The European Parliament should amend the regulation to better protect people's rights to social security and an adequate standard of living. The 28-page report in the form of a question-and-answer document, "How the EU's Flawed Artificial Intelligence Regulation Endangers the Social Safety Net," examines how governments are turning to algorithms to allocate social security support and prevent benefits fraud. Drawing on case studies in Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and the United Kingdom, Human Rights Watch found that this trend toward automation can discriminate against people who need social security support, compromise their privacy, and make it harder for them to qualify for government assistance. But the regulation will do little to prevent or rectify these harms. "The EU's proposal does not do enough to protect people from algorithms that unfairly strip them of the benefits they need to support themselves or find a job," said Amos Toh, senior researcher on artificial intelligence and human rights at Human Rights Watch.

The past decade has seen significant progress in artificial intelligence (AI), which has resulted in algorithms being adopted for resolving a variety of problems. However, this success has been met by increasing model complexity and employing black-box AI models that lack transparency. In response to this need, Explainable AI (XAI) has been proposed to make AI more transparent and thus advance the adoption of AI in critical domains. Although there are several reviews of XAI topics in the literature that identified challenges and potential research directions in XAI, these challenges and research directions are scattered. This study, hence, presents a systematic meta-survey for challenges and future research directions in XAI organized in two themes: (1) general challenges and research directions in XAI and (2) challenges and research directions in XAI based on machine learning life cycle's phases: design, development, and deployment. We believe that our meta-survey contributes to XAI literature by providing a guide for future exploration in the XAI area.

When technology enters applications and processes with a long tradition of controversial societal debate, multi-faceted new ethical and legal questions arise. This paper focusses on the process of whistleblowing, an activity with large impacts on democracy and business. Computer science can, for the first time in history, provide for truly anonymous communication. We investigate this in relation to the values and rights of accountability, fairness and data protection, focusing on opportunities and limitations of the anonymity that can be provided computationally; possible consequences of outsourcing whistleblowing support; and challenges for the interpretation and use of some relevant laws. We conclude that to address these questions, whistleblowing and anonymous whistleblowing must rest on three pillars, forming a 'triangle of whistleblowing protection and incentivisation' that combines anonymity in a formal and technical sense; whistleblower protection through laws; and organisational and political error culture.

Jules studied English Literature with Creative Writing at Lancaster University before earning her masters in International Relations at Leiden University in The Netherlands (Hoi!). She then trained as a journalist through News Associates in Manchester. Jules has previously worked as a mental health blogger, copywriter and freelancer for various publications.

Congress is making its biggest push ever to stop drunk driving with President Biden's huge infrastructure bill. As we previously reported, one of the provisions included a mandate for anti-drunk driving technology in new cars. Now, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has passed Congress with the measure intact, Autoblog (AP) reports, and it's expected to be signed by the President soon. As part of the legislation, carmakers will have to include technology to detect and stop drunk drivers by as early as 2026. First, though, the Department of Transportation will have to determine the best solution to curtail intoxicated drunk driving.

The European Union's (EU) proposed plan to regulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to undermine the bloc's social safety net, and is ill-equipped to protect people from surveillance and discrimination, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. Social security support across Europe is increasingly administered by AI-powered algorithms, which are being used by governments to allocate life-saving benefits, provide job support and control access to a variety of social services, said Human Rights Watch in its 28-page report, How the EU's flawed artificial intelligence regulation endangers the social safety net. Drawing on case studies from Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and the UK, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) found that Europe's trend towards automation is discriminating against people in need of social security support, compromising their privacy, and making it harder for them to obtain government assistance. It added that while the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) proposal, which was published in April 2021, does broadly acknowledge the risks associated with AI, "it does not meaningfully protect people's rights to social security and an adequate standard of living". "In particular, its narrow safeguards neglect how existing inequities and failures to adequately protect rights – such as the digital divide, social security cuts, and discrimination in the labour market – shape the design of automated systems, and become embedded by them."

An expert in legal technology, Ope Olugasa, has said judges can use artificial intelligence (A.I) to easily review and evaluate written addresses and submissions in seconds. The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of LawPavilion Business Solutions, Ope Olugasa, said the firm will showcase its new A.I system geared towards smart justice delivery at the forthcoming biennial judges' conference in Abuja. According to him, the solutions are made by Nigerians to help solve some of the challenges facing the country's justice sector. Olugasa told reporters at a briefing in Lagos that the new solution, A.I Document Review, can identify a judge's previous judgments on similar issues. He said it makes adjudication easier and faster, without judges having to always reinvent the wheel in deciding each matter.

Over the past few years, and after decades as little more than a mathematical curiosity, useful industrial applications of AI have become commonplace. AI is now recognised as one of the primary drivers of computing development. In 2018, Canadians Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun – the'godfathers of AI' – received the Turing Award, computing's highest honour, for their foundational work on deep learning. The International Data Corporation forecasts that worldwide revenues for the AI market will grow to nearly $330 billion in 2021, and will exceed $550 billion by 2024 (IDC Semiannual AI Tracker, January 2021). Driven and enabled by the extraordinary growth of data globally, this surge in the AI industry has also spurred a flood of AI-related patenting.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHERS are facing a problem of accountability: How do you try to ensure decisions are responsible when the decision maker is not a responsible person, but rather an algorithm? Right now, only a handful of people and organizations have the power--and resources--to automate decision-making. Organizations rely on AI to approve a loan or shape a defendant's sentence. But the foundations upon which these intelligent systems are built are susceptible to bias. Bias from the data, from the programmer, and from a powerful company's bottom line can snowball into unintended consequences.

Receiving a film recommendation on your favourite video-on-demand platform, unblocking your phone with your face, using autocorrect, and chatting with a chatbot: all of these are everyday examples of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Despite sounding futuristic, AI is already being used by European citizens daily. Its opportunities can be endless, but there are also risks on the table. "The potential of using AI in beneficial ways is enormous: less pollution, improved medical care, enhanced opportunities, better education and more ways to enable citizens to engage in their society," said Margrethe Vestager, Europe's competition commissioner who is also in charge of digital. It can also be used "to fight terrorism and crime and enhance cybersecurity," Vestager underlined in a debate at the European's Parliament Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence.