A few years ago, when my son was barely three, he confused me for a slow hard drive. As I was explaining a new concept to him, I stumbled. While I searched my brain for the right words, he looked up at me: "Mama, it's loading." We are surely on a path to faster downloads. We just need to make sure we are loading the right stuff.

As automation supplants more forms of labor, creative expression still seems like a distinctly human enterprise. This may someday change: by ingesting works of authorship as "training data," computer programs can teach themselves to write natural prose, compose music, and generate movies. However, current fair use doctrine threatens either to derail the progress of machine learning or to disenfranchise the human creators whose work makes it possible. It concludes that fair use may not protect expressive machine learning applications, including the burgeoning field of natural language generation. Part II explains that applying today's fair use doctrine to expressive machine learning will yield one of two undesirable outcomes: if US courts reject the fair use defense for machine learning, valuable innovation may move to another jurisdiction or halt entirely; alternatively, if courts find the technology to be fair use, sophisticated software may divert rightful earnings from the authors of input data.

Each new year provides the opportunity for reflection upon how far we have come and how far we still have to go, on both a personal and societal level. It was also the year that it took you at least a few minutes to realise the customer agent answering your queries in that little chat-box wasn't human, when you picked up a VR headset from your local toyshop for the price of a pizza, when you found yourself in far too many political arguments around the water-cooler, and when you began seriously questioning whether a computer might someday take your job -- maybe for the second time that year. We will see continuing tensions within and between countries, as 20th century nationalist sentiments push resentfully against 21st century supranational integration. There will be moments when it feels like only technology can save us, followed by events which remind us of how perilous our inventions can be when we still barely understand them. The following is not investment or professional advice of any kind, and is intended only to promote discussion and reflection on some of the rising trends and ideas of our time.

Every year, poachers kill about 27,000 African elephants--an astounding 8 percent of the population. If current trends continue, these magnificent animals could be gone within a decade. The solution, of course, is to stop poachers before they strike, but how to do that has long confounded authorities. In protected areas like wildlife preserves, elephants and other endangered animals may roam far and wide, while rangers can patrol only a small area at any time. "It's a two-part problem," explains Milind Tambe, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles.

Questions about the imminent release of the convicted rapist, John Warboys, continue to dominate many of the papers. The Daily Mail asks why wasn't he given a longer minimum sentence, while the Times wants the Parole Board to explain its decision to free him. His ex-wife tells the Daily Express he should never be let out and the Daily Mirror insists "this sex monster should still be behind bars." There may yet be further prosecutions, according to the Guardian. It says alleged victims are considering bringing fresh cases.

In December 2017, two years after the Paris climate accord was adopted, French President Emmanuel Macron led government, business and civic leaders in a conference called The One Planet Summit. President Trump, who earlier in the year announced his commitment to withdraw the U.S. from the historic climate accord, was not invited. At this event, Microsoft's President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith announced the company would be committing $50 million over the following five years as part of a new strategy to provide access to artificial intelligence (AI) for groups and people who want to use it for the good for the planet. Microsoft's AI for Earth, a program with the goal of using AI to address environmental challenges, launched six months before this announcement. "Fundamentally, AI can accelerate our ability to observe environmental systems and how they are changing at a global scale, convert the data into useful information and apply that information to take concrete steps to better manage our natural resources," Smith writes in a related post on the Microsoft website.

When artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on jobs and the economy comes up, the conversation centers on blue collar jobs. Per The State of Automation Report, there are 4.6M such jobs at risk in the USA due to AI. But, the jobs of MBAs and their white-collar brethren will also be impacted dramatically by AI. A growing wave of AI-infused Expert Automation & Augmentation Software (EAAS, pronounced /ēz/) platforms will usher in a new era of AI-assisted or AI-enhanced productivity. This AI-enhanced productivity is threatening jobs at the lower end of the white-collar spectrum as evidenced by these recent headlines. But to start, Expert Automation & Augmentation Software will be more focused on augmentation, i.e., helping humans do countless complex tasks that are either beyond human cognition and/or inefficient for human beings to do (read thousands of pages of patents and understand key topics). Think of these AI-enhanced assistants as junior analysts (lawyers, journalists, etc) who never tire and who can process information beyond human capacity but who will still need the steady eye of a manager to make subjective judgments.

The New York City Council met early in December to pass a law on algorithmic decision-making transparency that could have real significance for cities and states in the rest of the nation. With the passage of an algorithmic accountability bill, the city gains a task force that will monitor the fairness and validity of algorithms used by municipal agencies. The public is in the dark about AI (artificial intelligence) and how it is deployed and used, said Bronx City Council representative James Vacca. "I strongly believe the public has a right to know when decisions are made using algorithms," said Vacca during the December City Council Technology Committee meeting. New York uses algorithms to determine if a lower bail will be assigned to an indigent defendant, where firehouses are established, student placement for public schools, accessing teacher performance, identifying Medicaid fraud and to determine where crime will happen next.

As the use of sex robots becomes increasingly common, specialists warn about the moral and ethical issues associated with this phenomenon, which need to be addressed. Kent Law School Professor Robin Mackenzie, who specializes in areas such as robotics and the ethical and legal relations between humans and robots, believes that the advent of increasingly lifelike "sexbots" calls for a change in the way people think about sex, morals and the legal status of these artificial concubines, The Express wrote. However, sentient, self-aware sex robots created to engage in emotional and sexual intimacy with humans fly in the face of this time-tested notion, she pointed out. She added that even though the sex robots look like humans and act as intimate sexual partners, they can't simply be categorized as either things or animals. That being said, recent technological advancements meant that sex robots can now have realistic, lifelike characteristics and functionality.

The team faced some unique challenges. They were starting with a small quantity of labelled data, the software would often pick up other noises like construction, cars and even doorbells, and some of the bird species had a variety of birdsongs or two would sing at the same time. To overcome these hurdles, they tested, verified and retrained the system many times over. As a result, they have learned things that would have otherwise remained locked up in thousands of hours of data. While it's still early days, already conservation groups are talking to Victor about how they can use these initial results to better target their efforts.