We live in a fractured world that is increasingly becoming polarised with shrill voices intent on drowning out dissent. We have divided ourselves, created inequalities and are steeped in prejudices that we have carried for years. It's not a perfect world, and how can it be -- we are after all humans, intolerant, and unfair. However when it comes to machines, the expectations change. The first words that usually come to mind are: cold, calculating and unbiased.

People who apply for a loan from a bank or credit card company, and are turned down, are owed an explanation of why that happened. It's a good idea -- because it can help teach people how to repair their damaged credit -- and it's a federal law, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Getting an answer wasn't much of a problem in years past, when humans made those decisions. But today, as artificial intelligence systems increasingly assist or replace people making credit decisions, getting those explanations has become much more difficult. Traditionally, a loan officer who rejected an application could tell a would-be borrower there was a problem with their income level, or employment history, or whatever the issue was.

There is no such thing as robot lawyers, and even if there were, they are not coming to take jobs away from human lawyers. Instead, lawyers should think about how best to work with and harness the potential of software and artificial intelligence to propel their practices forward while bridging the access-to-justice gap. Those were the main takeaways in a wide-ranging Friday morning panel discussion at ABA Techshow featuring Ross Intelligence CEO Andrew Arruda, IBM Global Chief Information Security Officer Shamla Naidoo and FastCase CEO Ed Walters. The three gave a brief history and overview of artificial intelligence, while dispelling some myths and cautioning those in attendance to temper their expectations as to what AI can and can't do. "This is tech that's been around for 60 to 80 years," Arruda said.

Intelligent agents could travel across networks of blockchains and coordinate resources, execute smart contracts, and return value to the owners of those agents. Imagine for example a driverless car run by its AI. The car may be owned by a number of humans, thousands even, through ownership contracts recorded on a blockchain. The car, or rather its AI, once called to execute a ride via a distributed application, searches a blockchain to ensure that the call is legitimate, executes the ride, and returns the income it collects almost instantaneously to its owners for immediate distribution. Or think of a swarm of agricultural robots collaborating with intelligent sensors and managing efficiently, and with minimum environmental impact, farmland to produce the highest possible yields.

The way tech companies deal with online harassment and abuse is broken. YouTube allows anti-Semitism to stay live. Twitter waffles as targeted harassment runs rampant. Facebook takes down an iconic photo that shouldn't be banned. Now one German politician is tired of letting platforms make excuses.

On January 25, 1979, 25-year-old Robert Williams climbed into a storage rack to retrieve parts from a malfunctioning robot at Ford's Flat Rock plant in Michigan. The robot, not able to sense Williams' presence, swung round and struck him on the head, killing him instantly. The robot kept working for 30 minutes as Williams lay dead on the floor. His death, nearly forty years ago, makes Williams the first person to be killed as a result of actions by a robot. In August 1983, his family was awarded $10 million after a jury ruled against Unit Handling, the company that designed the one-ton machine.

The allegations are spicy, the insinuations downright fiery. In a lawsuit filed last month in San Francisco, Google's autonomous vehicle spinoff Waymo accuses former engineer Anthony Levandowski of stealing 14,000 pages of intellectual property and trade secrets, then using them to launch his robotruck startup, Otto. Just four months later, Uber acquired Otto for a reported $680 million--and that, Waymo alleges, is how the ride-hailing giant started using Google's vital circuit board and sensor setup in its own self-driving cars. Some folks, reading between the lines of the lawsuit, see a conspiracy: Perhaps Uber directly conspired with Levandowski to steal Google's self-driving secrets. 'It's so dangerous to be hiring a very knowledgeable former employee of another company and put him in a position in your company to do the same thing.'

It happened recently as I was looking at demonstrations of two very interesting new technology-based companies that help automate due diligence processes. They are both classic examples of the type of technological innovation that's happening at lightning speed in the legal industry today. They are addressing an enormous pain point in the industry: the mind-numbing burden of manually reviewing thousands of contracts as part of a due diligence mandate. It's the kind of work that has provided a good living for generations of young law firm associates, but it is not efficient and, being human-based, not always very accurate. These two new companies are using technology to make that review more efficient and accurate, by analyzing, summarizing, and extracting structured data from big masses of unstructured and wildly inconsistent documents. To the extent the technology works, it's because it imposes some kind of order on the non-standard work of human lawyers.

FinTech startups are changing the financial services landscape as we know it. As FinTech enters the mainstream, federal and state regulation, cybersecurity, money laundering, and artificial intelligence (AI) will shape its future. Evolving regulatory trends will transform FinTechs' business models. In the US, the federal financial regulatory framework will undergo a series of radical changes. Congress is exploring ways to repeal provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act and federal financial regulatory agencies have received instructions to relax regulatory requirements. This trend toward federal deregulation will level the regulatory playing field between FinTechs and financial institutions as banks will be subject to less federal regulation, and FinTechs will enjoy fewer federal regulatory arbitrage opportunities relative to their traditional bank counterparts.

Matt Coatney is a technology executive, business advisor, entrepreneur, author, and speaker. His focus is on bringing advanced artificial intelligence and analytic technologies to market. He has co-founded three companies, advised several others, and contributed to the early success of two different tech startups. Matt has also launched data analytics products designed for the fields of life sciences, healthcare, government, finance, and law. Currently Matt is the VP of Services for Exaptive; he previously was the IT strategy lead for global law firm WilmerHale, and was in charge of technology and operations for a legal search product at LexisNexis.