When Chad Latham was convicted to spend 15 years behind bars for growing marijuana, he couldn't have predicted what the future would hold for him. A decade into his sentence, marijuana was legalized in his state (Washington), and shortly afterward he received clemency from President Obama. Sent out into the world a free man, Latham had some recalibrating to do. The looming question, of course, was "What now?" In his teenage years he'd been interested in computers, and it had stuck.

A man who groomed young boys through the online game Minecraft has been jailed for two years and eight months. Adam Isaac, 23, from Merthyr Tydfil, previously admitted eight sexual offences against children. Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court heard he targeted two boys, aged 12 and 14, and asked them to send intimate photos of themselves. Judge Richard Twomlow QC said: "This predatory behaviour is a worry and a concern to parents." Isaac admitted causing or inciting child prostitution or pornography, performing sexual acts in the presence of a child, encouraging a child to engage in a sexual activity and the possession of indecent photos of a child.

Is it acceptable for a driverless car to deliberately swerve in a way that saves its own passengers yet kills a pedestrian? That and other ethical dilemmas related to artificial intelligence will be put under the microscope by Kiwi researchers receiving $400,000 in funding from the charitable Law Foundation trust. With AI technology set to increasingly transform transport, crime prevention and other areas the Otago University research aims to inform public policy over three years. "New technologies are rapidly transforming the way we live and work, and (this funding) will help ensure that New Zealand's law and policy keeps up with the pace of change," Law Foundation executive director Lynda Hagen said. Research project leader Colin Gavaghan said the legal, practical and ethical challenges posed by AI technologies, which learn and adapt for themselves, fascinated him.

Experts warn of the threat posed by super-intelligent machines, but what does this new era of automation mean for the future of work as we know it? Earlier this year, the Japanese office of advertising agency McCann Erickson announced a new creative director. The new employee underwent the agency's traditional welcoming ceremony alongside 11 college graduates. However, McCann's new creative director wasn't able to join the post-ceremony celebrations with the rest of the graduates. That's because it was a robot.

This piece was coauthored with Megan Beck, Chief Insights Officer at OpenMatters, and Steven Cracknell, advisor to OpenMatters. When we examine and value companies, we use a lens that is more than five hundred years old. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which dates back to a Venetian Friar who lived in 1500 AD, has long been the determinant of what we how society measures value. According to this now global standard, things and money are valuable assets. People and ideas, and their development, are expenses.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stands by his offer to go to the USA now that Chelsea Manning is being released, he told a press conference. Mr Assange had previously committed to hand himself in and face any possible extradition to the US, should Barack Obama offer clemency to Ms Manning. But when that happened, his lawyers suggested that he wouldn't actually fulfil that commitment – arguing that Ms Manning wasn't being released quickly enough. Now Mr Assange has said that he will stand by the offer. He said that there will be "many discussions" on his future before Ms Manning leaves prison in May.

'It is similar to what we now have for companies,' Delvaux noted. The idea of corporate personhood has existed for several decades, giving firms the right to take part in legal cases both as the plaintiff and respondent, own property, and a limited amount of free speech. They are limited in that they cannot vote, run for office, or bear arms. The comparison with corporate personhood is, unfortunately, not particularly unfavorable. When it comes to promoting commercial interests, however, various parties have proven themselves highly adept at exploiting the notion of corporate personhood for their own gain, and there is no reason to think that they shouldn't take advantage of electronic personhood in the same way.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming at us before we fully understand what it might mean. Established ways of doing things in areas like transport regulation, crime prevention and legal practice are being challenged by new technologies such as driverless cars, crime prediction software and "AI lawyers". The possible implications of AI innovations for law and public policy in New Zealand will be teased out in a new, ground-breaking Law Foundation study. The three-year multi-disciplinary project, supported by a $400,000 Law Foundation grant, is being run out of the University of Otago. Project team leader Associate Professor Colin Gavaghan of the Faculty of Law says that AI technologies – essentially, technologies that can learn and adapt for themselves – pose fascinating legal, practical and ethical challenges.

Most people's expectations of robots are driven by fantasy. These marvelous machines, optimists hope, will follow Moore's law, doubling in quality every 18 months, and lead to a Jetsonian utopia. Or, as pessimists fear, humanoid bots will reproduce, increase their intelligence, and wipe out humanity. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of "discovery" -- providing documents relevant to a lawsuit -- the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates. But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.