Lawyers, be forewarned: In what could be a foreshadowing of things to come, a judge has penalized two lawyers for failing to use artificial intelligence. The case comes to us by way of Ontario. It arose after a woman named Kristen Cass slipped and fell in a tavern in Port Dalhousie, a waterfront community on Lake Ontario, 30 minutes by car from Niagara Falls. The tavern owner defaulted, so her lawsuit proceeded solely against the building's owner, the Port Dalhousie Vitalization Corporation (PDVC). PDVC won summary judgment dismissing the action against it.

In a recent report published by Protiviti and North Carolina State University, analysts found just how important technology and innovation are becoming for corporate executives. Their December 2018 survey found "digital readiness" to be the c-suite's top priority for 2019, with executives also reflecting their concern that the biggest risks their companies face are intensifying. "The perceived increase in the magnitude and severity of risks in today's ever-changing landscape should prompt boards and senior executives to closely scrutinize the approaches to proactively address emerging risks," said North Carolina State University Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Initiative Director and ERM Professor Dr. Mark Beasley, quoted in Protiviti's release. "Boards of directors and executive management teams cannot afford to manage risks casually on a reactive basis, especially considering the rapid pace of disruptive innovation and technological developments in an ever-advancing digital world." Separate research last month also examined how corporate finance expects are bracing for this digital disruption.

Accountancy, law, insurance… these professions usually conjure images of spreadsheets, glass and steel offices, jargon-filled sentences, square eyes and grey suits. Perhaps this is part of the reason why we willingly pay high fees for such services: passing the burden to highly intelligent individuals who will perform those laborious tasks for us. But all this might be about to change. Machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions are already better at performing many tasks than the professionals: beating human lawyers in reviewing contracts and predicting the outcomes of legal cases[1]. But it is not about replacing lawyers, accountants and insurance managers with machines.

Turing researchers recently made a written submission in which they answered key questions like these from the House of Lords inquiry into artificial intelligence on the implications and future of AI in the UK. Here we look at some of the highlights. Algorithms, according to Turing Visiting Researcher Simon DeDeo, "have the potential to transform the material, social, and political landscape… and alter the basic rhythms of human life in a fashion last seen at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution." A key example of this transformation effect is health, as raised by Turing Fellow Maria Liakata who discussed the way it can combine different data sources and transform the way diseases are diagnosed, monitored and treated. What is the future of AI? Turing Fellow David Barber was called in front of the Committee to give oral evidence, and said that: "where we are right now is what we call perceptual AI. If somebody speaks, the machine can transcribe into words what you are saying, but the machine does not understand what you are saying. It does not understand who you are or the relationship of objects in this environment. The bigger fruit out there is the reasoning AI; really understanding what these objects are, being able to query this machine and get sensible answers back. That is the biggest and most exciting challenge that all the tech giants are currently desperately seeking to solve. For whoever solves that, the world is their oyster."

With algorithms playing an increasingly more important role in business transactions, from online retail to innovative brick-and-mortar; from structuring dispersed - and often not standardized - electronic health records, to diagnosing patients and connecting them with the right specialist; from autonomous vehicles deciding between saving the life of a passenger on-board or a pedestrian on a road side, many are warming up to the idea of an AI regulatory framework, which will never happen soon enough. But as the framework is far from being ready, companies should embrace an AI based not only on possibilities - what we can do - but also on ethical implication - what we should do not pursue. The importance is underscored by two examples, that made it to mainstream media: Amazon scrapping its HR-related AI project because it showed recruiting bias, and Equivant / Northpointe which had to kill their machine-learning for parole recommendation, because of wrong - biased - recommendations on prisoners. The risks should not underestimated. In an article on the MIT Sloan Review of August 2018, Davenport and Foutty identify seven attributes of AI-driven Leaders, or as I prefer to call them, of leaders in the era of AI.

Technology entrepreneur and billionaire investor Elon Musk sounded the alarm again, telling Axios in late November that humans must merge with machines or risk becoming an endangered species. What follows is just a sample of what some of your peers are thinking. "As account-based marketing becomes more mainstream and more tools become available, larger marketing automation software vendors will roll ABM features into their platforms. Adoption of ABM will increase overall as more companies will turn to the tailored, personalized approach to their messaging due to the General Data Protection Regulation and other privacy regulations, which dampen the effectiveness of spray-and-pray demand-generation activities." "The questions customer service representatives will receive in 2019 will be much more technical and difficult, since bots and self-service technologies can answer the simple questions. As a result, the role of the customer service representative will require a higher skill set. There will be a need for a universal customer service representative who has the whole package, with a willingness for development and lifelong learning."

This Employment Law This Week Monthly Rundown features a recap of the biggest employment law trends from 2018 and a look ahead at what's to come in 2019. Specifically, this episode includes the following: 1. #MeToo Movement in the Workplace For employers, 2018 was the year of #MeToo. While the movement began in the fall of 2017, last year, it touched every aspect of employment law--from harassment training to arbitration. Jennifer Gefsky (Member of the Firm, Epstein Becker Green): "I think if the #MeToo movement taught us one thing, it's that employers face significant liability and risk in the event that allegations are made against any employee or supervisor or the highest-level executive at the company." In 2019, we can expect to see more legislative action, particularly in the area of equal pay, where much of the #MeToo focus has shifted.

When Lockport City School District in New York announced it was planning on using the technology, the New York Civil Liberties Union came out against the move, calling the cameras "invasive and error-prone," and raising concerns about children's privacy. The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas similarly condemned a move by an Arkansas school district to install cameras equipped with facial recognition, nothing they could be vulnerable to hacking.

Way back in 1967, a couple of psychologists named Holmes and Rahe discovered a positive correlation between illness and stressful life events. Thus was born the "Holmes and Rahe Stress Inventory," a list of 43 stressful life events that can literally make you sick. Turns out that half of life's most stressful events surround the age-old institution of marriage. Now before we move on, we're not arguing against marriage in any way. It's a structure that has served society well and is the optimal way to raise children based on the literature that supports this conclusion, like Mary Parke's piece on What Research Says About the Effects of Family Structure on Child Well-Being.

Advances in artificial intelligence have created new threats to the privacy of people's health data, a new University of California, Berkeley, study shows. Led by UC Berkeley engineer Anil Aswani, the study suggests current laws and regulations are nowhere near sufficient to keep an individual's health status private in the face of AI development. The research was published Dec. 21 in the JAMA Network Open journal. The findings show that by using artificial intelligence, it is possible to identify individuals by learning daily patterns in step data, such as that collected by activity trackers, smartwatches and smartphones, and correlating it to demographic data. The mining of two years' worth of data covering more than 15,000 Americans led to the conclusion that the privacy standards associated with 1996's HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) legislation need to be revisited and reworked.