Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here. The writer is professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh professor in engineering, University of California, Berkeley The subject of autonomous killer robots exercises many technologists, politicians and human rights activists. Indeed, the Financial Times's advice page for would-be opinion writers complains that, in their pitches, "lots of people spin doomsday scenarios about robots".

What does it mean to be an inventor? In patent law, designed to protect the intellectual property of inventors, officials are used to thinking of inventors as humans, taking an "inventive step" – a new way of doing something -- not obvious to a person skilled in the same art. But last week -- in a judicial world first -- Australia's Federal Court ruled an artificial intelligence (AI) system can be named as an inventor. That judgement overturned a decision by the nation's Commissioner of Patents that meant US scientist Stephen Thaler could not patent inventions by his AI system, DABUS (Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). Thaler says DABUS independently designed a fractal-shaped container for improved grip and heat transfer, and an emergency beacon that flashes more noticeably.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Human resources (HR) is an area that is ripe for automation, and in particular, the kind of automation made possible by artificial intelligence (AI). HR, after all, is a cost center at most organizations, which means organizations are always looking for ways to keep costs as low as possible. And yet, HR is rife with complex, time-consuming processes that, so far, have required the unique logic and intuitive thinking that only humans can provide. But all that is changing with the newest generations of AI-driven HR platforms.

As machine learning models grow more complex and their applications become more high-stakes, tools for explaining model predictions have become increasingly important. This has spurred a flurry of research in model explainability and has given rise to feature attribution methods such as LIME and SHAP. Despite their widespread use, evaluating and comparing different feature attribution methods remains challenging: evaluations ideally require human studies, and empirical evaluation metrics are often data-intensive or computationally prohibitive on real-world datasets. In this work, we address this issue by releasing XAI-Bench: a suite of synthetic datasets along with a library for benchmarking feature attribution algorithms. Unlike real-world datasets, synthetic datasets allow the efficient computation of conditional expected values that are needed to evaluate ground-truth Shapley values and other metrics. The synthetic datasets we release offer a wide variety of parameters that can be configured to simulate real-world data. We demonstrate the power of our library by benchmarking popular explainability techniques across several evaluation metrics and across a variety of settings. The versatility and efficiency of our library will help researchers bring their explainability methods from development to deployment. Our code is available at https://github.com/abacusai/xai-bench.

For years, tech companies have struggled between two impulses: the need to encrypt users' data to protect their privacy and the need to detect the worst sorts of abuse on their platforms. Now Apple is debuting a new cryptographic system that seeks to thread that needle, detecting child abuse imagery stored on iCloud without--in theory–introducing new forms of privacy invasion. In doing so, it's also driven a wedge between privacy and cryptography experts who see its work as an innovative new solution and those who see it as a dangerous capitulation to government surveillance. Today Apple introduced a new set of technological measures in iMessage, iCloud, Siri, and search, all of which the company says are designed to prevent the abuse of children. A new opt-in setting in family iCloud accounts will use machine learning to detect nudity in images sent in iMessage.

Following a report on work the company was doing to create a tool that scans iPhones for child abuse images, Apple has published a post that provides more details on its efforts related to child safety. With the release of iOS 15, watchOS 8 and macOS Monterey later this year, the company says it will introduce a variety of child safety features across Messages, Photos and Siri. To start, the Messages app will include new notifications that will warn children, as well as their parents, when they either send or receive sexually explicit photos. When someone sends a child an inappropriate image, the app will blur it and display several warnings. "It's not your fault, but sensitive photos and videos can be used to hurt you," says one of the notifications, per a screenshot Apple shared.

When California's fair employment agency sued Activision Blizzard, one of the largest video game studios in the world, on July 20th, it wasn't surprising to hear the allegations of systemic gender discrimination and sexual harassment at the company. It wasn't a shock to read about male executives groping their female colleagues, or loudly joking about rape in the office, or completely ignoring women for promotions. What was surprising was that California wanted to investigate Activision Blizzard at all, considering these issues have seemingly been present since its founding in 1979. Activision Blizzard is a multibillion-dollar publisher with 9,500 employees and a roster of legendary franchises, including Call of Duty, Overwatch, Diablo and World of Warcraft. On July 20th, California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, alleging executives had fostered an environment of misogyny and frat-boy rule for years, violating equal pay laws and labor codes along the way.

We know we are not anonymous online. Our every move in the digital sphere is tracked, collected, analyzed. It's all fascinating to our spies, who know our identity at every step. They can pinpoint us by the way we write our emails, use the mouse on our computer screens--even how we hold and swipe our cellphones. Soon we may not be anonymous in public either.

MIT researchers have used AI to predict which technologies are rapidly improving -- and which ones are overhyped. In a new study, the team quantitatively assessed the future potential of 97% of the US patent system. The fastest-improving domains were predominantly software-related. They then converted their findings into an online system in which users can enter keywords to find improvement forecasts for specific technologies. Their research could give entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, and policy-makers clues about the future opportunities in tech.

United Nations delegates are currently meeting to debate possible regulations controlling autonomous killer robots -- but Russia is having none of it. The Russian delegate, representing a country that has already developed and deployed military robots in real-world conflicts, remained steadfast that the global community doesn't need any new rules or regulations to govern the use of killer robots, The Telegraph reports. That pits Russia against much of the rest of the international community, who are calling for rules to keep humans in charge of the decision to open fire, highlighting on the main anxieties and ethical conundrums surrounding autonomous weaponry. The argument from Russia is that the AI algorithms driving these killer robots are already advanced enough to differentiate friend from foe from civilian, and that therefore there's no need to burden the autonomous death machines with unnecessary regulations. "The high level of autonomy of these weapons allows [them] to operate within a dynamic conflict situation and in various environments while maintaining an appropriate level of selectivity and precision," the delegate said, according to The Telegraph.