Wall-E fell in love with another robot in the movie named after him. Researchers have yet to create a sentient machine, but a breakthrough could be on the horizon. Peter Remine says he will know it's time to get serious about rights for robots "when a robot knocks on my door asking for some help." Remine, founder of the Seattle-based American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, says the moment will come when a robot in an automobile factory "will become sentient, realize that it doesn't want to do that unfulfilling and dangerous job anymore, and ask for protection under state workers' rights." Bit by bit, we are growing more comfortable with digital devices in our daily lives.

THERE's been a minor car crunch on a city street in Brazil, and the two drivers are screaming and gesticulating, arguing angrily over who's to blame and who should pay for the damage. Instant justice has arrived, cyber-style. The laptop runs an artificial-intelligence program called the Electronic Judge, and its job is to help the human judge on the team swiftly and methodically dispense justice according to witness reports and forensic evidence at the scene of an incident. It can issue on-the-spot fines, order damages to be paid and even recommend jail sentences. The software is being tested by three judges in the state of Espirito Santo.

At least 160 federal agencies churn out rules and regulations -- more than 4,000 a year -- from specifying the height of steps on buses for the disabled to the method of calculating food's fiber content. Before finalizing a rule, government agencies are required to solicit and consider public comment, which, until recently meant publishing a notice in the Federal Register, accessible mostly to lobbyists. Now, all notices and requests for comment are to go through the Web site http://regulations.gov. Although that site communicates about as clearly as the instructions that come with income tax forms, it sometimes produces more public participation than regulators would prefer. To help the agencies deal with rule-making in the Internet age and make the process more accessible to the public, Cornell scientists and legal experts have created the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI), funded by a $750,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

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?

IBM's Watson, the computational genius that has bested "Jeopardy" champions, published a cookbook and even been unleashed in the fight against cancer, now has what is perhaps its greatest challenge: taking on the federal procurement morass. For years, government agencies have tried to find ways to make the purchasing process more efficient. But now the Air Force has come to the conclusion that humans cannot on their own manage the Federal Acquisition Regulation, 1,897 pages of the densest prose on the planet. The only way to navigate a stifling bureaucracy that virtually everyone agrees is broken is to turn to the power of the machine. The Air Force is working with two vendors, both of which have chosen Watson, IBM's cognitive learning computer, to develop programs that would harness artificial intelligence to help businesses and government acquisitions officials work through the mind-numbing system.

The proceedings of the conferences are published in the Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence and Applications series of IOS Press. The Jurix conference attracts a wide variety of participants, coming from government, academia and business. It is accompanied by workshops on topics ranging from eGovernment, legal ontologies, legal XML, alternative dispute resolution (ADR), argumentation, deontic logics, etc.

Prof. Dr. (Juris) Jon Bing is the Institute leader of the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law, the second oldest academic institution in the world working specifically with the interrelationship of law and information / communication technology; Dr. Bing is the recipient of numerous international awards. He is the Editor of the news-letter Lov&data (Norwegian news-letter on computers and law, published by the Lawdata foundation) and is an editorial board member of over 16 international journals.

The LOAIT workshop aims at offering an overview of theories and well-founded applications that combine Legal Ontologies and AI techniques. Similarly to past events organized in conjunction with ICAIL-97, Jurix 2001 and ICAIL-03 the LOAIT workshop will constitute a valuable opportunity for researchers and practitioners in AI, AI&Law, Legal Ontologies and related fields to discuss problems, exchange information and compare perspectives.

The conference will feature a main track for technical papers, a demonstration track, workshops, tutorials, a doctoral consortium and best paper prizes. The 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2017) will be held at King's College London from Monday, June 12 to Friday, June 16, 2017. The main Call for Papers can be found at: http://nms.kcl.ac.uk/icail2017/cfp.php The 2016 JURIX conference will take place on the beautiful French Riviera at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis on 14, 15 and 16 December 2016. We invite submissions of papers (long and short), technology demonstrations and proposals for workshops & tutorials.

We are, however, fast approaching 3.0, where the power of computational technology for communication, modeling and execution permit a radical redesign, if not a full replacement, of the current system itself. If the Internal Revenue Code were enacted in computer code rather than natural language, a good technological parsing engine (rather than the limited biological parsing engine of a lawyer's brain) could give tax advice quickly and cheaply. Indeed, regulatory compliance could be built directly into computational objects such as a share of stock built as a "smart security," keeping track of ownership and applicable trading rules. Online dispute resolution looks significantly different from current courts, as the offerings of Modria already demonstrate.