Connie Brenton, senior director of legal operations at NetApp and chairman of the board of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), said AI technology takes "significant resources to get up and running." Speaking at Legalweek: The Experience 2017 Conference, she joined other experts in explaining the financial reality of AI. "We're talking years before AI fundamentally changes the way we practice law," Brenton said. Jennifer McCarron, technology program manager at Cisco, said lawyers have to account for the costs behind licensing and purchasing the solutions. With Riverview Law's KIM virtual assistant, for example, she estimated the "starting point" for 10 users is about $30,000 to automate and create in-house workflows and processes. She said tailor-made programs with "templates for auto-generated documents" also increase the cost.

In the frantic race for artificial intelligence, driven by GAFA[1], with its increasingly efficient algorithms and ever-faster automated decisions, engineering is king, supporting this highly-prized form of innovation. So, does philosophy still have a role to play in this technological world that places progress at the heart of every objective? Armen Khatchatourov, a researcher in philosophy at Télécom École de Management, describes his own approach as acting as "an observer who needs to keep his distance from the general hype over anything new". Over the past several years he has worked on human-computer interactions and the issues of artificial intelligence (AI), examining the potentially negative effects of automation. In particular, he analyses the problematic issues arising from legal frameworks established to govern AI. His particular focus is on "ethics by design".

When I left Big Firm, it was for personal reasons. I did not leave shaking my fist at a horrible culture and history of injustice. I did not experience that. I started thinking about a professional life staring at a different set of walls. I began to question my place in the Big Firm ecosystem and whether I could succeed without the safety net. For many attorneys, the choice will not be theirs to make.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) could add a whopping £654bn to the UK economy, according to a report published by Accenture. Perhaps this is why the government announced late last week that it would pump approximately £20m into developing and researching AI and robotics as part of its long-awaited Digital Strategy. The technology, which could potentially render almost half a million public sector workers unemployed over the next 15 years, has been credited with helping organisations save time and money – both attractive propositions for governments across the globe. With this in mind, here are four examples of how the UK public sector has delved into the world of AI in recent times. The Serious Fraud Office used AI for the first time in its landmark investigation of Rolls Royce, which saw the car manufacturer found guilty of bribery and corruption in January this year.

KITAKYUSHU – A man was arrested Friday for allegedly flying a drone in a prohibited area without permission in the first such incident since Japan began regulating the unmanned aircraft in 2015. Koji Shiokawa, 58, was arrested on suspicion of violating the revised Civil Aeronautics Law by flying a drone around a park in Kitakyushu on Aug. 21. The park is near a residential area in the city that is designated as a no-fly zone by law due to its high population density. While several drone flight violations have been recorded since the legal revision took affect, only some of cases have been referred to prosecutors. Friday's arrest, however, is the first for flying a drone in a prohibited area without permission, the National Police Agency said.

Kay Firth-Butterfield: One of the things that stick out in my mind is some research that McKinsey did recently, where they describe AI as a contributing factor to the transformation of society. And I just want to quote what they're saying about the transformation of our society: that it's happening ten times faster, and at three hundred times the scale, or roughly three thousand times faster than the impact of the industrial revolution. And you know, a lot of people compare this revolution to the industrial revolution. But, I think it's the speed and the real, core underpinning that AI is contributing to that transformation of our society that makes these discussions so important. David Bray: It's not just about handing over judgment and decisions to a machine that a human would do otherwise.

Yet another announcement from a global behemoth declaring itself committed to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. In this article reported by the Irish Times and international press, it is notable that the consequence of American bank, JP Morgan Chase's commitment to AI is the redundancy of banking lawyers in mundane document or contract review work. They say 360,000 hours of lawyers billable work goes up in a puff of smoke because AI replaces lawyers reviewing banking documents. A headline to make any middle class professional quake in their boots. AI definitely has a role to play in the mass review of standard contracts.

America is now one step closer to becoming a sci-fi utopia, thanks to a new law passed in Virginia. On Friday the state's governor signed a ruling which will allow delivery robots to use its sidewalks and crosswalks from July 1st. Advised by Starship Technologies (an Estoninan robotics company that specializes in ground delivery) the legislation states that the bots cannot travel faster than ten miles per hour, or weigh over 50 pounds. The new law will allow the little bots to roam the streets completely autonomously. In a bid to reduce collisions, however, Virginia requires them to remain under the watchful eye of the delivery company via remote monitoring.

A total of 37 people are suspected of violating the national drone flight rules in the year since the revised Civil Aeronautics Law took effect in late 2015, the National Police Agency said Thursday. Of the 36 cases in which police had taken action by the end of last year, most involved unmanned flights over prohibited areas, with the rest concerning breaches of regulations on appropriate drone use. The law was revised to regulate unmanned flights after a small drone carrying radioactive material was found on the roof of the prime minister's office in Tokyo in April 2015. The law allows police officers to destroy drones, if necessary. The revision was first applied in Shikoku in January 2016 against a male photographer who flew a drone over a crowded residential area in Takamatsu without authorization.

A question that would have been thought of as ridiculous 25 years ago, has now become an actual worry for many workers across the world. The AI revolution is well underway and soon it will not only be the simplest tasks done by machines, but professions such as banking, law and medicine also under threat from superior machine intelligence. When it comes to the automated workforce, people are mainly worried that robots will take their job (a 31 per cent chunk to be exact). The next big worry about the future implications of AI is humans will end up relying on robots (selected by 23 per cent) which could end in disasters that used to be confined to dystopian sci-fi films – Think The Terminator series. Additionally, 20 per cent of those surveyed said they were anxious that robots will play a bigger role in the military.