Uber is dismissing allegations that it stole trade secrets from self-driving car rival Waymo, calling them "a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor." "We look forward to vigorously defending against them in court," the company said in an email on Friday. The day before, Waymo, a spin-off from Google's self-driving car initiative, filed a lawsuit against Uber, claiming that the company had stolen designs for a key technology that makes computer-led driving possible. According to the lawsuit, Uber allegedly built a LiDAR system for its own self-driving car that lifts confidential designs from Waymo's own technology. LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, can essentially help an autonomous car map its surroundings.

Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft--the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web--to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. As it becomes increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other technologies are going to be history's most aggressive job killers, more people (in Silicon Valley and elsewhere) are re-examining the possibility that a universal basic income could provide a solution. But as NYT Mag's Annie Lowrey reports, "No experiment has been truly complete, studying what happens when you give a whole community money for an extended period of time -- when nobody has to worry where his or her next meal is coming from or fear the loss of a job or the birth of a child." But now, in a few villages in Kenya, a non-profit is looking to run the biggest such experiment yet.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly mentions what has become known as the "10,000-hour rule", which states that to become world-class in any field you must devote 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice". Whether or not you believe the 10,000-hour figure, many would acknowledge that to become an accomplished legal professional requires considerable legal, communicative and, particularly in in-house environments, interpersonal skills that are often acquired after a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. There has been much hoopla about AI-based legal systems that, some might have you believe, may soon replace lawyers (no doubt causing a degree of anxiety among some legal professionals). There is some misunderstanding among many lawyers, and much of the public, about what AI systems are presently capable of. Can a legal AI, based on current technology, actually "think" like a lawyer?

Science fiction likes to depict robots as autonomous machines, capable of making their own decisions and often expressing their own personalities. Yet we also tend to think of robots as property, and as lacking the kind of rights that we reserve for people. But if a machine can think, decide and act on its own volition, if it can be harmed or held responsible for its actions, should we stop treating it like property and start treating it more like a person with rights? What if a robot achieves true self-awareness? Should it have equal rights with us and the same protection under the law, or at least something similar?

Waymo, set up by Google owner Alphabet, is taking legal action against Otto, Uber's self-driving vehicle unit that it bought last year for $700m. The lawsuit argues that former Waymo manager Anthony Levandowski took information when he left to co-found a venture that became Otto.

Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To do so, we develop a time evolving random forest classifier which leverages some unique feature engineering to predict more than 240,000 justice votes and 28,000 cases outcomes over nearly two centuries (1816-2015). Using only data available prior to decision, our model outperforms null (baseline) models at both the justice and case level under both parametric and non-parametric tests. Over nearly two centuries, we achieve 70.2% accuracy at the case outcome level and 71.9% at the justice vote level. More recently, over the past century, we outperform an in-sample optimized null model by nearly 5%.

In another astonishing detail from the court filing, Waymo says it was tipped off of the alleged theft when Waymo was "apparently inadvertently" copied on an email from a vendor of Uber's. The email included an attachment of an Uber circuit board that "bears a striking resemblance to Waymo's own highly confidential and proprietary design and reflects Waymo trade secrets," Waymo said in its lawsuit. In addition to the allegations against Levandowski, Waymo's complaint claims a supply-chain manager and a hardware engineer stole additional trade secrets before leaving their jobs at Waymo to join Otto, which was later acquired by Uber. The technology at stake involves a laser-based sensing system known as LiDAR, which helps self-driving cars position themselves on the roads, figure out where they're going, and essentially see what's around them. Indeed, Waymo's leadership in the self-driving car arena has much to do with its LiDAR system. They're "so far ahead of everyone else because the maps they use are so detailed and the LiDAR they're using gives so much rich information," John Leonard, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me in 2015.

Get used to hearing a lot more about artificial intelligence. Even if you discount the utopian and dystopian hyperbole, the 21st century will broadly be defined not just by advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, computing and cognitive neuroscience, but how we manage them. For some, the question of whether or not the human race will live to see a 22nd century turns upon this latter consideration. Last month, in a 17-2 vote, the parliament's legal affairs committee voted to begin drafting a set of regulations to govern the development and use of artificial intelligence and robotics While forecasting the imminence of an AI-centric future remains a matter of intense debate, we will need to come to terms with it. For now, there are many more questions than answers.

On December 15, 1791, when the U.S. government passed the first amendment and guaranteed freedom of speech, legislators were not thinking about Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant. People enjoy rights such as free speech in the United State and other countries around the world, and corporations are legally considered people for many purposes. As the field of artificial intelligence continues to grow and engineers pair it with natural language processing, we are increasingly seeing a voice-first future computer interface driven by intelligent assistants. And that matters, because where AI is answering, AI had to be listening. And when AI listens, sometimes it hears sensitive material.

Innovation is exploding into new territories...daily. Artificial intelligence is becoming the crux of sales strategies, facial recognition technology promises to create a seamless digital experience for brick and mortar stores, and self-driving cars will soon be carting us around as we read the news about what's next. And with all that innovation comes the marketing that goes with it. When you are creating anything new, the time will come when you have to find the best way to sell it to the masses. So you get your marketing team in there to bounce around ideas and find the best way to persuade the audience to buy the product.