With great power comes great responsibility--and artificial-intelligence technology is getting much more powerful. Companies in the vanguard of developing and deploying machine learning and AI are now starting to talk openly about ethical challenges raised by their increasingly smart creations. "We're here at an inflection point for AI," said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference this week. "We have an ethical imperative to harness AI to protect and preserve over time." Horvitz spoke alongside researchers from IBM and Google pondering similar issues.

Washington DC - Two journalists who say they have been targeted by the United States have filed a complaint against the American government, accusing it of putting them on a "kill list" and demanding to be taken off it. The complaint was filed in the US District Court of the District of Columbia on Thursday on behalf of Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan - a dual Pakistani-Syrian citizen who works for Al Jazeera and Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American who has freelanced for Al Jazeera. It accuses the US government of using information gathered via its Skynet surveillance programme, which has been used to guide drone strikes on "terror suspects". The plaintiffs accuse the United States of conspiracy to commit murder outside its borders and violating international law on targeting civilians. Filed by UK-based rights group Reprieve and the Washington DC-based law firm Lewis Baach, the complaint asks the court to declare the journalists' inclusion on the list illegal, and issue an injunction removing their names until they can review the secret evidence against them.

Rent application denials, Japanese-only recruitment and racist taunts are among the most rampant forms of discrimination faced by foreign residents in Japan, according to the results of the country's first nationwide survey on the issue, released Friday. The unprecedented survey of 18,500 expats of varying nationalities at the end of last year paints a comprehensive picture of deeply rooted discrimination in Japan as the nation struggles to acclimate to a recent surge in foreign residents and braces for an even greater surge in tourists in the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It also represents the latest in a series of fledgling steps taken by Japan to curb racism, following last year's first-ever video analysis by the Justice Ministry of anti-Korea demonstrations and the enactment of a law to eradicate hate speech. In carrying out the survey, the Justice Ministry commissioned the Center for Human Rights Education and Training, a public foundation, to mail questionnaires to non-Japanese residents in 37 municipalities nationwide. Of the 18,500, 4,252 men and women, or 23.0 percent, provided valid responses.

During my time as a graphic designer, I've experienced nearly everything – short of physical violence – that working life can throw at you: recessions, legal disputes, defaulting clients, and of course, the thrill that comes with completing a successful project. But two events – both of which turned the practice of graphic design on its head – stand out as life changing. The first was the arrival of the Macintosh computer. For all practising designers at the time, computerisation necessitated an extensive rethink of the craft: no more mechanical artwork, no more paste-up, no more typesetters, no more expensive retouchers. Many of the tasks previously done by repro houses were taken over by designers sitting in front of computer screens.

The bill would ban the use of weaponized drones, but exempt police. Details on how law enforcement could use drones with weapons would be spelled out in new rules to be developed by the state Police Officer Standards and Training Council. Officers also would have to receive training before being allowed to use drones with weapons. "Obviously this is for very limited circumstances," said Republican state Sen. John Kissel, of Enfield, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee that approved the measure Wednesday and sent it to the House of Representatives. "We can certainly envision some incident on some campus or someplace where someone is a rogue shooter or someone was kidnapped and you try to blow out a tire."

Robotics technology is no longer limited to industry. Climate Controls, 3D printers, surveillance robots, drones, household and even sex robots are entering the private market. The more autonomous they become, the more difficult it becomes to resolve conflicts, such as those between humans and software. The law currently recognizes individuals, like you and me. Also companies, organizations and governments can negotiate agreements and liability. These non-natural persons are represented by real people (they should be controlled after all).

With great power comes great responsibility--and artificial-intelligence technology is getting much more powerful. Companies in the vanguard of developing and deploying machine learning and AI are now starting to talk openly about ethical challenges raised by their increasingly smart creations. "We're here at an inflection point for AI," said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference this week. "We have an ethical imperative to harness AI to protect and preserve over time." Horvitz spoke alongside researchers from IBM and Google pondering similar issues.

The AI revolution may take longer than some expect to spread from Silicon Valley into other industries. Recent breakthroughs in machine learning have let tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook build impressive new businesses and products powered by software that parses text and images. Some have launched cloud services they say can "democratize AI" by helping other companies do the same. But Peter Lee, vice president at Microsoft's research division, said this week that the most valuable, high-end machine-learning systems so useful to tech giants are still too inflexible and expensive for the company to offer its business customers. "We are right now in terms of enterprise application of machine learning and AI concepts in an in-between spot," said Lee at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco this week.

Moreover, 2 keynote and 2 tutorial papers were invited. Most regular papers were presented in one of these tracks: Smart Contracts, Blockchain, and Rules, Constraint Handling Rules, Event Driven Architectures and Active Database Systems, Legal Rules and Reasoning, Rule-and Ontology-Based Data Access and Transformation, Rule Induction, and Learning. Following up on previous years, RuleML also hosted the 6th RuleML Doctoral Consortium and the 10th International Rule Challenge, which this year was dedicated to applications of rule-based reasoning, such as Rules in Retail, Rules in Tourism, Rules in Transportation, Rules in Geography, Rules in Location-Based Search, Rules in Insurance Regulation, Rules in Medicine, and Rules in Ecosystem Research. The 10th International Rule Challenge Awards went to Ingmar Dasseville, Laurent Janssens, Gerda Janssens, Jan Vanthienen, and Marc Denecker, for their paper Combining DMN and the Knowledge Base Paradigm for Flexible Decision Enactment, and Jacob Feldman for his paper What-If Analyzer for DMN-based Decision Models. As in previous years, RuleML 2016 was also a place for presentations and face-to-face meetings about rule technology standardizations, which this year Mark Your Calendars!

Lawyers are using artificial intelligence tools for automating tasks, such as contract review and sorting through electronic discovery documents, according to the article. But higher level tasks, especially those that require experience, will take a while, lawyers and other experts told the newspaper. Professor Dana Remus of the University of North Carolina School of Law and labor economist Frank Levy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper on the automation of legal work in 2016 and concluded that although the automation of legal tasks reduces the amount of work lawyers must do, it's not enough to put lawyers out of business. Their paper said that if large law firms adopt new legal technology immediately, those lawyers would lose 13 percent of their current work hours. But the authors said it's more realistic to assume that this would happen over five years, which would result in closer to a 2.5 percent reduction in hours per year. Furthermore, the authors said, large law firms already have largely automated or outsourced document review, and lawyers at those firms now spend only about 4 percent of their time on that task.