"I hear a lot that algorithms are powerful technologies, and the companies are monopolies, and we are helpless against them, and Google is the only option," says Kartik Hosanagar, a professor of technology and digital business at the University of Pennsylvania. "I'm trying to say that we aren't." Hosanagar is the author of A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control, which comes out March 12th from Penguin Random House. The book takes the reader through all of the ways that daily lives are touched by algorithms. The Verge spoke to Hosanagar about the last part of the book: four suggestions, or "pillars," to implement to prevent harmful, unanticipated consequences.

Legal technology can be a highly beneficial for law practices. In fact, most now rely upon it in some fashion. Practice management software, appointment scheduling software, time and billing software, client portals, and digital contract management are all common forms of legal tech. Yet, there are some forms of technology, such as a law firm chatbot, that still cause quite a bit of fear in the legal industry. However, much like more commonly adopted options, a law firm chatbot could mean more money for your law practice because it can improve efficiency.

Well, if technology keeps trending as it does, it'll be a sector teeming with as many innovative and efficient solutions as other industries. According to a Deloitte Insight report, the next two decades could see more than 100,000 law jobs become automated. The sooner lawyers can learn to incorporate AI into their day-to-day, the easier time they'll have remaining relevant. Fortunately, making that transition won't be as complicated as it might sound. Some envision AI as make-believe smarter-than-human robots.

We provide a formal definition of blameworthiness in settings where multiple agents can collaborate to avoid a negative outcome. We first provide a method for ascribing blameworthiness to groups relative to an epistemic state (a distribution over causal models that describe how the outcome might arise). We then show how we can go from an ascription of blameworthiness for groups to an ascription of blameworthiness for individuals using a standard notion from cooperative game theory, the Shapley value. We believe that getting a good notion of blameworthiness in a group setting will be critical for designing autonomous agents that behave in a moral manner.

Most recently, Chinese telecom equipment and consumer electronics giant Huawei filed suit against the U.S. government on Thursday, alleging that a law passed last August banning the company's hardware is unconstitutional because it unfairly targets Huawei. The arms race between the two superpowers over the tech talent, physical infrastructure and industrial muscle--not to mention the IP that comes with the technologies--that will unlock these advancements has been increasingly evident in diplomatic machinations, public investments of varying size and outward rhetoric from state leaders, as each country's government has moved the technologies to the top of their respective economic agendas. These struggles are about more than economic opportunity alone. The shift to 5G networks, which promise to eventually reach speeds up to 100 times faster than what's currently available, could expand the role of wireless communications systems into everything from power grids to traffic, while AI is already facilitating the mass collection and processing of data that will power critical tools like autonomous driving and facial recognition. In that future state, control over telecom equipment and AI-powered data centers could be like holding the keys to a society.

New technologies often bring calls for new regulation. A current example is artificial intelligence (AI)--the creation of machines that think and act in ways that resemble human intelligence. There are plenty of AI optimists and AI pessimists. Both camps see the need for government intervention. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who believes AI will "allow us to produce a lot more goods and services with less labor," foresees labor force dislocations and has suggested a robot tax.

Lawyers have long been characterized as technology Luddites who are slow to change and wary of innovation. For corporate counsel, though, this stereotype may be fading. According to the results of a new Thomson Reuters report, "Ready or Not: Artificial Intelligence and Corporate Legal Departments", corporate counsel believe they are tech savvy but acknowledge that their comfort level and confidence with technology have limitations, specifically around artificial intelligence (AI). The applications and impact of AI are growing, and AI tools will undoubtedly affect how the legal profession practices over the next decade. Consider how dramatically technology inventions have already changed the practice of law: From typewriters to computers and from fax machines to email, each advance has been transformative in the law.

Is the age of intelligent machines bringing gender equality nearer or turning back the clock? Gemma Lloyd, co-founder of Work180, an Australia-based international jobs network for women, is proud of her engineering team in which women outnumber men. She just wishes there were more female engineers generally. "If there aren't enough women in the mix, the products won't be as good as they could be, and they certainly won't be what society wants -- because women are 50 per cent of society," she says. The lack of female technologists -- only 22 per cent of artificial intelligence professionals globally are female, for instance -- is a frustration for many gend er equality advocates.

It's International Women's Day, a day to celebrate the achievements of women around the world and throughout history. But the day is also about recognizing the hardships women face, and the continued urgency of the fight for gender equality. That is true of WIRED's world, too--the world of technology and science, of media and innovation. Though this magazine was co-founded by a woman, and women have been key figures in every part of scientific and technological progress, men's narratives still dominate. Men still hold more STEM jobs.

Every sibling relationship has its clichés. In the Microsoft family of social-learning chatbots, the contrasts between Tay, the infamous, sex-crazed neo-Nazi, and her younger sister Zo, your teenage BFF with #friendgoals, are downright Shakespearean. When Microsoft released Tay on Twitter in 2016, an organized trolling effort took advantage of her social-learning abilities and immediately flooded the bot with alt-right slurs and slogans. Tay copied their messages and spewed them back out, forcing Microsoft to take her offline after only 16 hours and apologize. A few months after Tay's disastrous debut, Microsoft quietly released Zo, a second English-language chatbot available on Messenger, Kik, Skype, Twitter, and Groupme.