This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy, Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian. We were each asked to speak for ten minutes, to an audience of social scientists. I am only a small minnow in the technology ocean, but since it is my natural habitat, I want to make an effort to describe it to you. As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world.

Pulling these threads together, recently a gaming AI defeated a US Air Force expert combat pilot in simulated combat.

There is lots of talk about machine learning at the moment, says Alexander Graubner-Müller. AI can write songs, compose novels and even beat the world champion at Go – and machine learning can even help with financial services. Consumer credit is one of these areas, says Graubner-Müller, who cofounded Kreditech in 2012. There are two classes of consumer credit, he says – people with no access to credit and people with access to credit. One is middle class, well-employed and has a strong credit history.

The history of artificial intelligence (AI) dates back into antiquity – intelligent robots appear in the myths of many ancient societies, including Greek, Arabic, Egyptian and Chinese. Today, the field of artificial intelligence is more vibrant than ever and some believe that we're on the threshold of discoveries that could change human society irreversibly, for better or worse. Humans tend to think in straight lines, but every aspect of technological progress is actually accelerating – including AI. Futurist Ray Kurzweil calls this the "Law of Accelerating Returns", and presents evidence that an amount of progress equal to the entire 20th century's gains was attained between 2000 and 2014. He also argues that the same amount will happen again before 2021. Understanding the exponential nature of progress and ignoring the inner tendency to think things will keep improving at the same rate is key to getting to grips with how fast we'll make scientific advances in the future.

Do you believe that companies live and die by their understanding of how customers use and grow with their products? Do you love the idea of rapidly iterating on new features as experiments against thousands of users to find the ones which move the needle and hit customer engagement out of the ballpark? Would you like to drive real change at the world's hottest SaaS company, and the best place to work in Australia? Atlassian is looking for an analytical mind to work in our Product Growth team to analyze the way customers use our our amazing suite of products – JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket, Bamboo, HipChat... We use real data science to point the way, then design experiments to improve customer engagement and growth; we work with Product Managers, Designers and Engineers to build a magical experience for customers. It's not for the faint of heart -- you'll need to slice and dice large-scale data, looking for key trends and patterns.

Artificial Intelligence or AI as it popularly called is surely and steadily working its way to become more like humans. We have had an AI which injured its host will fully while another AI robot ran out of its enclosure in Russia. Now another AI has successfully managed to beat an ace fighter pilot in a combat simulation. Recently, an artificial intelligence (AI) named ALPHA developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate went up against retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene Lee in a high-fidelity air combat simulator. The result, the Colonel lost. In a series of flight combat simulations, the A.I. successfully dodged Lee, and shot him down every time.

The idea of human-robot relationships may sound absurd to you, especially if you aren't the biggest fan of technology, but these types of relationships will happen in the next twenty to fifty years, and maybe even sooner. In case you are wondering about the above picture, it is from the movie Serenity. The man in the photo is Mr. Universe--a man who sits in front of screens all day monitoring the universe--and the "woman" is his female companion robot that he married. The idea of someone like this is absurd right? Except when you look at what is happening in western society, you realize it isn't.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

The ROCSAFE Project (Remotely Operated CBRNe Scene Assessment & Forensic Examination) has recently been funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme. Led by Dr Michael Madden in NUI Galway, it will make advances in autonomous robotics, probabilistic reasoning, intelligent decision support, and miniaturised sensors, all of which will work together to gather forensic evidence in the event of a chemical, biological, radiation/nuclear or explosive (CBRNe) incident. ROCSAFE's overall goal is to fundamentally change how CBRNe events are assessed, and ensure the safety of crime scene investigators, by reducing the need for them to enter dangerous scenes to gather evidence. There are 13 partners in total involved in the project across Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Germany, along with a further group of advisory board members. There is more information at http://www.nuigalway.ie/remoteforensics/.

Details of the fallout from the Brexit vote may take months to become clear, but there are concerns the UK pulling out of the European Union could lead to the loss of many low skilled migrant workers. But this apparent loss could be technology's gain, according to the findings from one think-tank. According to a new report from the Resolution Foundation, shortfalls in the human workforce could lead to a surge in robots to take their place. A new report from a think-tank says shortfalls in the workforce post-Brexit could lead to a surge in robots to take their place. According to findings from the Resolution Foundation, low-skilled jobs in agriculture and the food industry currently carried out by large numbers of EU workers could be automated.