It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the change and the infinite number of strategic options. But embracing this change is manageable with the right tools and the right partner. Deloitte is helping clients navigate this increasingly complex, digital world by leveraging the combined strength of our technology capabilities from our Consulting and Tax & Legal practices, and by placing a continued emphasis on technology investment and skills development to prepare talent to meet the evolving needs of the business. Businesses in all sectors and regions are experiencing the opportunities and challenges that come with the immense changes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Even the most traditional business areas, such as tax and legal, are not immune.

The agency is anticipating the need to adjust some policies as more inventions are created (or at least assisted) by artificial intelligence. Here are two savvy practitioners' takes on four potential flash points.

Popular culture has contemplated societies of thinking machines for generations, envisioning futures from utopian to dystopian. These futures are, arguably, here now-we find ourselves at the doorstep of technology that can at least simulate the appearance of thinking, acting, and feeling. The real question is: now what?

Algorithmic risk assessments are increasingly used to help humans make decisions in high-stakes settings, such as medicine, criminal justice and education. In each of these cases, the purpose of the risk assessment tool is to inform actions, such as medical treatments or release conditions, often with the aim of reducing the likelihood of an adverse event such as hospital readmission or recidivism. Problematically, most tools are trained and evaluated on historical data in which the outcomes observed depend on the historical decision-making policy. These tools thus reflect risk under the historical policy, rather than under the different decision options that the tool is intended to inform. Even when tools are constructed to predict risk under a specific decision, they are often improperly evaluated as predictors of the target outcome. Focusing on the evaluation task, in this paper we define counterfactual analogues of common predictive performance and algorithmic fairness metrics that we argue are better suited for the decision-making context. We introduce a new method for estimating the proposed metrics using doubly robust estimation. We provide theoretical results that show that only under strong conditions can fairness according to the standard metric and the counterfactual metric simultaneously hold. Consequently, fairness-promoting methods that target parity in a standard fairness metric may --- and as we show empirically, do --- induce greater imbalance in the counterfactual analogue. We provide empirical comparisons on both synthetic data and a real world child welfare dataset to demonstrate how the proposed method improves upon standard practice.

As a former Silicon Valley intellectual property attorney for more than 20 years, the potential of disruptive technology has long been of special interest to me. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to be one of the most important innovations that powers many disruptive ventures and brings exciting changes to our legal system. AI is already influencing the way we work, travel, shop, and play. From autonomous vehicles to improved medical diagnostics to voice assistants, AI is increasingly at the forefront of innovation. As a continuation of the United States Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) policy leadership in the field of AI, the USPTO convened a conference on Artificial Intelligence: Intellectual Property Policy Considerations on January 31 this year.

The chief executive is headed to an artificial intelligence conference in Shanghai that kicks off on Thursday where he's set to face-off with Alibaba founder Jack Ma in what Bloomberg reports to be a "free-wheeling debate." "Conference-goers can look forward to featured speakers shedding light on the status quo of the industry and the potential impacts of artificial intelligence," a press release distributed by conference organizers says. Both leaders have been outspoken in their views on AI. Musk, who counts an AI company among his diverse portfolio of bets, has stressed the dangers of the nascent technology. "I'm really quite close, very close to the cutting edge in AI. It scares the hell out of me," Musk said at SXSW in 2018.

Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers or the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. Despite its nascent nature, the ubiquity of AI applications is already transforming everyday life for the better. Whether discussing smart assistants like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, applications for better customer service or the ability to utilize big data insights to streamline and enhance operations, AI is quickly becoming an essential tool of modern life and business. In fact, according to statistics from Adobe, only 15 percent of enterprises are using AI as of today, but 31 percent are expected to add it over the coming 12 months, and the share of jobs requiring AI has increased by 450 percent since 2013. Leveraging clues from their environment, artificially intelligent systems are programmed by humans to solve problems, assess risks, make predictions and take actions based on input data.

The Artificial Intelligence industry is currently booming. The major competitors are the United States, China and the European Union, each of which is attempting to attain a large share of the international market for AI technology. The EU wants to distinguish itself by investing in AI that it trustworthy and ethical: AI that meets societal needs and expectations, obeys legal requirements, and supports human values. In this presentation, we will discuss and critique the European approach. In doing so, we will present results of the SIENNA project, an EU-funded project that studies ethical and human rights aspects of AI.

Fox News Flash top headlines for August 29 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com A Pennsylvania court ruled Tuesday that making a "gunlike hand gesture" is a crime after a man made the hand motion during an argument with his neighbor -- an act which reportedly made several nearby residents nervous and prompted a call to police. Stephen Kirchner, 64, made the gesture toward his neighbor in Manor Township in June 2018, according to surveillance video. Kirchner, walking alongside a female neighbor, "stopped, made eye contact with [the male neighbor] and then made a hand gesture at him imitating the firing and recoiling of a gun," according to court documents.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is asking for the help of experts and the broader public to determine the impact AI will have on intellectual property and "whether new forms of intellectual property protection are needed." A call for public comment was published in the Federal Registrar by the USPTO today in search of answers about such issues as how AI is reshaping perceptions of inventions or whether additional information should be required to claim a deep learning system as an invention since they can have a large number of hidden layers and weights that evolve. To help solicit responses, the notice in the federal registrar comes along with a series of questions such as "what is an AI invention and what does it contain?" "What are the different ways that a natural person can contribute to conception of an AI invention and be eligible to be a named inventor? Structuring data in order to train a model?