Openly sharing information has been a part of human culture since the beginning of civilization. Information would be shared with the general community and the practice has had a powerful impact on the development of tools and machinery. In opposition to this practice, is the concept of ownership and control over new ideas and concepts, also known as "intellectual property." While the open sharing of new ideas is difficult to abuse, patents can be abused, with a reasonable amount of planning. For example, in 1879, George B. Selden, a patent lawyer, applied for a patent, claiming ownership of the "idea" of a 2-cycle gasoline-powered engine, and, for devious monetary reasons, delayed its patent office approval until "1895."

Three years after Elon Musk announced in his famous "All Our Patent Are Belong To You" blog post that Tesla would be opening all of its patents to the public, he tweeted a recommendation of Max Tegmark's recent book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence--which just happens to allude to a not-too-distant future world in which, based on current patent law, all inventions might be free and open to the public. In this story, superhuman general artificial intelligence is secretly created by humans, and its creation began the end of human invention. In Tegmark's world, the superhuman A.I. makes its first millions by targeting Amazon's Mechanical Turk (or MTurk) and developing category-specific A.I. modules that perform tasks requested in the MTurk marketplace. Quickly thereafter, the superhuman A.I. makes its first billions by creating sensationally successful animated movies and series without human guidance. Although the Federal Circuit recently concluded that "inventors must be natural persons and cannot be corporations or sovereigns," the court's conclusion appeared to be based on the premise that the "conception" element required under patent law is "a mental act" and that only natural persons can perform such an act.

Criminal recidivism is when a released criminal goes back to crime. From charging crimes through probation, the criminal justice system is constantly looking for ways to better predict which criminals are more likely to remain legal on release and who is a risk of recidivism. Bias can create inaccuracies through weighing variables incorrectly, and machine learning might provide a way of limiting bias and improving recidivism predictions. A recent study by Julia Dressel and Hany Farid, published in Science Advances, points to the limitations of deterministic algorithms with fixed parameters for the task of such predictions. The study analyzes the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) software, a package used by court systems to predict the likelihood of recidivism in criminal defendants. The lessons learned lead me to a discussion about the promise of machine learning (ML) systems – specifically, deep learning.

The grosser parts of the internet have a new trick: Using machine learning and AI to swap celebrities' faces onto porn performers'. Fake celebrity porn seamless enough to be mistaken for the real thing. Early victims include Daisy Ridley, Gal Gadot, Scarlett Johansson, and Taylor Swift. Originally reported by Motherboard, this nasty trend has been brewing for months, acquiring its own subreddit. And now that someone has made an app--drastically lowering the technical threshold would-be creators have to clear-- it's presumably about to become much more prevalent.

Over the past few years, Uber has schemed to boost its self-driving efforts by spying on rivals, poaching staff, and acquiring their software, according to newly released court documents. Though competitor intelligence work is standard among large companies, the details are rarely made public. In the long-running Waymo v. Uber lawsuit, Uber stands accused of stealing and using trade secrets from Alphabet's self-driving car division to boost its own, younger program. New documents filed in federal court this week focus on the activities of Uber's Strategic Services Group (SSG), an eight-person group within the company's Threat Operation division, dedicated to collecting intelligence on competitors. A former ThreatOps employee has claimed that SSG frequently engaged in fraud and theft, and employed third-party vendors to obtain unauthorized data or information.

Tue 23 Jan 2018 12.47 EST Last modified on Tue 23 Jan 2018 14.35 EST The computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who has died aged 93, was on the programming team for the computer that in 1951 became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I. She led a successful campaign at Ferranti for equal pay for male and female programmers, almost two decades before the Equal Pay Act came into force. As a young mother in the mid-1950s she set up on her own as a home-based software consultant, making her one of the world's first freelance programmers. Modest about her own pioneering achievements, she is on record (in an interview with computer historian Janet Abbate) as saying that her biggest contribution was to be "the grandmother of the web". In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), the eldest of her four children, proposed a system to access and exchange documents across the internet, and soon afterwards built the first web server, website and browser.

Artificial Intelligence is a great help to humanity. Unfortunately, the scope for misuse is also huge. Given tendencies among corporate and state entities to establish dominance, we analyze ethical concerns and advocate the need for democratization. "It is not enough to be electors only. It is necessary to be law-makers; otherwise those who can be law-makers will be the masters of those who can only be electors."

Wed 24 Jan 2018 14.02 EST Last modified on Wed 24 Jan 2018 14.15 EST The chief executive of Google has declared he is happy for his company to pay more tax, and called for the existing system to be reformed. Sundar Pichai told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the tax system needed to be reformed to address concerns that some companies were not paying their fair share. Speaking before the French president, Emmanuel Macron, challenged tech giants to pay more tax, Pichai said: "As a company we paid, over the last five years, close to 20% in tax. We are happy to pay a higher amount, whatever the world agrees on as the right framework. It's not an issue about the amount of tax we pay, as much as how you divide it among various countries."

Oscar Nilsson'knocked to ground' in San Francisco as company tested self-driving cars Wed 24 Jan 2018 06.55 EST Last modified on Wed 24 Jan 2018 07.09 EST General Motors is facing one of the first lawsuits to involve an autonomous vehicle, after a collision between its Cruise self-driving car and a motorbike in California. Motorcyclist Oscar Nilsson is suing GM stating that the Chevrolet Bolt, which was operating in autonomous mode with a backup driver behind the wheel, "suddenly veered back into Nilsson's lane, striking Nilsson and knocking him to the ground". The accident happened on 7 December in heavy traffic in the Hayes Valley district of San Francisco, with the GM vehicle reportedly travelling at 12mph and the motorcycle 17mph. The accident report filed with the California disputes Nilsson's claims. The report states that the autonomous vehicle was driving in the centre of three one-way lanes.

There's plenty of evidence that mobility offers tremendous benefits to patients, doctors, and the healthcare industry, as outlined in VDC's report, The Global Market for Health Care Mobility. It's clear that the combination of mobile healthcare apps and artificial intelligence is the future of healthcare. Artificial intelligence offers broad benefits to healthcare, as well, according to a recent detailed report by JASON, an independent US government advisory panel composed of science and technology experts. The report is clear-eyed about the hype that has accompanied AI in the past. But it says that this time, the hype about the benefits of AI for healthcare is justified.