What has improved American lives most in the last 50 years? According to a Pew Research study reported this month, it's not civil rights (10 percent) or politics (2 percent): it's technology (42 percent). And yet, according to other studies, most Americans are wary of technology, especially in areas of automation (72 percent), or robotic caregivers (59 percent), or riding in driverless vehicles (56 percent), and even in using brain chip implants to augment the capabilities of healthy people (69 percent). Science fiction, however, is quickly becoming science fact--the future is the machine. This is leading many to argue that we need to anticipate the ethical questions now, rather than when it is too late.

WASHINGTON – Apple will let you unlock the iPhone X with your face -- a move likely to bring facial recognition to the masses, along with concerns over how the technology may be used for nefarious purposes. Apple's newest device, set to go on sale on Friday, is designed to be unlocked with a facial scan with a number of privacy safeguards -- as the data will only be stored on the phone and not in any databases. Unlocking one's phone with a face scan may offer added convenience and security for iPhone users, according to Apple, which claims its "neural engine" for FaceID cannot be tricked by a photo or hacker. While other devices have offered facial recognition, Apple is the first to pack the technology allowing for a three-dimensional scan into a hand-held phone. But despite Apple's safeguards, privacy activists fear the widespread use of facial recognition would "normalize" the technology and open the door to broader use by law enforcement, marketers or others of a largely unregulated tool.

Everyone now is learning, or claiming to learn, Deep Learning (DL), the only field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that went viral. Paid and free DL courses count 100,000s of students of all ages. Too many startups and products are named "deep-something", just as buzzword: very few are using DL really. Most ignore that DL is the 1% of the Machine Learning (ML) field, and that ML is the 1% of the AI field. Remaining 99% is what's used in practice for most tasks.

Some people are afraid that heavily armed artificially intelligent robots might take over the world, enslaving humanity – or perhaps exterminating us. These people, including tech-industry billionaire Elon Musk and eminent physicist Stephen Hawking, say artificial intelligence technology needs to be regulated to manage the risks. But Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg disagree, saying the technology is not nearly advanced enough for those worries to be realistic. As someone who researches how AI works in robotic decision-making, drones and self-driving vehicles, I've seen how beneficial it can be. I've developed AI software that lets robots working in teams make individual decisions, as part of collective efforts to explore and solve problems. Researchers are already subject to existing rules, regulations and laws designed to protect public safety.

IBM Watson has partnered with two of Sweden's leading law firms, MAQS and Lindahl, as well as legal knowledge management consultancy, VQ, to build an AI-driven contract review and advice system. The new AI tool, which is called True Agreement, is at present focused on Swedish shareholder agreements and has been trained to identify the type of document, find key clauses and then provide advice on aspects of those clauses as they are surfaced by IBM Watson's natural language processing capability. The new venture was revealed at the VQ forum event in Stockholm, yesterday and is the first joint venture legal AI project of its kind in Scandinavia. Also, MAQS revealed that it is now working with UK legal AI company, Luminance, becoming one of several law firms in the region now making use of the due diligence-focused AI company's platform. MAQS Knowledge Manager, Hans Hedkvist told Artificial Lawyer: 'The idea came about jointly between myself, the head of IT at Lindahl and Helena Hallgarn of VQ.' 'We saw that AI was coming and we wanted to do something in Swedish.

Sophia is a robot that also happens to be one the newest citizens of Saudi Arabia. The unprecedented move has left some human rights activists upset. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Sophia is a robot that also happens to be one the newest citizens of Saudi Arabia. The unprecedented move has left some human rights activists upset.

West starts his new job next month, and a long list of legal tangles await him. They include a lawsuit from Alphabet Inc's self-driving car unit, alleging trade secret theft; lawsuits from drivers and former employees; and a number of federal investigations that span possible bribery in Asian countries, the use of a software tool to evade regulators and the possible mishandling of medical documents belonging to a woman who was raped by an Uber driver in India.

Some people are afraid that heavily armed artificially intelligent robots might take over the world, enslaving humanity--or perhaps exterminating us. These people, including tech-industry billionaire Elon Musk and eminent physicist Stephen Hawking, say artificial intelligence technology needs to be regulated to manage the risks. But Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg disagree, saying the technology is not nearly advanced enough for those worries to be realistic. As someone who researches how AI works in robotic decision-making, drones and self-driving vehicles, I've seen how beneficial it can be. I've developed AI software that lets robots working in teams make individual decisions as part of collective efforts to explore and solve problems.

The right to due process was inscribed into the US constitution with a pen. A new report from leading researchers in artificial intelligence cautions it is now being undermined by computer code. Public agencies responsible for areas such as criminal justice, health, and welfare increasingly use scoring systems and software to steer or make decisions on life-changing events like granting bail, sentencing, enforcement, and prioritizing services. The report from AI Now, a research institute at NYU that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence, says too many of those systems are opaque to the citizens they hold power over. The AI Now report calls for agencies to refrain from what it calls "black box" systems opaque to outside scrutiny. Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft and cofounder of AI Now, says citizens should be able to know how systems making decisions about them operate and have been tested or validated.

Fed up with the bribery, insider trading, embezzlement and money laundering committed by white-collar criminals? What if there was an app that could help nab these crooks by using the same machine learning tools and geospatial data increasingly relied upon by police to predict where the next burglary, drug deal or assault might go down? Sam Lavigne, co-creator of the White Collar Crime Risk Zones app, was onstage at the recent Strata Data Conference in New York, claiming to be able to do just that. "We used instances of financial malfeasance; density of nonprofit organizations, liquor stores, bars and clubs; and density of investment advisers," a straight-faced Lavigne said to an audience of data experts who immediately got the dark humor. For although the White Collar Crime Risk Zones app was indeed built -- using historical data from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority -- its purpose is not to track white-collar crime, but to draw attention to the danger these kinds of applications, and the data they rely upon, present.