"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." This truism--by the media-scholar John Culkin about the work of Marshall McLuhan--is more potent than ever in the age of data and algorithms. The technology is having a profound effect on how people live and think. Some of those changes are documented in "Re-Engineering Humanity" by two technology thinkers from different academic backgrounds: Brett Frischmann is a law professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania and Evan Selinger teaches philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.

On giant screens in the European parliament building in Brussels last week, the face of Mark Zuckerberg looked down on the world's data protection and privacy commissioners assembled there for their annual conference. What he said was cautious and rather bland, but the imagery was potent: a young Big Brother issuing a tailored message to those who administer the laws of many lands. Zuckerberg did not take questions – a Facebook executive in the chamber did, after Zuckerberg faded from the screens into the green and sunny background of his distant locale. An actual dialogue with the controller of Facebook might have been illuminating. For example, does Facebook anticipate, as others speculate, that the internet will split into two, or three – the US internet, the China internet and the EU internet?

Once again, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a trendy term that brings either trepi dation or inspiration. At one end of the scale, people fear that the advancement of AI will result in machines taking over our lives. On the other side, people believe that AI is the answer to everything. The first step is to assess whether AI today can take over humanity as we know it. Artificial General Intelligence is still far from being achieved – having an AI system that is able to solve all types of human-level tasks with equal proficiency is a very hard problem.

In a landmark study, 20 top US corporate lawyers with decades of experience in corporate law and contract review were pitted against an AI. Their task was to spot issues in five Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), which are a contractual basis for most business deals. The study, carried out with leading legal academics and experts, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an average 94% accuracy rate, higher than the lawyers who achieved an average rate of 85%. It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI. The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes.

Apple CEO, Tim Cook spoke up for privacy at a conference of European privacy commissioners in Brussels this morning. The themes of this year's conference is "Debating Ethics: Dignity and Respect in Data Driven Life", Cook is the first tech CEO to serve as the keynote speaker for the conference and was invited to speak. He talked about data, put in a bid for a bill of U.S. digital rights, slammed competitors for profiting while unleashing powerfully negative forces, and spoke up for a GDPR-style privacy protection in the U.S. What follows is the transcript of his speech. "It is an honor to be here with you today in this grand hall…a room that represents what is possible when people of different backgrounds, histories, and philosophies come together to build something bigger than themselves. "I am deeply grateful to our hosts.

For the second straight year, Deloitte surveyed executives 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.

In 1971, philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment to understand the idea of fairness: the veil of ignorance. What if, he asked, we could erase our brains so we had no memory of who we were -- our race, our income level, our profession, anything that may influence our opinion? Who would we protect, and who would we serve with our policies? The veil of ignorance is a philosophical exercise for thinking about justice and society. But it can be applied to the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI) as well. Can AI provide the veil of ignorance that would lead us to objective and ideal outcomes?

Given the increasing prominence of artificial intelligence in our business – from product development, to sales analysis, to recruitment, to contract review – it is vital that we ensure the algorithms at the heart of AI are fair, legal and representative of the values of our organization, and that they're seen to be as such,

As we write this paper there is a team of researchers who are working toward the creation of a "Brain Simulation Platform", software that will map the human brain down to a minute level of detail (see https://www.humanbrainproject.eu). This research has incredible implications for many scientific fields of study. The completion of this project will also represent the completion of the first two criteria set forth by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom in their paper Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap [1], which would imply that we will be well on our way toward our first functional brain emulation. With the apparent eminence of, at least a simplistic version, of whole brain emulation, we must begin to consider some implications for the future. The goal of whole brain emulation is the eventual use of the technology to emulate a human mind.

The ACLU, along with nearly 70 other civil rights organizations, has asked Amazon to stop selling facial recognition technology to the government and further called on Congress to enact a moratorium on government uses of facial recognition technology. The media weighed in, and important voices expressed anxiety. Over at the Washington Post, the editorial board declared, "Congress should intervene soon." Even some members of Congress -- many of whom were recently misidentified by Amazon's facial recognition software -- are rightly worried. Along with a group of other scholars, we asked Amazon to change its ways.