The king ate his lunch.

Next week, I'll be in Spain thinking about ethics and artificial intelligence. You can find my 5-pg paper, "Goal-oriented design for ethical machine learning and NLP" alongside a bunch of others by going to http://ethicsinnlp.com/program. Or come chat with me in Valencia, Spain on Tuesday, April 4th between 4pm and 5pm! That's the poster -- the images are conversation starters that are in the 5 pg paper, but not necessarily part of the text of the poster. If you want more details, check out the paper!

Artificial intelligence technology is accelerating forward at a blistering pace, and a trio of scientists are calling for more accountability and transparency in AI, before it's too late. In their paper, the UK-based researchers say existing rules and regulations don't go far enough in limiting what AI can do – and recommend that robots be held to the same standards as the humans who make them. There are a number of issues, say the researchers, that could lead to problems down the line, including the diverse nature of the systems being developed and a lack of transparency about the inner workings of AI. "Systems can make unfair and discriminatory decisions, replicate or develop biases, and behave in inscrutable and unexpected ways in highly sensitive environments that put human interests and safety at risk," the team reports in their paper. In other words: how do we know we can trust AI? Even before we get to the stage of the robots rising up, AI that's unaccountable and impossible to decipher is going to cause issues – from problems working out the cause of an accident between self-driving cars, to understanding the reasons why a bank's computer has turned you down for a loan.

VENTURER is the first Connected and Autonomous Vehicle project to start in the UK. The results of VENTURER preliminary trials show that the handover process is a safety critical issue in the development of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). The first VENTURER trials set out to investigate'takeover' (time taken to reengage with vehicle controls) and'handover' (time taken to regain a baseline/normal level of driving behaviour and performance) when switching frequently between automated and manual driving modes within urban and extra-urban settings. This trial is believed to be the first to directly compare handover to human driver-control from autonomous mode in both simulator and autonomous road vehicle platforms. The handover process is important from a legal and insurance perspective – the length of time it takes people to regain full control of the vehicle represents a meaningful risk to insurers and understanding when control is transferred between the vehicle and the driver has liability implications.

In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne published a report titled "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?". The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. According to their estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. Although the report is specific to the US job market, it is easy to see how this might apply all over the world. We extracted the jobs and the probability of automation from the report and have made it easy to search for your job.

This piece was originally published at Scout.ai. "This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

AUCKLAND 30 May 2017 – Accenture is today releasing research – Why Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Growth – which shows New Zealands growth rate could double between now and 2035 if emerging technologies are embraced. Artificial Intelligence could double New Zealand's growth rate in the next 20 years AUCKLAND 30 May 2017 – Accenture is today releasing research – Why Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Growth – which shows New Zealand's growth rate could double between now and 2035 if emerging technologies are embraced. Accenture New Zealand Technology Lead, Mary-Anne McCarthy says New Zealand could use innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as a tool to transform our thinking about how growth is created, and significantly boost labour production. "AI has the potential to boost labour productivity, driven by innovative technologies enabling people to make more efficient use of their time. There has been a marked decline in the ability of increases in capital investment and in labour to propel economic progress, yet long-term pessimism is unwarranted. AI has the potential to overcome the physical limitations of capital and labour and open up new sources of value and growth."

We don't know how quickly machines will displace people's jobs, or how many they'll take, but we know it's happening -- not just to factory workers but also to money managers, dermatologists and retail workers. The logical response seems to be to educate people differently, so they're prepared to work alongside the robots or do the jobs that machines can't. But how to do that, and whether training can outpace automation, are open questions. Pew Research Center and Elon University surveyed 1,408 people who work in technology and education to find out if they think new schooling will emerge in the next decade to successfully train workers for the future. Two-thirds said yes; the rest said no.

Salesforce have coined the current era as'The Age of the Customer', where everyone and everything is connected. In banking, this transformation means that technology will play an increasingly significant role in, the way customers interact with their bank. But will the introduction of the bots, machine learning, and AI mean a better quality of customer service? Or do people still want the human touch? Among the benefits, machines are more accurate than human beings; they don't get tired or agitated and can be available 24/7 – an important factor in today's round-the-clock global market.

The artificial intelligence revolution is gathering pace and no part of legal practice will be left untouched, writes legal commentator Morry Bailes. When South Korea's reigning Go master was beaten by artificial intelligence last year I published a column about the future of law. While a computer defeating a gaming champion seemed innocuous enough, the gravity of that event, given the complexity of Go, was significant. It has flow-on effects for all businesses, including law firms. Little over a year later, a Google-powered AI has just defeated China's best Go player, Ke Jie, who is also the world's No.1 player.