In Google's demonstration of its new AI assistant Duplex this week, the voice assistant calls a hair salon to book an appointment, carrying on a human-seeming conversation, with the receptionist at the other end seemingly unaware that she is speaking to an AI. Robots don't literally have ears, and in order to "hear" and analyze the audio coming from the other end, the conversation is being recorded. But about a dozen states -- including California -- require everyone in the phone call to consent before a recording can be made. It's not clear how these eavesdropping laws affect Google Duplex. In fact, it's so unclear that we can't get a straight answer out of Google.

As research on hate speech becomes more and more relevant every day, most of it is still focused on hate speech detection. By attempting to replicate a hate speech detection experiment performed on an existing Twitter corpus annotated for hate speech, we highlight some issues that arise from doing research in the field of hate speech, which is essentially still in its infancy. We take a critical look at the training corpus in order to understand its biases, while also using it to venture beyond hate speech detection and investigate whether it can be used to shed light on other facets of research, such as popularity of hate tweets.

Chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming business essentials. If utilised correctly, the continent will be able to benefit from the wealth of data its citizens generate on a daily basis. You recently participated on a panel titled Entrepreneurial Perspectives on Emerging Technologies in the Field of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems in Switzerland. With the power of big data, companies in Africa are looking for opportunities to provide more personalised customer experiences, improve core business processes and spark innovation through the use of AI. Businesses use chatbots to collect meaningful data through conversation.

The nucleus of Amazon's effort to upend the health-care market may very well be the Echo device in your living room. According to an internal document obtained by CNBC, Amazon has built a team within its Alexa voice-assistant division called "health & wellness," which includes over a dozen people and is being led by Rachel Jiang, who has spent the last five years at Amazon in various roles including advertising and video. The team's main job is to make Amazon's Alexa voice assistant more useful in the health-care field, an effort that requires working through regulations and data privacy requirements laid out by HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), according to people familiar with the matter. The group is targeting areas like diabetes management, care for mothers and infants and aging, said the people, who asked not to be named because the work is confidential. Echo/Alexa opens up a new sales channel for Amazon.

Last week was a busy one for the conversation around digital privacy as Facebook fired an employee of its security division for allegedly misusing his privileged access to stalk women, while the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the company's own employees are protected by a special privacy feature that alerts them when its security employees access their profiles. In the space of just one week, it emerged that Facebook's security staff can access any of the platform's ordinary two billion profiles and rummage through them without the user ever knowing their information has been accessed, while if those same security staff attempt to access a fellow Facebook employee's profile to investigate misconduct or illegal activity, that employee will receive a notice they are being investigated. What does this double standard teach us about how social media platforms view their users? Perhaps the most interesting element of Facebook's system, originally called "Sauron alert" and now known simply as "Security Watchdog" is that alerts are sent directly to the employees whose profiles are accessed, rather than to corporate legal, human resources or some other watchdog division. One could imagine a process in which all accesses to employee profiles are routed to a dedicated staff in the legal department to review for appropriateness. Under this model the employee whose profile is accessed by security would never know their profile was viewed.

The Trump administration has a simple approach to regulating artificial intelligence: developers pretty much have free reign to experiment. At a meeting with representatives of 40 companies including Google, Facebook and Intel, White House science advisor Michael Kratsios said the administration will avoid AI regulations for the foreseeable future, Bloomberg reported. Kratsios noted the government did not get in the way of Alexander Graham Bell or the Wright brothers when they invented the telephone and airplane, suggesting that a loose regulatory approach was vital for innovation and could keep the US at the forefront of AI development. The hands-off tactic reflects Trump's broader free-market approach to governing. The Obama administration was reluctant to impose AI rules as well, though it wanted companies to make sure their software worked safely and securely.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Alexa and Siri never say "like" or "mmm-hmmm" to buy themselves time. Instead, the virtual assistants from Amazon and Apple are brief and to the point when they speak. They're machines, after all, and their stilted cadence and brevity are reassuring. They show that we can still tell the difference between humans and robots.

It turns out that artificial intelligence may be just as bigoted as human beings. Last fall, it was discovered that a complex program used in image recognition software was producing sexist results--associating cleaning or the kitchen with women, for example and sports with men. The developers were disturbed, but perhaps it shouldn't have been so surprising. After all, Computers and software, even at their most sophisticated, are still in essence input-output systems. AI is "taught" by feeding it enormous amounts of pre-existing data--in this case, thousands upon thousands of photos.

With only 1 in 5 executives believing their incumbent team capable of developing talent to meet organisational needs, jobs in L&D are vulnerable to outsourcing and automation. How is your job impacted? It depends on the duties, responsibilities and deliverables expected from you in your current role. Bottom line: As is the case across all industries and sectors, if your role is currently focused more on producing output (i.e. Organisational competitive advantage mandates getting this critical equation right; leveraging automation where available and highly skilled, results-oriented people talent where required.

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place.