This is the text version of a talk I gave on November 11, 2016, at the Direction conference in Sydney. When John Allsopp invited me here, I told him how excited I was discuss a topic that's been heavy on my mind: accountability in automated systems. But then John explained that in order for the economics to work, and for it to make sense to fly me to Australia, there needed to actually be an audience. Let's start with the most obvious answer--the military. This is the Predator, the forerunner of today's aerial drones. Those things under its wing are Hellfire missiles. These two weapons are the chocolate and peanut butter of robot warfare. In 2001, CIA agents got tired of looking at Osama Bin Laden through the camera of a surveillance drone, and figured out they could strap some missiles to the thing. And now we can't build these things fast enough. We're now several generations in to this technology, and soldiers now have smaller, portable UAVs they can throw like a paper airplane. You launch them in the field, and they buzz around and give you a safe way to do reconaissance. There are also portable UAVs with explosives in their nose, so you can fire them out of a tube and then direct them against a target--a group of soldiers, an orphanage, or a bunker–and make them perform a kamikaze attack. The Army has been developing unmanned vehicles that work on land, little tanks that roll around with a gun on top, with a wire attached for control, like the cheap remote-controlled toys you used to get at Christmas. Here you see a demo of a valiant robot dragging a wounded soldier to safety. The Russians have their own versions of these things, of course. I imagine it asking you who you are in a heavy Slavic accent before firing its many weapons into your fleeing body. Not all these robots are intended as weapons. The Army is trying to automate transportation, sometimes in weird-looking ways like this robotic dog monster.

A consortium of experts last week issued an updated Roadmap For Robotics report. The first Roadmap report was issued in 2009 and led to the Obama administration to set up the National Robotics Initiative in 2011, which allocated $70 million to research for robotics. Weighing in at over 100 pages, the report is full of guidelines and recommendations that experts believe require funding and attention from Congress moving forward, as well as providing policymakers enough information to more accurately determine optimal allocation of resources. Since the first report (and a 2013 revision) drones, driverless cars, and all sorts of assistive robots have taken centre stage due to their accelerating development. Integrating these systems into daily life is seen as one of the primary goals, and to that end, the importance of STEM education is highlighted.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY: China Used Crispr to Fight Cancer in a Real, Live Human Megan Molteni Wired "The FDA, for better and for worse, is a historically cautious gatekeeper, unconcerned with international spitting contests. Clinical trials cost millions, and last for years. But George Church, Harvard University geneticist and co-founder of Editas Medicine believes it's a necessary step to ensure new technologies like Crispr-based gene therapies really work. Even when they hold you up from making history." VIRTUAL REALITY: I Hung out With My Past Self in Virtual Reality Ben Popper The Verge "I met the crew from AltspaceVR inside a virtual space station. We chatted briefly, moving around the room...Then I moved off to the side, and watched as my avatar reappeared at our starting location...I watched as beta-Ben repeated the last five minutes of my life."

General Electric builds jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.

The UK's national security boss, Robert Hannigan, should come clean on surveillance and stop attacking technology companies, privacy experts have said. Intelligence agencies must use the debate sparked by Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations to overhaul their attitude to privacy and oversight, said the group speaking at Dublin's Web Summit in November. "What's urgently required is a real cultural shift amongst our politicians and among our civil servants in Whitehall as to the value of privacy: the fact that it's a public and social good, and it's a collective good as well," said Bella Sankey, policy director at civil liberties organisation Liberty. Sankey, speaking alongside the former MI5 intelligence officer and whistleblower Annie Machon, criticised Hannigan for his attack on technology companies, in which he claimed were "in denial" about the misuse of the internet by terrorists, and that "privacy has never been an absolute right". "Given everything we've learnt in the past 18 months, he chose not to address at all the very serious things that GCHQ stand accused of: blanket surveillance of the UK population with public knowledge and without parliamentary knowledge, [and] receiving warrantless bulk intercepts from the NSA on US and people around the world," said Machon.

The U.S. State Department generates some two billion e-mails every year. A significant fraction of these contain sensitive or secret information and so have to be classified, a process that is time-consuming and costly. In 2015 alone, it spent $16 billion to protect classified information. But the reliability of this process of classification is unclear. Nobody knows whether the rules for classifying information are applied consistently and reliably.

While reading about the City of L.A.'s Security Operations Center's use of artificial intelligence, I became intrigued by the beneficial analogs that sales organizations can derive by implementing chatbots. The ComputerWorld article that I reference is not directly sales and marketing related. However, it does demonstrate the value of having artificial intelligence ala chatbots when trying to meet customer demand at scale for your sales, support, and customer service inquiries. That seems like an overwhelmingly large number, especially when you read that their command center is staffed with only eight cyber threat analysts per shift in their around the clock operations to handle threats in realtime. While they don't go into detail about their A.I. system, I can appreciate the huge uplift that A.I. gives to their threat assessment and response in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

It seems like we've perennially been on the edge of major breakthroughs in AI (artificial intelligence), virtual reality, personal robots, and other such cool tech for the past two decades. The first set of science fiction imaginings came true rather rapidly -- think trans-continental air travel, space stations, even drone warfare -- but it appears that the emergence of next-gen tech wizardry has stalled. But while we still can't chat with the on-board computer on our personal spaceship, artificial intelligence is far more pervasive in our daily lives today than most of us realize. As anyone who has trained their mobile phone assistant can attest, years of painstaking research and investment in artificial intelligence technologies is starting to yield impressive results. Siri can predict our commute patterns, Microsoft Cortana warns us of bad weather, and the Google Assistant diligently sets calendar reminders with the impassive demeanor of an English butler of yore.

I moderated a panel Tuesday night at a Fortune dinner during the LA Auto show. It was on the ethics of autonomous vehicles, a subject so broad it could fill a Ph.D. thesis, let alone a 30-minute discussion. The short version is this: Humans react to crises, and no one faults them much for the consequences. Machines, aided by artificial intelligence, may well be held to a higher standard because they will be programmed to think through the ramifications of their actions, including killing one person to save many. Panelist Patrick Lin of CalPoly created this marvelous video to illustrate the conundrum.

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.