Amba Kak was in law school in India when the country rolled out the Aadhaar project in 2009. The national biometric ID system, conceived as a comprehensive identity program, sought to collect the fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs of all residents. It wasn't long, Kak remembers, before stories about its devastating consequences began to spread. "We were suddenly hearing reports of how manual laborers who work with their hands--how their fingerprints were failing the system, and they were then being denied access to basic necessities," she says. "We actually had starvation deaths in India that were being linked to the barriers that these biometric ID systems were creating. So it was a really crucial issue."

Art is subjective and everyone has their own opinion about it. When I saw the expressionist painting Blue Poles, by Jackson Pollock, I was reminded of the famous quote by Rudyard Kipling, "It's clever, but is it Art?" Pollock's piece looks like paint messily spilled onto a drop sheet protecting the floor. The debate of what constitutes art has a long history that will probably never be settled, there is no definitive definition of art. Similarly, there is no broadly accepted objective definition for the quality of a piece of art, with the closest definition being from Orson Welles, "I don't know anything about art but I know what I like." Similarly, people recognize unfair bias when they see it, but it is quite difficult to create a single objective definition.

Michael Kauffman is Principal and Chief Legal Officer at Tech DNA, a global leader in technology due diligence. Our company's experience is that when investors realize they lack the technical skills to evaluate ML/AI technology, they tend to throw in the towel and take a target's inflated claims at face value. The good news is that it only requires general business knowledge to assess one of ML/AI's main value drivers: profit proximity. Turns out, the main value of ML/AI comes from which type of business problems ML/AI is applied to. I'll cover a few categories here and explain how each differs in its proximity to profit, which is what really drives value.

The debate over automation has been overshadowed by more immediate economic problems created by the coronavirus crisis. But when things return to some semblance of normality, it's sure to crop up again and may well play a role in how a recovery takes shape. The basic question is whether automation is good or bad for average workers. The latest salvo against the robots comes from economists Daron Acemoglu, Andrea Manera, and Pascual Restrepo. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper entitled "Does the US Tax Code Favor Automation?," they argue that taxes are higher on labor than on capital equipment, causing companies to invest too much in machines and not enough in manpower.

The AI wave in law is not coming, it's already here … and it's already transforming law firms. Change happens faster than we predict. It is also happening more frequently. Consider, China is launching an online AI arbitrator this year. The United Nations wants to improve access to justice through AI judges and has been actively working on this for four years.

During July and August, UNESCO convened a global public online consultation, along with eleven regional and sub-regional virtual consultations, to discuss the first draft text of the Recommendation. It sought feedback that addressed various local concerns to achieve a truly inclusive and pluralist normative instrument. The consultations strengthened regional partnerships, particularly in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, and provided a platform to raise further social, economic, and cultural implications of AI globally: from a data breach to hate speech and harassment; from gender bias to AI accountability; from human rights to education and climate change. Addressing over 600 submissions and 50,000 suggestions – from policymakers, international organizations, civil society, media, private sector, academia, and the general public – twenty-four internationally renowned experts will re-examine ethical concerns in the emerging age of AI and draft appropriate revisions. All voices will be heard.

The A-level results drama last month has placed a lot of attention on how algorithms are used in decision-making. As the use of AI expands, Esther Langdon looks at how organisations can make sure they get the best out of AI while keeping its outcomes fair. Artificial intelligence and algorithms have been very much in the news recently, following the recent A-level results fiasco. Can an algorithm eradicate bias in decision making? Stories of young students whose hopes were dashed simply because the "computer says no" made headlines for several days.

This article is a transcript of a presentation I gave to the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley about Clearview AI, a facial recognition company which the New York Times said "might end privacy as we know it." My presentation was based on an article earlier this year in Medium's OneZero. Thanks to the whole Rotary eClub team for the opportunity to present. This is the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley. Every week, we are trying to bring you cool and interesting material that will make you go, "Hmm. That's interesting," and hopefully will inspire you to act in some way, whether that's act in service, or perhaps even act in self defense. Because we are going to learn some really interesting stuff over the coming minutes, and that is a function of having as our speaker today, Thomas Smith. He goes by Tom when we were just speaking, so I'll refer to him as Tom. And Tom wrote an article recently that I found in OneZero, I think, via Medium. And I finished reading that article and thought, "Holy poop." So, so as a result of that, I actually reached out to him to say, "Could you speak to our Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley? And he was gracious enough to write back.

An artificial intelligence (AI) technology made by a firm co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk has won praise for its ability to generate coherent stories, novels and even computer code but it remains blind to racism or sexism. GPT-3, as Californian company OpenAI's latest AI language model is known, is capable of completing a dialogue between two people, continuing a series of questions and answers or finishing a Shakespeare-style poem. Start a sentence or text and it completes it for you, basing its response on the gigantic amount of information it has been fed. This could come in useful for customer service, lawyers needing to sum up a legal precedent or for authors in need of inspiration. While the technology is not new and has not yet learnt to reason like a human mind, OpenAI's latest offering has won praise for the way its text resembles human writing.

Equifax's chief executive resigned from the company following its 2017 data breach, as did Target's chief executive in 2014. At Sony, the co-chair of the business stepped down from that role after embarrassing emails were publicly leaked by hackers, but she stayed on at the company. To be sure, the burden of responsibility for successful hacks still falls largely on chief information and security officers, rather than chief executives. But experts say the issue of cybersecurity is now front-and-center for the seniormost corporate ranks. "Almost every CEO we talk to, the words that come out of their mouth are, 'I lose sleep and our board loses sleep every night due to the fact that we could be compromised'," said Michael Piacente, co-founder and managing partner at Hitch Partners, a recruiting firm focused on cybersecurity professionals.