Video game developer Valve removes the controversial'Rape Day' from its platform Steam in response to backlash. A sick video game where players commit sexual assaults against female characters has been pulled from Steam after a worldwide backlash. A preview of "Rape Day," which is developed by Desk Plant, had been listed on Steam, a popular distribution platform for video games, according to media reports. "Rape Day's" gameplay advertised "violence, sexual assault, non-consensual sex, obscene language, necrophilia, and incest," the Independent reports. The rapeday.com website describes "Rape Day" as "a visual novel" and "a dark comedy with pornographic elements" where players control "a terrifying psychopath during a zombie apocalypse."

Might this be the updated list of basic unalienable rights as we march into the AI-powered world of tomorrow? Theoretical neuroscientist, technologist, entrepreneur and AI specialist Vivienne Ming said last December we need to be thinking of AI as a human right. More recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a similar statement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, saying that AI is becoming a new human right and that everyone will need access to it. "Those who have the artificial intelligence will be smarter, will be healthier, will be richer, and of course, you've seen their warfare will be significantly more advanced," he said. This begs the question of what exactly constitutes a human right.

And the problem with living through a revolution is that it's impossible to take the long view of what's happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we're all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg's home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all this and more. Because we're about the same distance into our revolution, the one kicked off by digital technology and networking. And although it's now gradually dawning on us that this really is a big deal and that epochal social and economic changes are under way, we're as clueless about where it's heading and what's driving it as the citizens of Mainz were in 1495. That's not for want of trying, mind. Library shelves groan under the weight of books about what digital technology is doing to us and our world.

Artificial intelligence is taking automation to a new level at an increasing number of companies. Here are five things to know about this technology, often called AI. Related: Ready to work with a smart robot? It can process massive amounts of data, come to conclusions about it and make decisions. Related: Here's how local companies use artificial intelligence right now They include the University of Dayton, Evanhoe & Associates, Mile Two, Galois Inc., Tangram Flex Inc., LexisNexis Legal and Professional, Yaskawa America Inc.'s Motoman Robotics Division, Huntington Bancshares, Kroger Co., Premier Health and Kettering Health Network.

For further information on the Summer School on AI & Law, you can write to: aiandlaw@eui.eu.

The accounting industry can benefit from this technology, as well. When I was the keynote speaker at KPMG's annual partner meeting, I suggested that the company consider partnering with IBM to have Watson learn all of the global accounting regulations so that they could transform their practice and gain a huge advantage. After doing their own research on the subject, the KPMG team proceeded to form an alliance with IBM's Watson unit to develop high-tech tools for auditing, as well as for KPMG's other lines of business. Thanks to the cloud and the virtualization of services, no one has to own the tools in order to have access to them, allowing even smaller firms to gain an advantage in this space. Success all comes back to us humans and how creatively we use the new tools.

Last week, several members of Congress began pushing the resolution with the aim of "supporting the development of guidelines for ethical development of artificial intelligence." It was introduced by Reps. Brenda Lawrence and Ro Khanna -- the latter of whom, crucially, represents Silicon Valley, which is to the ethical development of software what West Virginia is to the rollout of clean energy. This has helped make Khanna a national figure, in part because, far from being a tech industry cheerleader, he's publicly supported cracking down on the data Wild West his home district helped create. For example, he has criticized the wrist-slaps Google and Facebook receive in the wakes of their regular privacy scandals and called for congressional action against Amazon's labor practices.

In 2011, a friend of mine in college asked me if I'd read The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt's aim was to probe and distill--and "savor"--the moral precepts of antiquity in the light of modern science. The 2006 book was an answer to an overabundance of too-little-appreciated advice. "We might have already encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives," Haidt wrote." My friend was happy to encounter it: Haidt helped him through a difficult breakup. I hadn't heard of the book, but I had heard of its author. A paper of Haidt's, "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment," had been assigned in my moral psychology course, and I was in the middle of writing an essay that argued against its conclusion. Haidt wrote that reason, compared to emotion, typically matters little to what we believe is ...

Citing technology giants such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, Assange warned that Silicon Valley's biggest and most powerful companies will deploy A.I. to gather big data, leading to a reconstitution of the global economic order. "Look at what Google and Baidu and Tencent and Amazon and Facebook are doing," Assange began."They Which is to take the surveillance capitalism model and transform it instead into a model that does not yet have a name, an "AI model,'" he added. The WikiLeaks founder mused how artificial intelligence could have transformative effects on the global labor force, including the replacement of entire "intermediary sectors," which the Austrian-born hacker says makes up a substantial chunk of the Internet. "Which is to use this vast reservoir to train Artificial Intelligences of different kinds," Assange told the forum.

Illegal wildlife poaching threatens ecosystems and drives endangered species toward extinction. However, efforts for wildlife monitoring and protection in conservation areas are constrained by the limited resources of law enforcement agencies. To aid in wildlife protection, PAWS is an ML pipeline that has been developed as an end-to-end, data-driven approach to combat illegal poaching. PAWS assists park managers by identifying areas at high risk of poaching throughout protected areas based on real-world data and generating optimal patrol routes for deployment in the field. In this paper, we address significant challenges including extreme class imbalance (up to 1:200), bias, and uncertainty in wildlife poaching data to enhance PAWS and apply its methodology to several national parks with diverse characteristics. (i) We use Gaussian processes to quantify predictive uncertainty, which we exploit to increase the robustness of our prescribed patrols. We evaluate our approach on real-world historic poaching data from Murchison Falls and Queen Elizabeth National Parks in Uganda and, for the first time, Srepok Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia. (ii) We present the results of large-scale field tests conducted in Murchison Falls and Srepok Wildlife Sanctuary which confirm that the predictive power of PAWS extends promisingly to multiple parks. This paper is part of an effort to expand PAWS to 600 parks around the world through integration with SMART conservation software.