Manufacturing, finance, and the communications industry have in the last decade all come to rely upon artificial intelligence. But there's one industry that continues to put up resistance: the legal profession. The idea of a machine making legal decisions was long considered by opponents to be dangerous and ethically untenable. That's about to change, says John Zeleznikow, a computer scientist at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Zeleznikow believes AI is about to improve people's access to justice and massively reduce the costs of running legal services.

"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots." The key reasons cited by humans for dissatisfaction with robots are: • "That infernal humming." PART II Our surveys reveal that extramarital infidelity is the "tipping point" for the deterioration of human-robot relationships. As noted elsewhere in roboliterature (see "Russian Robot Wives Date Cyclotrons," National Enquirer, March 2047), a notorious flaw of robots' artificial intelligence technology is an underdeveloped moral sense. Over 75 percent of human-robot marital spats involve rampant robot promiscuity.

There is a strong possibility that in the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligences (AIs), perhaps in the form of robots, will become capable of sentient thought. Whatever form it takes, this dawning of machine consciousness is likely to have a substantial impact on human society. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and physicist Stephen Hawking have in recent months warned of the dangers of intelligent robots becoming too powerful for humans to control. The ethical conundrum of intelligent machines and how they relate to humans has long been a theme of science fiction, and has been vividly portrayed in films such as 1982's Blade Runner and this year's Ex Machina. Academic and fictional analyses of AIs tend to focus on human–robot interactions, asking questions such as: would robots make our lives easier?

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S last year, the new phone looked just like the previous one. It had a better camera and a faster chip, but it could do only one new thing: Siri. Siri, as everyone knows by now, is a software assistant that takes spoken orders. No training necessary: just hold down the "Home" button and speak casually. Siri lit the cultural world on fire. There were YouTube parodies, how-to guides and copycat apps for Android phones.

Artificial intelligence promises to fundamentally change the way humans live. By replicating intelligence on any level, we can begin to automate all kinds of jobs and otherwise human tasks, shifting the economy and potentially eliminating the need for a flesh-and-blood workforce. Turns out that idea perks up some ears at the White House. The National Science and Technology Council subcommittee on machine learning and artificial intelligence will start to meet next week, for the purpose of "monitor state-of-the-art advances and technology milestones in artificial intelligence and machine learning within the Federal Government, in the private sector, and internationally; and help coordinate Federal activity in this space." Additionally the White House will be holding four events in Summer 2016, to create more dialogue on how A.I. could change the United States.

Senators, law enforcement officials, and assorted experts attended a judiciary hearing yesterday to discuss the implications of drones in U.S. airspace. Right now drones aren't a part of everyday life for most Americans, but that's changing with 81 organizations--including government agencies, police departments, and universities-- cleared to fly robots in the U.S. and more expected down the line. In 2015, the Federal Aviation Authority plans to allow the first commercial use of drones in the United States. That might sound scary to people worried about a drone flying overhead and--legally--snapping pictures of them in their backyard sunning in their birthday suit. Thing is, that future has already arrived.

The bot, which had no consciousness, obviously learned those words from some data that she was trained on. Tay did reportedly have a "repeat after me" function, but some of the most racy tweets were generated inside Tay's transitive mind. However, Tay is not the last chatbot that will be exposed to the internet at large. For artificial intelligence to be fully realized, it needs to learn constraint and social boundaries much the same way humans do. Mark Riedl, an artificial intelligence researcher at Georgia Tech, thinks that stories hold the answer. "When humans write stories, they often exemplify the best about their culture," Riedl told Popular Science.

Xerox Corp. researchers have developed a search tool that tries to understand documents, rather than looking for keywords, in order to provide better results. The tool, FactSpotter, analyzes the underlying grammar of a text in order to infer additional information, such as whether ambiguous words are being used as nouns or verbs, or to whom a pronoun refers, said Fridirique Segond, who manages the parsing and semantics research group at Xerox Research Center Europe near Grenoble, France. The analysis allows the software to understand that references to "Bill Gates", "he" and "the head of Microsoft" in the same document likely refer to the same person. But the software should also be able to tell that "Bill Gates said ... " and "A friend of Bill Gates said ..." do not precede words spoken by the same person, a situation that would likely lead search engines using keyword analysis alone to return irrelevant results. One of the first groups to use FactSpotter will be Xerox Litigation Services, which next year will build it into a suite of "e-discovery" software for the legal profession, Segond said.

Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a patent holding company to resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit accusing Siri of infringing one of its patents. Apple will pay the money to Marathon Patent Group, the parent company of Texas firm Dynamic Advances, which held an exclusive license to a 2007 patent covering natural language user interfaces for enterprise databases. Marathon reported the settlement in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday. On Wednesday, in response to the settlement, Magistrate Judge David Peebles of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit against Apple filed by Dynamic Advances and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where the natural language technology was created. A trial had been scheduled to begin early next month in Syracuse, New York.

Workers who may be tempted to sell confidential corporate data should think twice about what they write in an email--an AI-based monitoring system could be watching. Tokyo-based data analysis company UBIC has developed an artificial intelligence system that scans messages for signs of potential plans to purloin data. A risk prediction function is being added to an existing product from the company that audits email for signs of activity such as price fixing. The Lit i View Email Auditor has been used in electronic discovery procedures in U.S. lawsuits. The artificial intelligence system, dubbed Virtual Data Scientist, can sift through messages and identify senders whose writing suggests they are in financial straits or disgruntled about how their employer treats them.