Criminal suspects could soon be locked up, breathalysed, read their rights and driven to jail in autonomous police cars. Technology company Motorola has submitted a patent for the self-driving vehicle, which would also scan the detainee for drugs, weapons and alcohol. It could even put them in a conference call with their lawyer and court officials. The documents, submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office, describes a'mobile law enforcement communication system and method' that would even let suspects swipe their bank cards to pay bail and unlock the car. Technology company Motorola has submitted a patent for the self-driving vehicle, which would also scan the detainee for drugs, weapons and alcohol.

Classification models are often used to make decisions that affect humans: whether to approve a loan application, extend a job offer, or provide insurance. In such applications, individuals should have the ability to change the decision of the model. When a person is denied a loan by a credit scoring model, for example, they should be able to change the input variables of the model in a way that will guarantee approval. Otherwise, this person will be denied the loan so long as the model is deployed, and -- more importantly -- will lack agency over a decision that affects their livelihood. In this paper, we propose to audit a linear classification model in terms of recourse, which we define as the ability of a person to change the decision of the model through actionable input variables (e.g., income vs. gender, age, or marital status). We present an integer programming toolkit to: (i) measure the feasibility and difficulty of recourse in a target population; and (ii) generate a list of actionable changes for an individual to obtain a desired outcome. We demonstrate how our tools can inform practitioners, policymakers, and consumers by auditing credit scoring models built using real-world datasets. Our results illustrate how recourse can be significantly impacted by common modeling practices, and motivate the need to guarantee recourse as a policy objective for regulation in algorithmic decision-making.

As facial recognition technology use generates intense scrutiny, a new system unveiled at Washington's Dulles airport is being touted as a "user friendly" way to help ease congestion for air travelers. Officials at Dulles unveiled two new face recognition systems Thursday, one to meet legal requirements for biometric entry-exit records, and a second to help speed processing of travelers arriving on international flights by matching their real-time images with stored photos. The growing use of facial recognition has ignited debate over surveillance and privacy around the world, but officials told media this system was a way to help reducing annoying lines and wait times without compromising security. "The technology works," US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters at an airport unveiling. And we believe it will change the face of international travel."

Carl Milton Levin went on to question the vehicle, which stands accused of homicidal tendencies, by asking it to repeat the statement in Siri's voice instead of Alexa's; which he proclaimed is a much superior and calming voice to listen to. A request which the AI Legal Defence Team went on to deny; questioning as to the relevance of the absurd request claiming, "This is exactly the kind-of racist and dismissive behaviour which is driving the AI Vehicles to develop homicidal tendencies." The Senator has not yet decided if the Vehicle will be "scrapped into tiny tin cans to hold Beans and Soda" but does acknowledge that the presentation of the AI Vehicle in Court was "Damn Sexy". In other news, AI Bots have called a "Labour strike" after being repeatedly abused by the local residents who claim "Them tin cans invaded our country stole our damn jobs!"

Carl Milton Levin went on to question the vehicle, which stands accused of homicidal tendencies, by asking it to repeat the statement in Siri's voice instead of Alexa's; which he proclaimed is a much superior and calming voice to listen to. A request which the AI Legal Defence Team went on to deny; questioning as to the relevance of the absurd request claiming, "This is exactly the kind-of racist and dismissive behaviour which is driving the AI Vehicles to develop homicidal tendencies." The Senator has not yet decided if the Vehicle will be "scrapped into tiny tin cans to hold Beans and Soda" but does acknowledge that the presentation of the AI Vehicle in Court was "Damn Sexy". In other news, AI Bots have called a "Labour strike" after being repeatedly abused by the local residents who claim "Them tin cans invaded our country stole our damn jobs!"

If artificial intelligence were to run the world, it wouldn't be so bad -- it could objectively make decisions on exactly the kinds of things humans tend to screw up. But if we're gonna hand over the reins to AI, it's gotta be fair. AI trained on datasets that were annotated or curated by people tend to learn the same racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted biases of those people. Slowly, programmers seem to be correcting for these biases. But even if we succeed at keeping our own prejudice out of our code, it seems that AI is now capable of developing it all on its own.

The British installation at the London Design Biennale is an international project that demonstrates how victims of human rights violations around the world can gather proof of their own experiences. Plastic bottles, digital cameras and kites, just some of the low-cost items in the exhibition, are being used in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq to gather the remaining evidence of Isis's 2014 treatment of the Yazidi ethnic minority, treatment that survivors and their supporters have called genocide and hope to prosecute in the international courts. Not only do they say thousands were killed by the terrorist group and thousands more displaced, but Yazidi cultural and religious heritage sites were destroyed and their temples were used as mass graves. Four years later, the region is still dangerous, littered with landmines and booby-traps left by the militants as they retreated. So when Yazda, a global rights organisation established by the Yazidi diaspora, sought help in supplementing their documentation efforts from Forensic Architecture, an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, its team of architects, photographers, software developers, lawyers and archaeologists adapted their investigative methods to provide ways for Yazidis to gather video and data without entering the most hazardous areas.

Kent Walker, vice president and general counsel with Google Inc., from right, Colin Stretch, general counsel with Facebook Inc., and Sean Edgett, acting general counsel with Twitter Inc., swear in to a House Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017. Technology has advanced rapidly along several related fronts. In just the last few years, there have been dramatic improvements in robotics, sensors, and machine vision, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now perform better, per Stanford's AI Index, than humans on multiple dimensions, including image recognition, speech recognition, translation, and strategy games such as Go, Poker and chess. In pursuit of profits from AI-enabled business models, firms are now investing lots of money in these technologies. Worldwide industrial robotics shipments have increased from an annual average of about 100,000 units prior to 2010 to almost 300,000 annual shipments by 2016.

Google's secretive plans in China are attracting renewed scrutiny from privacy advocates. The tech giant is said to be building a prototype version of a censored Chinese search engine that links users' activity to their personal phone number, according to the Intercept. In doing so, it would be able to comply with the Chinese government's censorship requirements, increasing the chances that such a product would launch there in the future. A bipartisan group of 16 US lawmakers asked Google if it would comply with China's internet censorship and surveillance policies should it re-enter the search engine market there While China is home to the world's largest number of internet users, a 2015 report by US think tank Freedom House found that the country had the most restrictive online use policies of 65 nations it studied, ranking below Iran and Syria. But China has maintained that its various forms of web censorship are necessary for protecting its national security.

What will happen as we enter the era of human augmentation, artificial intelligence and government-by-algorithm? James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention, said: "Coexisting safely and ethically with intelligent machines is the central challenge of the twenty-first century." A lot of folks are earnestly exploring the topic. "Will scientists soon be able to create supercomputers that can read a newspaper with understanding, or write a news story, or create novels, or even formulate laws?" asks J. Storrs Hall in Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (2007). "And if machine intelligence advances beyond human intelligence, will we need to start talking about a computer's intentions?" Sharing this concern, SpaceX/Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk has joined with Y Combinator founder Sam Altman to establish OpenAI, an endeavor that aims to keep artificial intelligence research -- and its products -- accountable by maximizing transparency and openness. Among the most-worried is Swiss author Gerd Leonhard, whose new book Technology Vs. Humanity: The Coming Clash Between Man and Machine, coins an interesting term, "androrithm," to contrast with the algorithms that are implemented in every digital calculating engine or computer. Some foresee algorithms ruling the world with the inexorable automaticity of reflex, and Leonhard asks: "Will we live in a world where data and algorithms triumph over androrithms…i.e., all that stuff that makes us human?"