There's no doubt Artificial Intelligence (AI)–machines that reproduce human thought and actions–is on the rise, both in the scientific community and in the news. And along with AI, there comes "emotional AI," from systems that can detect users' emotions and adjust their responses accordingly, to learning programs that provide emotional analysis, to devices, such as smart speakers and virtual assistants, that mimic human interactions. As the pace of AI development and implementation accelerates–with the potential to change the ways we live and work–the ethics and empathy that guide those designing technology of our future will have far-reaching consequences. It is this moral dimension that concerns me most: do the organizations and software developers creating these programs have an ethical rudder? Long before the concept of AI became commonplace, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov introduced the "Three Laws of Robotics" in his 1942 short story "Runaround" (which was later included in his 1950 collection, I, Robot): Much of Asimov's robot-based fiction hinges upon robots finding loopholes in their interpretations of the laws, which are programmed into them as a safety measure that cannot be bypassed.

Everyone likes to talk about the ways that liberalism might be killed off, whether by populism at home or adversaries abroad. Fewer talk about the growing indications in places like Denmark that liberal democracy might accidentally commit suicide. As a philosophy of government, liberalism is premised on the belief that the coercive powers of public authorities should be used in service of individual freedom and flourishing, and that they should therefore be constrained by laws controlling their scope, limits, and discretion. That is the basis for historic liberal achievements such as human rights and the rule of law, which are built into the infrastructure of the Scandinavian welfare state. Yet the idea of legal constraint is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the revolution promised by artificial intelligence and machine learning--specifically, those technologies' promises of vast social benefits in exchange for unconstrained access to data and lack of adequate regulation on what can be done with it. Algorithms hold the allure of providing wider-ranging benefits to welfare states, and of delivering these benefits more efficiently.

Before you open up the presents under the tree, I've got some geekier gifts. In response to execs and luminaries from across the world of data and analytics sharing their predictions for the next year, I've dutifully compiled and stitched them together. Gather round, and soak up this year's batch, which focus on artificial intelligence, data regulation, data governance, the state of the Hadoop market, open source and "the edge." Predictions about artificial intelligence (AI) are all over the map. They range from optimistic and starry-eyed to a bit more skeptical and jaded.

Over the past two years, the world has learned through a series of dramatic media revelations that harassment and discrimination reporting mechanisms are broken. And it's not just women who are hurting. People of colour, people who identify openly as LGBTQi, those who are disabled and many others are being disproportionately targeted and urgently need better ways to speak up. In 2019 we will use AI to monitor what employees are doing, not just to detect fraud, but for signs of bias and discrimination, overcoming some of the biggest barriers to identifying and reporting harassment and discrimination. Using natural language processing, AI will scan emails for inappropriate words and phrases and flag problem makers.

The rise of the internet over the last 20 years has enhanced our lives in many ways. Online technologies have made it easier to find and buy products, learn new skills, get directions, book a hotel room, discover new music – even watch an entire season of a TV show in a single weekend and get recommendations on other shows we might like. It's also made it easier to commit the most heinous of crimes. The anonymity of the internet and digital currency make it possible to share, sell and trade illicit material from drugs to weapons to victims of human trafficking. In 2004, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reviewed approximately 450,000 child sexual abuse files.

Elon Musk has cited the First Amendment in seeking to dismiss a lawsuit brought against him by a British diver, who the entrepreneur called "pedo guy" on Twitter. Vernon Unsworth sparked a war of words with Mr Musk during the attempted rescue of 12 Thai school boys and their soccer coach trapped in a cave earlier this year. The cave diver described Mr Musk's efforts to build a rescue submarine as a "PR stunt" with "absolutely no chance of working." In an interview on CNN in July, Mr Unsworth said: "He can stick his submarine where it hurts." Mr Musk responded by insinuating that the British diver, who was assisting with rescue efforts, had travelled to Thailand looking for a "child bride."

Microsoft Corp. called for new legislation to govern artificial intelligence software for recognizing faces, advocating for human review and oversight of the technology in critical cases. "This includes where decisions may create a risk of bodily or emotional harm to a consumer, where there may be implications on human or fundamental rights, or where a consumer's personal freedom or privacy may be impinged," Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith wrote in a blog published in conjunction with a speech on the topic at the Brookings Institution think tank. Sellers of the technology must "recognize that they are not absolved of their obligation to comply with laws prohibiting discrimination against individual consumers or groups of consumers," he added. Smith also wants laws to require sellers of the products to explain what they do clearly and open up their services to testing by outside parties for accuracy and bias. Earlier Thursday, advocacy group AI Now called for greater regulation and regular audits of AI tools used by governments.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have created new threats to the privacy of health data, a study has found. The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, 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 led by professor Anil Aswani from the University of California -- Berkeley in the US, shows that by using AI, it is possible to identify individuals by learning daily patterns in step data like that collected by activity trackers, smartwatches and smartphones, and correlating it to demographic data. The mining of two years' worth of data covering over 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. "We wanted to use NHANES (the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) to look at privacy questions because this data is representative of the diverse population in the US," Aswani said.

What a huge advance it is that the financial sector now has robots to relieve the ever-growing pressure of regulation. Almost everyone handling or processing personal data now faces vastly increased compliance requirements once the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force in May. The new rules cover the personally identifiable data of any European Union or British citizen and are very prescriptive, with penalties for infringement that could amount to four per cent of global revenue. Small wonder, then, that Fortune 500 organisations are reported to have spent $7.8 billion on GDPR so far. For the financial sector the challenges of GDPR come on top of the plethora of Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering regulations.

Google's first foray into Chinese markets was a short-lived experiment. Google China's search engine was launched in 2006 and abruptly pulled from mainland China in 2010 amid a major hack of the company and disputes over censorship of search results. But in August 2018, the investigative journalism website The Intercept reported that the company was working on a secret prototype of a new, censored Chinese search engine, called Project Dragonfly. Amid a furor from human rights activists and some Google employees, US Vice President Mike Pence called on the company to kill Dragonfly, saying it would "strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers." In mid-December, The Intercept reported that Google had suspended its development efforts in response to complaints from the company's own privacy team, who learned about the project from the investigative website's reporting. Observers talk as if the decision about whether to reenter the world's largest market is up to Google: will it compromise its principles and censor search the way China wants?