectural white. The walls are white, the furniture is white, the counters are white. It might as well have been a set for the space station in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“The brilliant white was a conscious choice meant to evoke experimental science — think ‘white lab coat,’ ” said Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist and director of the new institute, which the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen launched this year as a sibling of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, his effort to map the human brain.

 

Yet for the 30 (soon to be 50) artificial-intelligence researchers who can look out on a striking view of downtown Seattle, the futuristic surroundings offer a paradoxical note: AI2 is an effort to advance artificial intelligence while simultaneously reaching back into the field’s past.

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While Silicon Valley looks to fashionable techniques like neural networks and machine learning that have rapidly advanced the state of the art, Dr. Etzioni remains a practitioner of a modern version of what used to be known as Gofai, for good old-fashioned artificial intelligence.

The reference goes back to the earliest days of the field in the 1950s and ’60s, when artificial-intelligence researchers were confident they could model human intelligence using symbolic systems — logic embedded in software programs, running on powerful computers.

Then in the late 1980s, an early wave of commercial artificial-intelligence companies failed, bringing on what became known as the “A.I. winter.” The field was seen as a failure and went into eclipse.

In recent years, however, A.I. has come roaring back as speech recognition, machine vision and self-driving cars have made progress with powerful computers, cheap sensors and machine-learning techniques. That has started a Silicon Valley gold rush led by Google, Facebook and Apple, drawing outsiders like Alibaba and Baidu in China, all caught up in a frantic race to hire the world’s best machine-learning talent.

But the debate over how to reach genuine artificial intelligence has not ended, and Dr. Etzioni and Mr. Allen are betting that their path is more pragmatic. The power of the new techniques is not disputed, but there is a growing debate over whether they can take the field to human-level capabilities by themselves.

“Think of it as Sherlock Holmes versus Spider-Man,” said Jerry Kaplan, a visiting lecturer at Stanford who teaches a course on the history and philosophy of artificial intelligence, comparing Holmes’s deductive powers with the irrational “spider sense” that tingles at the base of Spider-Man’s skull and alerts him to danger.

Mr. Allen, who noted that he came from a family of librarians, said his decision to fund an artificial-intelligence research lab was inspired by the question of how books and other knowledge might be encoded to become the basis for computer interactions in which human questions might be answered more fully.

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“AI2 was born from a desire to create a system that could truly reason about knowledge, rather than just offer up what had been written on a subject before,” he wrote in an email interview.

Dr. Etzioni says that the artificial-intelligence field has made incremental advances in areas like vision and speech, but that we have gotten no closer to the larger goal of true human-level systems.

“Driverless cars are a great thing,” he said, but added that the field had given rise to “bad A.I., like the N.S.A. is using it or Facebook is using it to track you.”

“We want to be the good guys,” he went on, “and it’s up to us to deliver on that.”

Moreover, he says, both he and Mr. Allen believe that technology cannot be separated from its social and economic consequences. They have added a social mission to the project that they call “artificial intelligence for the common good.”

The success or failure of the project, however, will ultimately hinge on whether Dr. Etzioni can create a new synthesis of artificial intelligence, weaving together powerful machine-learning tools with traditional logic-oriented software.

The current fad for big data, of which machine learning is a major component, has significant limits. “If you step back a little and say we want to do A.I., then you will realize that A.I. needs knowledge, reasoning and explanation,” he said. “My argument is that big data has made great progress in limited areas.”

Even Watson, the brainy IBM computer whose intelligence the company wants to apply in complex applications like medical diagnoses and automated call centers with interactive speech recognition, will soon reach fundamental limits, he argues.

“I really don’t want a system that can’t explain itself to be my doctor,” he said. “I can just imagine sitting there with Dr. Watson and the program saying, ‘Well, we need to remove a kidney, Mr. Etzioni,’ and I’m like, ‘What?!’ and they respond, ‘Well, we have a lot of variables and a lot of data, and that’s just what the model says.’ ”

Dr. Etzioni, 50, was already known for innovative web projects, including MetaCrawler, an early search engine, and an array of successful start-up companies; one of them, Farecast, was acquired by Microsoft and became the basis for its Bing Travel service. (The first student to major in computer science at Harvard, he is a son of the well-known sociologist Amitai Etzioni.)

At AI2 he is motivated by Mr. Allen’s view that “in order to be truly intelligent, computers must understand — that is probably the critical word,” as the Microsoft co-founder put it in a 1977 interview.

Some technology experts argue that self-aware computing machines are now on the horizon. “As for A.I. progress, we’re mostly haggling about a few decades,” said Hans Moravec, a leading roboticist who is the chief scientist of Seegrid Corporation, a maker of autonomous vehicles for warehouse applications. “I’m content to simply watch it play out, trying to do my part. I do want fully autonomous robots as soon as possible, to begin visiting the rest of the universe.”

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Mr. Allen and Dr. Etzioni are not so optimistic. Both are skeptical of claims that we may be only years away from machines that think in any human sense.

“Full A.I., in the sense of something like HAL in ‘2001,’ ” Mr. Allen wrote in an email interview, “is probably a hundred years away (or more). In reality, we are only beginning to grasp how deep intelligence works.”

Dr. Etzioni wants AI2 to set measurable goals to help get a new class of learning systems off the ground. During its first year, the researchers have focused on three projects — one in computer vision (in which computers learn to recognize images), one to build a reasoning system capable of taking standardized school tests, and a third to help scholars deal with the fire hose of information that is inundating every scientific field.

The school-test effort, Project Aristo, seeks to create a learning program that can collect and organize a wide range of information, and then use that database to reason and to answer questions, even discussing and explaining its answers with human users.

To chart Aristo’s progress, researchers plan to test it on increasingly difficult standardized science exams, moving from the fourth grade through the 12th.

“We’re not planning on putting 10th graders out of work,” Dr. Etzioni said. But he does believe that a program that can converse with humans and answer questions would serve as a foundation for many other achievements, going far beyond the most powerful search engines and systems like Watson.

In September, the researchers celebrated their first milestone — 60 percent correct answers in the language portion of New York State’s fourth-grade science test. Many of the questions in the actual test include diagrams and illustrations, which will ultimately require advances in computer vision.

That challenge is considered far more difficult than recognizing human speech. It calls for a computer system with “scene understanding,” the human ability to extract meaning from animate and inanimate objects that interact.

Whether AI2’s research leads to a new generation of thinking machine or just more incremental advances, the project is a clear indication that artificial intelligence has once again become the defining force in the software world.

“The narrative has changed,” said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research. “It has switched from, ‘Isn’t it terrible that artificial intelligence is a failure?’ to ‘Isn’t it terrible that A.I. is a success?’ ”

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