Until rules and guidelines are written that govern how artificial intelligence software makes decisions, there will be grave risks to using it, including utter ineffectiveness, warns Nicolas Economou of The Future Society. The society is a nonprofit that began at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Economou is the founder of the society's Science, Law and Society Initiative, an international forum that works on AI governance and policy to ensure that humanity reaps the benefits of AI while mitigating its risks. Economou, who is also the CEO of the legal tech company H5, participated last week in a Global Governance of AI Roundtable in Dubai, at which policymakers crafted recommendations and began creating a road map for global cooperation on setting standards. Participants included execs from global tech companies including Microsoft and Facebook, as well as representatives from government and academia. Economou discussed the kinds of issues he and others raised at the roundtable. He urges that careful work be done to vet AI technology for accuracy and fairness and that a methodical, multidisciplinary approach be taken to establish a legal and moral framework for the powerful technology.

China wants to become a country of innovation, and lead the world in artificial intelligence in 2030. China is outdoing the US in some kinds of AI-related intellectual property, according to a report published in mid-February by US business research firm CB Insights. The number of patents with the words "artificial intelligence" and "deep learning" published in China has grown faster than those published in the US, particularly in 2017, the firm found. Publication is a step that comes after applications are filed but before a patent is granted. The firm looked at data from the European patent office.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. As Facebook confronts a lawsuit over how it collects and uses biometric data, the social network is notifying more users about new facial recognition features that may infringe upon their privacy. Many people who logged onto Facebook this week were greeted with a News Feed alert detailing the new tools available through facial recognition software. Some people are receiving a notification saying that the "setting is on," while for others, it says "the setting is off." It's possible that the difference has to do with existing settings the user had selected.

Fresh on the heels of settling a contentious and expensive lawsuit with Uber, Alphabet's self-driving unit Waymo is looking to get out there and educate the public on how its autonomous vehicles work. In a blog post announcing that Waymo self-driving cars have racked up 5 million miles of driving experience on public roads, the company released a video called the Waymo 360-degree experience. The video, which is shot in 360, shows how Waymo's vehicles use lidar, radar, cameras and computer vision to not only see the world around them, but to predict the movement of objects nearby. In fact, the technology equipped in Waymo's autonomous vehicles allows them to identify objects up to 300 yards away. The video was shot during a ride around Phoenix, AZ, one of 25 cities in which Waymo's self-driving cars have been tested on real-world scenarios.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Within 48 hours of the Parkland, Florida, shooting, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin blamed the 17 deaths at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on entertainment and video games. "It's not the gun" that's responsible for the murders, he said. As Bevin repeated his obtuse theory over the ensuing days, President Trump echoed it, saying Feb. 23 that he is "hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts." It came up again at Trump's roundtable discussion Wednesday about school shootings.

This prophecy came a step closer this week as legal AI proved itself more accurate than lawyers for the first time on a staple legal task –reviewing and approving contracts. The study was overseen by top US law schools and veteran corporate lawyers (including for instance Bruce Mann, a former senior partner at top US law firm, Morrison Foerster -- a Harvey Specter- like deal-maker who has handled more than 300 IPOs and over 200 mergers & acquisitions). In the controlled experiment, 20 top US-trained lawyers took on a legal AI platform, LawGeex. Both the experienced corporate lawyers and the AI pored over five unseen Non-Disclosure Agreements to find a list of common 30 issues (vetted by contract experts from Duke University and the University of Southern California). Each participant (the AI included) was given 4 hours to issues spot clauses in the contracts.

Logicians have long known that some surprisingly simple tasks have no algorithmic solutions. That is, not everything is computable. This fact seems lost on artificial intelligence pundits who happily imagine a world of robots without limits. The assumption that self-driving cars for instance will be able to deal automatically and ethically with life-and-death situations goes unexamined in the public discourse. If algorithms have critical limits, then the tacit assumption that ethics will be automated is itself unethical.

The debate over artificial intelligence (AI) in public services took a new turn recently, with the publication of a report by PwC that forecast three waves of implementations and that it could affect a third of jobs in the sector by the mid 2030s. Its title, Will robots really steal our jobs? is bound to prompt some trepidation, but it takes a measured look at the impact across the economies of 29 countries, identifying opportunities and risks with the evolution of the technology. Report author Rob McCargow, AI programme leader for the consultancy, comes across as a cautious optimist, generally welcoming the development of AI, but highlighting the risks and making clear that it has to be applied carefully. "On one hand there is the increase maturity of technology offering solutions to intractable problems; but on the other there are new risks," he says. Perhaps the largest is one that has been identified from several quarters, that the algorithms used in AI to support decision making could reflect the biases of the people who programmed them.

In one of the most recent'man v machine' battles, lawyers were pitted against an AI algorithm. It turned out that AI achieved an average 94% accuracy rate, while the humans came in at 85%. The US-trained lawyers who took part aren't novices: they have decades of experience in corporate law and contract review. To identify legal issues in five standard NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). The company behind the algorithm is LawGeex and it's been developing the AI system for three years, training it on tens of thousands of contracts.

In this paper, law professor Lynn Lopucki ponders the question: What happens if you turn over control of a corporate entity to an AI? Odds are high you'd see them emerge first in criminal enterprises, as ways of setting up entities that engage in nefarious activities but cannot be meaningfully punished (in human terms, anyway), even if they're caught, he argues. Given their corporate personhood in the US, they'd enjoy the rights to own property, to enter into contracts, to legal counsel, to free speech, and to buy politicians -- so they could wreak a lot of havoc. The prospect of AI running firms and exploiting legal loopholes has been explored in cyberpunk sci-fi, so it's mesmerizing to watch the world of real-world law start to grapple with this. It's coming on the tails of various thinkers pointing out that Silicon Valley's fears of killer AI are predicated on the idea that AIs would act in precisely the way today's corporations do: i.e. that they'd be remorselessly devoted to their self-interest, immortal and immoral, and regard humans as mere gut-flora -- to use Cory's useful metaphor -- towards pursuance of their continued existence. Or to put it another way, corporations already evince much of the terrifying behavior LoPucki predicts we'll see from algorithmic entities; it's not clear that any world government is willing to bring to justice any of the humans putatively in control of today's crimedoing firms, so even the moral immunity you'd see in AIs is basically already in place.