AI has become such a huge topic that late last year the White House released a report on the Future of Artificial Intelligence, which focused on the opportunities, considerations, and challenges of AI. As more and more industries, including healthcare and financial services, adopt AI technology, the technology's value will increase its impact on society as a whole. AI, machine learning and other technologies are already making a significant impact in several industries, including e-commerce, hospitality, and retail. While there has always been a slight tension among workers about robots taking over and claiming jobs, there is a lot to be said about how these types of technologies will, in fact, add more value, contribute to economic growth and augment the workplace so employees can work more effectively. It starts with the huge volumes of contracts that define business relationships, capture the rules of engagement and are the foundation of business transactions every day.

MEPs have called for the adoption of comprehensive rules for how humans will interact with artificial intelligence and robots. The report makes it clear that it believes the world is on the cusp of a "new industrial" robot revolution. It looks at whether to give robots legal status as "electronic persons". Designers should make sure any robots have a kill switch, which would allow functions to be shut down if necessary, the report recommends. Meanwhile users should be able to use robots "without risk or fear of physical or psychological harm", it states.

Last year's trend outlook for 2016 suggested that you keep your eye on growing consumer control, the emerging questions about AI and our excitement about the prospects of virtual reality applications. The landscape has changed -- a lot. For 2017, consumer trends show a growing emphasis on shifting local and global identity, the impact of intersectionality on business and culture, and the real threats in the realm of cyber security. For marketers and business this means staying culturally relevant is even more important. A few years ago (or maybe just a few months back?) globalism seemed inevitable.

We at AIBusiness are officially launching our new series'AI Innovators' this January. This is a series dedicated to featuring interviews with relevant spokespersons across a range of businesses that have entered the world of artificial intelligence. AI Innovators aims to provide our readers with a broad insight into how artificial intelligence is implemented within different industries, anything from finance to medical research. The fourth company to feature in these series is EY, a multinational professional services firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom. EY is one of the largest professional services firm in the world and is one of the "Big Four" accounting firms.

Could AI-powered bots fight hate speech by flooding the internet with love? As social media platforms have become ever more intrinsic to how we live our lives and begun to evolve into the primary medium through which we communicate and listen to the rest of the world, their rise has handed a megaphone to the world's hate and vitriol. In fact, it was Twitter who initially stepped forward to staunchly defend the rights of terrorists and their sympathizers to communicate via its platform before abruptly reversing itself in the face of fierce public criticism. Yet, despite myriad programs and policies designed on paper to fight abuse, in reality the platforms have done very little to curb the spread of hate speech, harassment and violent threats. This raises the question of whether the rise of deep learning-powered "bots" could offer a powerful solution to online hate speech, by deploying them en masse to report, counter and overwhelm hateful posts in realtime. Over the last few years deep learning algorithms have made enormous advances in their ability to process human text and imagery at levels of sophistication and accuracy that approach human levels at times, while even simple ELIZA bots have managed to carry on fairly convincing chats for more than half a century.

Robots are taking increasingly bigger roles in life and business – moving well beyond manufacturing and into transportation, education, medicine and care for the elderly. But ethics and law haven't caught up. Dr. Kate Darling, a pioneer in the fields, is helping quicken the pace. A leading expert in robot ethics, she is a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab where she investigates social robotics and conducts experimental studies on human-robot interaction. Darling explores the emotional connection between people and life-like inventions, seeking to influence technology design and policy direction.

The legal profession is not far away from being exposed to the disruptive potential of AI. In India, a leading full service law firm, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas has plans to deploy AI technology. This will help the firm to enhance its delivery model, in an attempt to provide certain legal services more efficiently, swiftly, and more accurately to its clients. The firm recently signed an agreement with a leading Canada-based machine learning software provider, called Kira Systems. Cyril Shroff, Managing Partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, remarks "The firm has been working on several interconnected initiatives since last year. The collaboration with Kira will help us bring these technologies for our clients in a proactive manner."

Cult indie-folk band the Mountain Goats is known for having fans that are rabidly devoted--and you'd almost have to be like that just to keep up. Led by John Darnielle--a charmingly nerdy 49-year-old songwriter whose professed admirers include Stephen Colbert, and whom Rolling Stone recently dubbed rock's "best storyteller"--the Goats have put out 15 albums since 1994, using simple chord structures as a framework for Darnielle's complex lyrical narratives. Fans have even petitioned to make him America's Poet Laureate, so maybe it's no surprise that Darnielle recently stumbled into literary success as well. His debut novel, Wolf in White Van, about a reclusive, disfigured game designer who seeks refuge in a role-playing game, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Out February 7, Darnielle's latest, an enchanting horror mystery called Universal Harvester, follows a video store clerk in small-town Iowa whose customers begin complaining of disturbing footage spliced into their rented VHS tapes. When he's not writing something, Darnielle, raised in a progressive activist household, is out fighting for reproductive justice--serving, for instance, on the board of the National Abortion Rights Action League and performing in support of Planned Parenthood.

A week after Donald Trump's election, a thirty-year-old cognitive scientist named Maya Shankar purchased a plane ticket to Flint, Michigan. Shankar held one of the more unorthodox jobs in the Obama White House, running the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, also known as the President's "nudge unit." When she launched the team, in early 2014, it felt, Shankar recalls, "like a startup in my parents' basement"--no budget, no mandate, no bona-fide employees. Within two years, the small group of scientists had become a staff of dozens--including an agricultural economist, an industrial psychologist, and "human-centered designers"--working with more than twenty federal agencies on seventy projects, from fixing gaps in veterans' health care to relieving student debt. Usually, the initiatives had, at their core, one question: Could the growing body of knowledge about the quirks of the human brain be used to improve public policy? For months, Shankar had been thinking about how to bring behavioral science to bear on the problems in Flint, where a crisis stemming from lead contamination of the drinking water had stretched on for almost two years. She wondered if lessons from the beleaguered city could inform the Administration's approach to the broader threat posed by lead across America--in pipes, in paint, in dust, and in soil. "Flint is not the only place poisoning kids," Shankar said. In recent years, behavioral science has become a voguish field. In 2002, the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work with a colleague, Amos Tversky, exploring the peculiarities of human decision-making in the face of uncertainty. A basic premise of the discipline they'd helped to create was that people's cognition is bias-prone, and susceptible to the cognitive equivalent of optical illusions. As a result, small tweaks of presentation or circumstance could make a major difference: if a judge rendered a decision about granting parole just before a meal, the inmate's odds for a favorable outcome dipped to near zero; just after the judge ate, the chances rose to around sixty-five per cent. Grocers had learned that they could sell double the amount of soup if they placed a sign above their cans reading "limit of 12 per person." But, for all the field's potential, its advances seemed mostly to have served the private sector. A prominent exception was the "nudge," a notion advanced by the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, now at Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago behavioral economist Richard Thaler, in their 2008 best-seller "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

Whether it's a new employment contract, a rental contract, or sale contract, it needs to be checked before signing. Everyone knows the struggle of working through the dreaded small print, searching for pitfalls hidden in the tiniest details, and trying to make sense out of the bizarre language of law. In fairness to the layman, contract review is also a hustle for lawyers themselves. In 2014, commercial lawyer Noory Bechor got sick of the fact that 80 percent of his work was spent reviewing contracts. He figured the service could be done much cheaper, faster, and more accurately by a computer.