In September, Facebook CEO and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan promised to spend a whopping $3 billion of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's extensive capital over the next 10 years, as it works towards its lofty goal of curing, preventing or managing all diseases by the end of the century. To get a little bit closer to that goal, the Initiative announced Monday that it will acquire the AI-powered research paper search engine Meta and make the service free for anyone to use. Meta's search platform uses machine intelligence to analyze the number and quality of citations in medical journals and research papers, and then sorts them into the largest knowledge graph of its kind. Search results are then ranked in order of importance, similar to how Google News search gives a higher rank to highly linked sources, thus making it easier to find the most relevant or authoritative research among the thousands of scientific papers that are published every day. While that will undoubtedly help students and scientists save tons of time sifting through articles on PubMed, Meta can also help organizations decide where to direct their research budgets by identifying trends in certain areas of study or finding authors who have shown promising work in the past.

What would be your legal rights when coming up against a robot? Who would you sue if artificial intelligence denied you promotion, or even a job in the first place? What if your neighbour's future house-cleaning robot blew a fuse and crashed through your hedge or front window? A legal team from Otago University is going to try to find the answers to these questions. Robot'Nao' addresses the opening ceremony of the 2016 RoboCup China Open in Hefei, China.

It is common, at the beginning of the year, to ponder upon what the year ahead will bring. Several experts have published their predictions for trends we can expect in legal technology, in 2017. So, what are they saying? Generally speaking, they expect lawyers to become more mobile, more collaborative (using the cloud do to do), and more responsive (using social media to engage with clients and potential clients). Cybercrime & Cyberwarfare, too, will remain in the news.

"Experimentation is the least arrogant method of gaining knowledge. The experimenter humbly asks a question of nature." Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming for your job. But is it coming for the job of your photographer or inventor? The driver-less cars, automated factories, and automated laboratories of today may give way to AI capable of thinking, writing, creating or even diagnosing disease.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) leaders and experts in Enterprise Search and Knowledge Management solutions, RAVN Systems, is blending the world of tech and law with their latest AI endeavors: a self-service robot that promises big things for the legal industry. Through the use of a self-service AI portal, RAVN Systems' newest tech allows law firms to train an AI robot to perform any custom tasks necessary. The robot, known as RAVN Extract Direct, is a self-service version of the London company's older model RAVN Extract, which allowed users to use AI technology to automatically summarize, analyze, and extract key information from documents. The distinction of RAVN Extract Direct's self-service feature is integral, as it's what enables clients to be in complete control of the information obtained by the robot. RAVN's AI robot gives clients a more nuanced AI experience by allowing them to have complete control over the platform.

What initially began as a Facebook event has morphed into a cultural moment, a juxtaposition of the previous day's inauguration of America's 45th president, Donald Trump. Heather Whaling is CEO of Geben Communication, a PR and social media agency with offices in Columbus, Ohio, and Chicago. She serves on the board of The Women's Fund of Central Ohio, mentors women entrepreneurs, and is a vocal advocate for paid parental leave. On the issues, it's increasingly difficult to find commonalities between Trump supporters and the marchers who will flock to DC and other cities around the country. Yet both groups share at least one tool in their toolbox: A mastery of social media as the go-to channel to amplify viewpoints and shape perceptions.

Legal tech start-up, Juro, this week announced it had received significant funding to help grow its AI-powered contract system (see story here). Artificial Lawyer caught up with co-founder and former Freshfields lawyer, Richard Mabey to find out more. We discussed how Juro works, the difference between selling legal tech to lawyers and non-lawyers and where the UK-based company is headed. First, congratulations on the $750k in seed funding for Juro, that is a great sign of confidence from what are experienced tech investors. Can you set out for the readers broadly what Juro does?

In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens. Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India and Uganda have all shut off internet access when politically beneficial to their ruling parties. Nations like Singapore, Russia and China all exert outsized control over the structure and function of their national networks, often relying on a mix of political, technical and social schemes to control the flow of information within their digital borders. The effects of these policies are self-evident.

The internet was supposed to become an overwhelming democratizing force against illiberal administrations. It was supposed to open repressed citizens eyes, expose them to new democratic ideals and help them rise up against their authoritarian governments in declaring their basic human rights. It was supposed to be inherently resistant to centralized control. In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens.

I don't want to tell data scientists and AI developers what to do in any given situation. I want to give scientists and engineers tools for thinking about problems. We surely can't predict all the problems and ethical issues in advance; we need to be the kind of people who can have effective discussions about these issues as we anticipate and discover them. What are some of the ethical questions that AI developers and researchers should be thinking about? Even though we're still in the earliest days of AI, we're already seeing important issues rise to the surface: issues about the kinds of people we want to be, and the kind of future we want to build.