Imagine what a lawyer does on a given day: researching cases, drafting briefs, advising clients. While technology has been nibbling around the edges of the legal profession for some time, it's hard to imagine those complex tasks being done by a robot. And it is those complicated, personalized tasks that have led technologists to include lawyers in a broader category of jobs that are considered pretty safe from a future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. But, as we discovered in a recent research collaboration to analyze legal briefs using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, lawyers' jobs are a lot less safe than we thought. It turns out that you don't need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it.

The European Union is now considering what could become the world's first comprehensive legislation on artificial intelligence (AI). The aim is to promote European leadership in emerging technology. The proposed regulation seeks to limit government involvement in surveillance, but it actually threatens innovation in several ways. American policymakers should pay attention to avoid making a similar mistake. The EU's proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) would classify AI activities into different categories according to their perceived level of risk.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become embedded in everyday life around the world, touching how we work, play, purchase and communicate. The power of AI lies in its potential to improve lives, but this potential can only be realized if AI represents the entire population. Increasing diversity in AI development is crucial to delivering equitable outcomes. Bias in AI is a real concern and it's generating more attention. Gartner predicts that in 2022, 85% of AI projects will deliver erroneous outcomes owing to bias in data, algorithms or the teams responsible for managing them.

With the increasing trend in the topic of migration in Europe, the public is now more engaged in expressing their opinions through various platforms such as Twitter. Understanding the online discourses is therefore essential to capture the public opinion. The goal of this study is the analysis of social media platform to quantify public attitudes towards migrations and the identification of different factors causing these attitudes. The tweets spanning from 2013 to Jul-2021 in the European countries which are hosts to immigrants are collected, pre-processed, and filtered using advanced topic modeling technique. BERT-based entity linking and sentiment analysis, and attention-based hate speech detection are performed to annotate the curated tweets. Moreover, the external databases are used to identify the potential social and economic factors causing negative attitudes of the people about migration. To further promote research in the interdisciplinary fields of social science and computer science, the outcomes are integrated into a Knowledge Base (KB), i.e., MigrationsKB which significantly extends the existing models to take into account the public attitudes towards migrations and the economic indicators. This KB is made public using FAIR principles, which can be queried through SPARQL endpoint. Data dumps are made available on Zenodo.

The law has been relatively slow to regulate artificial intelligence, but the rules are evolving. An important question is whether an AI company can be held liable for malfunctioning AI. Ryan E. Long writes that a company's liability for its AI depends on whether a defect was present upon the AI release and whether, in the EU at least, the application is "high-risk." Artificial intelligence (AI) use has blossomed. The AI market was valued at $27.3 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow to $266.92 billion by 2026.

The term "Artificial Intelligence" is a broad umbrella, referring to a variety of techniques applied to a range of tasks. This breadth can breed confusion. Success in using AI to identify tumors on lung x-rays, for instance, may offer no indication of whether AI can be used to accurately predict who will commit another crime or which employees will succeed, or whether these latter tasks are even appropriate candidates for the use of AI. Misleading marketing hype often clouds distinctions between different types of tasks and suggests that breakthroughs on narrow research problems are more broadly applicable than is the case. Furthermore, the nature of the risks posed by different categories of AI tasks varies, and it is crucial that we understand the distinctions.

Now, Apple's software that looks at phones for evidence of child pornography has created a new need for security research, according to Apple. Other large tech companies, such as Facebook and Microsoft, scan their servers for child porn using a software product called PhotoDNA, developed by Microsoft and Dartmouth professor Hani Farid. The software relies on a database of known child pornography maintained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. If a photo on a company server matches the database, it is flagged and authorities are notified. Companies have employed that system on their servers, and not on devices owned by their customers.

By exploring the various facets of gendering at play in the design of VPAs, specifically Alexa, I argue that gendering Alexa as female poses societal harm insofar as she reproduces normative assumptions about the role of women as submissive, inferior, and secondary to men. The prevalence of AI-driven virtual personal assistants (VPAs) is proliferating, with Amazon Echo being one of the most highly sought-after smart speakers globally. However, not until recently has there been much research or attention focused on the gender bias noticeably programmed into this technology, specifically Alexa, intentionally designed, coded, and programmed by men and gendered to be distinctly female. Big Tech's decision to gender VPAs is seen most evident through their assigned female names and their female voices that users find more pleasant to give orders to than a male voice, as seen through witty flirtatious programmed responses. Through these interactions, Alexa performs gender as a feminized and sexualized entity imposed upon her by her Silicon Valley creators, that has the potential to unravel decades of social and political progress, as well as reinstate the gender bias of the past that women strived to eradicate. In the not-so-distant future, TechCrunch forecasts that the use of voice assistants is set to triple over the next few years and estimates there will be ten billion digital voice assistants by 2023, up from the 2.5 billion assistants in use at the end of 2018. This growth is attributed to Amazon Echo being one of the most highly sought-after smart speakers in the world.

In the context of legal services, the many consumers who can't afford a lawyer are already forgoing their day in court altogether or handling legal claims on their own--often with bad results. If partial automation means an overwhelmed legal-aid lawyer now has time to take more clients' cases, or clients can now afford to hire a lawyer, everyone will be better off. In addition, tech-enabled legal services can help consumers do a better job of representing themselves. For example, the federal district court in Missouri now offers a platform to help individuals filing for bankruptcy prepare their forms--either on their own or with a free 30-minute meeting with a lawyer. Because the platform provides a head start, both the lawyer and consumer can make better use of the 30-minute time slot.

Prisoners across the US could soon be subjected to a high-risk application of automated surveillance. A congressional committee is pressing the Department of Justice to explore the federal use of AI to analyze inmate's phone calls. The panel has called for further research into the tech's potential to prevent suicide and violent crime, Reuters reports. Attend the tech festival of the year and get your super early bird ticket now! The system transcribes phone conversations, analyzes the tone of voice, and detects certain words or phrases that are pre-programmed by officials.