Ken makes a decent living operating a large harvester on behalf of farmer Luke. Ken's salary generates income tax and social security payments that help finance government programmes for less fortunate members of his community. Alas, Luke is about to replace Ken with Nexus, a robot that can operate the harvester longer, more safely, in any weather and without lunch breaks, holidays or sick pay. Bill Gates thinks that, to ease the inequality and offset the social costs implied by automation's displacement effects, either Nexus should pay income tax, or Luke should pay a hefty tax for replacing Ken with a robot. And this "robot tax" should be used to finance something like a universal basic income (UBI).

If news, polls and investment figures are any indication, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will soon become an inherent part of everything we do in our daily lives. Backing up the argument are a slew of innovations and breakthroughs that have brought the power and efficiency of AI into various fields including medicine, shopping, finance, news, fighting crime and more. We're inviting 250 to exhibit at TNW Conference and pitch on stage! But the explosion of AI has also highlighted the fact that while machines will plug some of the holes human-led efforts leave behind, they will bring disruptive changes and give rise to new problems that can challenge the economical, legal and ethical fabric of our societies. Here are four issues that need Artificial Intelligence companies need to address as the technology evolves and invades even more domains.

Police in New York City are looking for the owner of a drone that crashed through a window on a high-rise apartment building. NYPD officials say the drone crash occurred around 3:15 p.m. Saturday into a 27th-floor apartment in the Waterside Plaza tower overlooking the East River in Manhattan's Kips Bay section. Police say a 66-year-old woman living in the apartment was at her computer when the drone crashed through the window and landed just a few feet away from her. Police have recovered the drone, but so far don't know who owns it. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Halpern and Pearl introduced a definition of actual causality; Eiter and Lukasiewicz showed that computing whether X = x is a cause of Y = y is NP-complete in binary models (where all variables can take on only two values) and Σ^P_2 -complete in general models. In the final version of their paper, Halpern and Pearl slightly modified the definition of actual cause, in order to deal with problems pointed out by Hopkins and Pearl. As we show, this modification has a nontrivial impact on the complexity of computing whether {X} = {x} is a cause of Y = y. To characterize the complexity, a new family D_k^P , k = 1, 2, 3, . . ., of complexity classes is introduced, which generalises the class DP introduced by Papadimitriou and Yannakakis (DP is just D_1^P). We show that the complexity of computing causality under the updated definition is D_2^P -complete. Chockler and Halpern extended the definition of causality by introducing notions of responsibility and blame, and characterized the complexity of determining the degree of responsibility and blame using the original definition of causality. Here, we completely characterize the complexity using the updated definition of causality. In contrast to the results on causality, we show that moving to the updated definition does not result in a difference in the complexity of computing responsibility and blame.

Mady Delvaux wrote a report urging European politicians to enforce regulation around AI and robotics. European politicians have voted in favour of a controversial report calling for regulation on robots and artificial intelligence (AI). The vote, which took place in France on Thursday, was based on a report from the Legal Affairs Committee, which warned that there is a growing need for regulation to address increasingly autonomous robots and other forms of sophisticated AI. The report passed 396-to-123, with 85 abstentions. "MEP's (Members of the European Parliament) voted overwhelmingly in favour of the report," said a spokesperson for the European Parliament.

The US Supreme Court is considering a law banning convicted sex offenders from social media sites such as Facebook. The lawsuit was sparked by a North Carolina sex offender who posted on Facebook after his traffic ticket was dismissed. Thanks, Jesus," Lester Packingham Jr wrote. Mr Packingham was forbidden by a 2008 North Carolina law from using social networking sites that children could join, because he is a registered sex offender. He was convicted of indecent liberties with a minor when he was 21 and served 10 months in prison. A Durham police officer investigated the post and determined Mr Packingham used an alias rather than his real name. He was prosecuted, convicted of a felony and received a suspended prison sentence. However, his lawyers say no evidence pointed to him using Facebook or his computer to communicate with minors, or that he posted anything inappropriate or obscene. The Supreme Court will now decide whether the law, meant to prevent communications between sex ...

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Scientific American's sister publication, as "Digitale Demokratie statt Datendiktatur." "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another." The digital revolution is in full swing. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015. Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel. Soon, the things around us, possibly even our clothing, also will be connected with the Internet. It is estimated that in 10 years' time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money. Everything will become intelligent; soon we will not only have smart phones, but also smart homes, smart factories and smart cities. Should we also expect these developments to result in smart nations and a smarter planet? The field of artificial intelligence is, indeed, making breathtaking advances. In particular, it is contributing to the automation of data analysis. Artificial intelligence is no longer programmed line by line, but is now capable of learning, thereby continuously developing itself. Recently, Google's DeepMind algorithm taught itself how to win 49 Atari games. Algorithms can now recognize handwritten language and patterns almost as well as humans and even complete some tasks better than them. They are able to describe the contents of photos and videos. Today 70% of all financial transactions are performed by algorithms. News content is, in part, automatically generated. This all has radical economic consequences: in the coming 10 to 20 years around half of today's jobs will be threatened by algorithms. It can be expected that supercomputers will soon surpass human capabilities in almost all areas--somewhere between 2020 and 2060.

There are few tasks more Sisyphean in modern computing than comment moderation. For decades now, websites and social-media platforms have been tweaking comment sections in the hope of creating a space online where the chances of being called a "butthurt carelord" are vanishingly low. The problem they confront is that human moderation is slow and costly, especially at the scale most large companies are dealing with -- but automated moderation is unable to handle the complicated nuances of language and meaning that are necessary to determine whether or not a comment should be heard. Now, Google hopes that it's cracked the problem. Perspective, a new API from Google's Jigsaw division, goes public today -- launching with partners including Wikipedia and the New York Times, but available to any developer who wants to incorporate it into their website.

In the past month, the San Francisco ride-hailing firm faced a customer boycott and sexual harassment allegations, which have devastated employee morale and steered users away from the service. Then it was slapped with a lawsuit Thursday, in which Waymo -- Google's self-driving car project -- alleged theft of trade secrets. While Uber has in the past been adept at weathering bad publicity, brand and industry analysts are less sure about the company's ability to emerge from the recent damaging events unscathed, particularly since Uber has pegged its future to self-driving cars. It's a remarkable turn of events for a company that had until recently plowed through any conflict on its path. The lawsuit landed as Uber tried to right itself after 200,000 customers deleted the app because its chief executive served on a council advising President Trump.

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) has recently reported Q4 results, beating earnings estimates but with a slight miss on revenue. Shares fell 5% after the news mainly due to the relatively weak guidance. The good news is that the effects of new regulation on online advertising is mostly gone and the core search business will soon be growing again, helped by the integration of AI. Baidu's core search results were actually better than I thought. I expected the biggest impact of the new regulation to have its greatest impact on Q4 results, and I was expecting a bigger contraction.