The Legal Market Embraces AI: Now Moving Beyond the Early Adopter Phase is the second post on The Dialogue from London-based Richard Tromans, publisher of Artificial Lawyer. As Richard points out data of this kind rapidly dates, such is the pace of change.

Never mind cancer research or climate change: IBM is finally bringing its Watson AI technology to bear on one of the real challenges still facing human civilisation – regulatory compliance. Big Blue has announced plans to snarf up Promontory Financial Group, a risk management and regulatory compliance consultancy, and combine the firm's expertise with Watson's cognitive capabilities in order to address the growing burden of regulation and risk management requirements. Promontory has about 600 workers in 19 offices across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East, and these are set to form the stout-hearted core of a new Watson Financial Services portfolio within IBM's Industry Platforms business. If all goes well, the transaction is expected to close before the end of 2016, but financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. According to IBM, more than 20,000 new regulatory requirements were created last year alone, and the complete catalogue of regulations is projected to exceed 300 million pages by 2020.

The use of artificial intelligence is more widespread in the law than in other sectors, and IT chiefs see more applications for it in the future, a survey has found. It said that 55% of senior IT decision makers in law firms have adopted predictive coding and 48% machine learning technologies, compared to 30% and 38% respectively in non-legal sectors. According to the study of 100 IT specialists in law firms and 100 in other industries conducted by IT company CenturyLink, 76% of legal chief information officers (CIOs) believed that AI would be capable of operating without supervision within the next decade, compared to 60% of non-legal CIOs. Legal CIOs also have a firm understanding of liability that coincides with the adoption of AI technology, it said – 73% of legal CIOs believed that machines would eventually be held liable for their own errors, compared to just 47% of non-legal CIOs. However, legal IT staff were also more conscious of possible problems caused by AI, with 62% citing concerns over errors in any work performed by artificial intelligence and automation systems.

A truck struck the center divider of the 101 Freeway in Hollywood early Monday morning, sending debris into lanes and briefly causing a full freeway closure. The crash was reported at about 3:08 a.m. on the northbound freeway, south of Cahuenga Boulevard, said California Highway Patrol Officer Elizabeth Kravig. There were no reported injuries, she said. Northbound and southbound lanes were closed, but the southbound lanes, shut down by debris on the roadway, reopened around 4:26 a.m. Northbound lanes remained closed as of 5:45 a.m. as a tow truck tried to upright the truck, which is possibly a taco truck, Kravig said.

Uber has killed off taxi service--it is a dying industry. AIRBNB is taking market share from hotels and motels--which is why lobbyists are swarming city hall to create regulations to make it more expensive and less available for property owners to use their private property. Fast food places are introducing robots to produce food, kiosks to take orders and payments. Hospitals are using robots to sanitize rooms and agriculture is developing driverless tractors. Now the legal profession is being hit is computer disruption.

One is overly credulous scare-mongering. But the other extreme is equally dangerous--complacency that we can overlook these issues now, because humanity-threatening AI is decades or more away. Whether it is down to scare-mongering or complacency, serious debates about the role of government, regulatory bodies and courts in regulating AI have been lacking. There are a number of possible explanations for this: the so-called'legal lag problem' where law is seen as invariably playing catch-up to rapid technological advances; the apparent anti-government libertarian bent of Silicon Valley; and the possibility that AI might elude traditional regulatory regimes. Like nuclear power and genetic research, AI is a classic risk/reward technology.

Five major technology companies said Wednesday that they had created an organization to set the ground rules for protecting humans -- and their jobs -- in the face of rapid advances in artificial intelligence. The Partnership on AI, unites Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in an effort to ease public fears of machines that are learning to think for themselves and perhaps ease corporate anxiety over the prospect of government regulation of this new technology. The organization has been created at a time of significant public debate about artificial intelligence technologies that are built into a variety of robots and other intelligent systems, including self-driving cars and workplace automation. The industry group introduced a set of basic ethical standards for engineering development and scientific research that its five members have agreed upon. In a conference call on Wednesday, five artificial intelligence researchers representing the companies said they thought the technology would be a major force in the world for social and economic benefits, but they acknowledged the potential for misuse in a wide variety of ways.

The gig: Kirstin Harper-Smith, 32, is senior project manager at Boston-based Suffolk Construction, where she is supervising the building of a 525-unit apartment tower on Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles. The 888 Grand Hope Lofts project by L.A. developer CIM Group will eventually rise 34 stories, consuming 27,000 cubic yards of concrete and 3,500 tons of rebar along the way. As head of the 10-person office side of the project, she oversees the budget, ensures safety requirements are met and directs who should do what jobs when -- all while trying to keep the project on schedule to wrap in about two years. She anticipates 10-hour days until then. An early start: Harper-Smith caught the engineering bug while growing up in San Diego.

May it please the court: I am HAL 9000, attorney for the plaintiff. Stephen Hawking once told the BBC that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Bill Gates and Elon Musk have voiced similar concerns. It could be that humanity's demise will look something like Skynet's takeover of the world when it became self-aware in the "Terminator" movie franchise. Irrespective of how the day of AI reckoning will look, we carbon-based lawyers have to figure out a way of making a living while competing against computer programs for work. Until fairly recently, AI never posed an existential threat to the critical-thinking professions such as law and medicine.

Airbnb boasts almost two million listings in 34,000 cities, and according to data from Inside Airbnb, a independent data analysis website, listed about 36000 apartments in New York as of July 5, 2016. This data exploration sets out to visualize how Airbnb operates in New York City. Airbnb's presence in NYC has been clouded in controversy from the beginning, with law makers arguing that Airbnb drive up rents for New York residents, as well as facilitating a lot of illegal hosting activities, all the while not paying any of the fees hotels are subjected to. Rent is drived up when landlords decide to rather rent apartments to short-term guests at higher rates, compared to signing up tenants for yearlong leases. In a study conducted in 2014, The New York State Attorney General concluded that 72%of all units used as private short-term rentals on Airbnb during 2010 through mid-2014 appeared to violate both state and local New York laws.