With the deluge of reports lately on how robots are replacing humans at everyday tasks, you may think the end of the world, at least for a certain category of human workers, is nigh. Indeed that may well be the case in certain professions. The Associated Press, for instance, has a team of robots that generates 3,000 news reports about the quarterly earnings releases of companies. This Japanese hotel that I wrote about recently is staffed entirely with robots. The paralegal may soon be a position of the past as law firms commission bots to sift through vast reams of legal information and synthesise them.

A huge amount of information is stored or communicated in the form of natural language. But it is difficult to make use of this information without asking people to read or listen it all. In our European research centre in Grenoble (France), we teach computers to read, understand and act. Our research in natural language processing (NLP) makes this information accessible, but also comprehensible, integrated, and actionable. Our algorithms and models are used in text analytics applications for healthcare, litigation, automation and finance.

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. Seventeen of the world's most wired minds stake their names – and their cash – on the future. Pronouncements about the future come easy. Even when made with an air of authority, they're usually just cheap talk, rarely revisited. Only the tiny fraction that have proven correct tend to be remembered, when their authors want to take credit. The Long Bets Foundation, a new project masterminded by Well founder Stewart Brand and Wired editor at large Kevin Kelly, hopes to raise the quality of our collective foresight by incorporating money and accountability into the process of debate. If someone makes a grandiose claim, any skeptic can challenge it – "Would you bet on that?" – and the Long Bets Foundation will keep tabs on the wager, whether it takes five years or five decades to come to pass. If proven right, a predictor can relish the victory; if wrong, the challenger gets the glory. By preserving the terms of the wager in public view, Long Bets promises to be more than a service for confident prognosticators. Over time, it hopes to foster better understanding of how predictions in aggregate work out in reality – what kinds of truths are easiest (or hardest) to forecast, and what kinds of people are right (or wrong) most reliably. Following are the first-ever "long bets."

When Jimoh Ovbiagele was ten years old, his parents decided to get a divorce. But as the couple got deeper into the process, the legal fees grew more and more expensive, until they ended up abandoning the whole plan. "It had a negative impact on my family," Ovbiagele says. In high school and beyond, when Ovbiagele was looking into various career options, he discovered that most of a lawyer's time is actually spent researching cases. Ovbiagele ended up studying computer science rather than law, but when he had the opportunity to pursue an artificial intelligence project at the University of Toronto, he had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to work on.

More fallout this week from the Edward Snowden leaks two years ago: the US Second Court of Appeals ruled May 7th that the NSA's mass phone surveillance is illegal, but did not issue an injunction to stop the Agency's bulk data collection. Meanwhile, many of us knowingly give up privacy online for digital convenience. As the concept of privacy continues to evolve, leading technologists and thinkers debate what privacy means and how much should we want and expect. VIDEO: Clockwise from left: voice-recognition pioneer Janet Baker, co-founder of Dragon Systems; Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO, Second Spectrum, a data software company that's helping NBA teams up their game; Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of predictably insightful books like Predictably Irrational; Polymath industrial designer Yves Behar, Founder, fuseproject; Chief Creative Officer, Jawbone; COO, August; Ali Kashani, Founder and CTO, Neurio, an Internet of Things start-up that is monitoring your house; Fei-Fei Li, Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab, is teaching computers to see; and Rodney Brooks, Founder and CTO, Rethink Robotics and Co-founder of iRobot, is concerned that Google knows every move he makes but is tempted by their tools nonetheless.

Airbnb is under fire for taking nearly one year to ban a host who turned away a transgender woman amid growing scrutiny of discrimination on the service. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky opens the company's Open Air tech conference by addressing the recent racist incidents that have plagued the site. SAN FRANCISCO -- Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky opened the company's Open Air technical conference Wednesday by addressing recent racist incidents that have taken place on the $25-billion company's home sharing site. Beyond expressing outrage at the incidents that have impacted African-Americans and transgender guests, Chesky said the company plans to pursue technological innovations to guard against future discriminatory events. Chesky did not get specific about what those tech solutions could be, but his presence at the event -- which was not listed in the program -- speaks to both the urgency and seriousness of the issue for the company.

A self-driving Lexus SUV owned by Google's parent company Alphabet struck a bus February 14 while it was testing on the streets of Mountain View, Calif. SAN FRANCISCO -- The FBI-Apple encryption battle is just the beginning of an important debate this country needs to have about what to do when U.S. innovation outpaces American law. The FBI's failure to get data it wanted from an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists -- despite significant help from Apple -- shows that time has arrived once again. As with the coming of the telephone, the car, the radio and TV, the spread of the mobile Internet has gotten ahead of case law. In this case, with hand-held smartphones now ubiquitous, a consumer technology has outstripped the ability of the government to complete an important terrorist investigation.

A committee of MPs has condemned police for continuing to upload custody photographs, including of people never charged, to a face recognition database, despite a high court judgement that ruled the practice was unlawful. In a report into use of biometric data, the Commons Science and Technology Committee said it was "dismayed" to learn that more than 12m photographs had been entered into the Police National Database without proper testing or oversight. It also noted that current practice appeared to flout a high court ruling from 2012 that said the contemporary policy of retaining custody photographs was unlawful. Some forces, including the Met, have stopped putting images on the national database until the law is clarified. But others have continued to upload photographs in the absence of any national guidance.

On 24 August 1965 Gloria Placente, a 34-year-old resident of Queens, New York, was driving to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Clad in shorts and sunglasses, the housewife was looking forward to quiet time at the beach. But the moment she crossed the Willis Avenue bridge in her Chevrolet Corvair, Placente was surrounded by a dozen patrolmen. There were also 125 reporters, eager to witness the launch of New York police department's Operation Corral – an acronym for Computer Oriented Retrieval of Auto Larcenists. Fifteen months earlier, Placente had driven through a red light and neglected to answer the summons, an offence that Corral was going to punish with a heavy dose of techno-Kafkaesque. It worked as follows: a police car stationed at one end of the bridge radioed the licence plates of oncoming cars to a teletypist miles away, who fed them to a Univac 490 computer, an expensive $500,000 toy ($3.5m in today's dollars) on loan from the Sperry Rand Corporation. The computer checked the numbers against a database of 110,000 cars that were either stolen or belonged to known offenders. In case of a match the teletypist would alert a second patrol car at the bridge's other exit. It took, on average, just seven seconds. Compared with the impressive police gear of today – automatic number plate recognition, CCTV cameras, GPS trackers – Operation Corral looks quaint.

In about A.D. 1300 the Anasazi people abandoned Long House Valley. To this day the valley, though beautiful in its way, seems touched by desolation. It runs eight miles more or less north to south, on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, just west of the broad Black Mesa and half an hour's drive south of Monument Valley. To the west Long House Valley is bounded by gently sloping domes of pink sandstone; to the east are low cliffs of yellow-white sedimentary rock crowned with a mist of windblown juniper. The valley floor is riverless and almost perfectly flat, a sea of blue-gray sagebrush and greasewood in sandy reddish soil carried in by wind and water. Today the valley is home to a modest Navajo farm, a few head of cattle, several electrical transmission towers, and not much else. Yet it is not hard to imagine the vibrant farming district that this once was. The Anasazi used to cultivate the valley floor and build their settlements on low hills around the valley's perimeter. Remains of their settlements are easy to see, even today. Because the soil is sandy and the wind blows hard, not much stays buried, so if you leave the highway and walk along the edge of the valley (which, by the way, you can't do without a Navajo permit), you frequently happen upon shards of Anasazi pottery, which was eggshell-perfect and luminously painted. On the site of the valley's eponymous Long House--the largest of the ancient settlements--several ancient stone walls remain standing. Last year I visited the valley with two University of Arizona archaeologists, George Gumerman and Jeffrey Dean, who between them have studied the area for fifty or more years. Every time I picked up a pottery shard, they dated it at a glance. By now they and other archaeologists know a great deal about the Anasazi of Long House Valley: approximately how many lived here, where their dwellings were, how much water was available to them for farming, and even (though here more guesswork is involved) approximately how much corn each acre of farmland produced. They have built up a whole prehistoric account of the people and their land. But they still do not know what everyone would most like to know, which is what happened to the Anasazi around A.D. 1300. "Really, we've been sort of spinning our wheels in the last eight to ten years," Gumerman told me during the drive up to the valley. "Even though we were getting more data, we haven't been able to answer that question."