Today is Thanksgiving in the US, so first of all Happy Thanksgiving to all of Artificial Lawyer's readers in America! Second point, I was thinking about this important celebration in the US calendar and couldn't help but make some parallels (albeit highly tenuous ones…) with the growth of the legal AI sector. Although Thanksgiving as a celebration has evolved over the course of the last few hundred years, its core message seems to be about how a hearty band of people looking for a better world took a big risk and headed off to into a future that they had taken upon themselves to create. As anyone around the world who remembers the story will recollect, the Pilgrim Fathers, who set off from England in 1620, did not find it easy going. First, although they knew that the shores of where they were headed were already occupied by other people they went anyway – and to put it delicately, that caused a few issues for all involved.

After a decade of stop-and-go development, Artificial Intelligence has now begun to provide real, tangible value to the business world. McKinsey published an 80-page report titled "Artificial Intelligence: The Next Digital Frontier?" which provides a comprehensive analysis of the value that Artificial Intelligence (AI) creates for businesses. The report points out that "wide application of Artificial Intelligence technology will bring great returns to businesses." This means that the disruptive nature of AI will continue to become more apparent in the future. Governments, enterprises, and developers should all be clear on this point. Currently, researchers and businesses are focusing on Artificial Intelligence systems such as robotics and automated transportation, virtual agents, and Machine Learning (including Deep Learning and the foundations of several recent advancements in AI technologies).

For the second straight year, Deloitte surveyed executives in the US knowledgeable about cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence,1 representing companies that are testing and implementing them today. We found that these early adopters2 remain bullish on cognitive technologies' value. As in last year's survey, the level of support for AI is truly extraordinary. These findings illustrate that cognitive technologies hold enticing promise, some of which is being fulfilled today. However, AI technologies may deliver their best returns when companies balance excitement over their potential with the ability to execute. To obtain a cross-industry view of how organizations are adopting and benefiting from cognitive computing/AI, Deloitte surveyed 1,100 IT and line-of-business executives from US-based companies in Q3 2018. All respondents were required to be knowledgeable about their company's use of cognitive technologies/artificial intelligence, and 90 percent have direct involvement with their company's AI strategy, spending, implementation, and/or decision-making. The respondents represent 10 industries, with 17 percent coming from the technology industry. Fifty-four percent are line-of-business executives, with the rest IT executives. Sixty-four percent are C-level executives--including CEOs, presidents, and owners (30 percent), along with CIOs and CTOs (27 percent)--and 36 percent are executives below the C-level.3 A year later, and the thrill isn't gone. In Deloitte's 2017 cognitive survey, we were struck by early adopters' enthusiasm for cognitive technologies.4 That excitement owed much to the returns they said cognitive technologies were generating: 83 percent stated they were seeing either "moderate" or "substantial" benefits.

The moment a hyped-up new technology garners mainstream attention, many businesses will scramble to incorporate it into their enterprise. The majority of these trends will splutter and die out by Q4. Artificial intelligence (AI) is unlikely to be one of them. AI is a transformative series of tools that can accelerate productivity, drive insight, and open up unexplored revenue streams. It's poised to revolutionize the way we do business and everyone in a leadership role should be thinking about it.

Government regulation is necessary to prevent harm. But regulation is also a blunt and slow-moving instrument that is easily subject to political interference and distortion. When applied to fast-moving fields like AI, misplaced regulations have the potential to stifle innovation and derail the enormous potential benefits that AI can bring in vehicle safety, improved productivity, and much more. We certainly do not want rules hastily cobbled as a knee-jerk response to a popular outcry against AI stoked by alarmists such as Elon Musk (who has urged U.S. governors to regulate AI "before it's too late"). To address this conundrum, I propose a middle way: that we avoid regulating AI research, but move to regulate AI applications in arenas such as transportation, medicine, politics, and entertainment.

When the head of the U.S. Supreme Court says artificial intelligence (AI) is having a significant impact on how the legal system in this country works, you pay attention. That's exactly what happened when Chief Justice John Roberts was asked the following question: "Can you foresee a day when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact-finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision-making?" His answer startled the audience. "It's a day that's here and it's putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things," he said, as reported by The New York Times. In the last decade, the field of AI has experienced a renaissance.

A nurse asks a patient to describe her symptoms. A fast-food worker greets a customer and asks for his order. A tourist asks a police officer for directions to a local point of interest. For those with all of their physical faculties intact, each of these scenarios can be viewed as a routine occurrence of everyday life, as they are able to easily and efficiently interact without any assistance. However, each of these interactions are significantly more difficult when a person is deaf, and must rely on the use of sign language to communicate.

Tumblr's app has disappeared on the iPhone App Store after child sex abuse images were found on its platform. The company says it is acting urgently to remove the content and to have the app restored onto iOS. The app mysterious disappeared last week, being removed from the App Store with no announcement. While that didn't take it from existing phones, it meant that the app would not update and that nobody could download it newly. Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona.

More than 50 million smart speakers have been installed in American households. For police, that means 50 million potential virtual witnesses to crimes that occur in the privacy of one's home. But the legal protections for this type of privacy-invading, Internet of Things–enabled evidence are still very unclear. The question matters because one of those smart speakers was just called to be a witness in a brutal double homicide in New Hampshire. Timothy Verrill stands accused of stabbing Christine Sullivan and Jenna Pellegrini to death over suspicion that one of them was a police informant.

SEATTLE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In December 2016, environmental group Chesapeake Conservancy unveiled one of the largest, high-resolution land-cover maps made in the United States. The bay, North America's biggest estuary, has struggled to recover from overfishing and pollution, and the conservancy hopes the map will guide environmental restoration decisions like where to plant stormwater-absorbing trees. Creating a 100,000-square-mile (259,000 square kilometres) digital map that defined land use - water, vegetation or concrete - at such a fine scale was "gruelling", said project director Jeff Allenby. "(It was) day after day of having staff process and correct the tiles," he said. First a computer analysed almost 80,000 tiles - each of which corresponds to about 13 square miles and digitally records the landscape.