International Business Machines is easily the most historical of all US IT computer behemoths. The question of what is IBM is today more apposite than ever. Any company that is 100 years old has faced challenges and met them but today's challenges are very different. It was founded in 1911 and is headquartered in Armonk, New York. IBM is being digitally disrupted. The company is transitioning from being an infrastructure player to being a data driven company.

When a new capability is conceived or developed, the intelligence community does not assign anyone responsibility for anticipating how a new AI algorithm may go awry. A computer algorithm issues orders to buy a stock and floods the market with hundreds or thousands of apparently separate orders to buy the same stock. Other algorithms take note of this sudden demand and start raising their buy and sell offers, confident that the market is demanding a higher price. The first algorithm registers this response and sells its shares of stock for the newly higher price, making a tidy profit.

On 21 June, the Law Society hosted a conference on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in law. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technology have made significant progress in recent years. Arguably, legal and ethical thinking about the societal implications could now be lagging behind this technical progress. We explored how machine learning is currently being used, how it may be used in the future and what the legal implications could be. The discussion will also examine the potential liability and regulatory considerations in relation to machine learning, and the role of the law and lawyers in this rapidly evolving area.

Self-driving cars in Germany might end up having "black boxes" that can record details of accidents, similar to planes, Reuters reports. Sources say that the proposal from Germany's Transport Minister, Alexander Dobrindt, will also require that riders stay seated in front of the steering wheel, though they won't have to pay attention to traffic or actually steer. As you've probably guessed right now, the legislation follows the recent Tesla Autopilot-related driver death. Regulators and car companies alike will have to work even harder to prove the safety of self-driving cars.

Snapchat has filed a patent application for a system of advertising that uses object recognition to serve users sponsored filters. The technology outlined by the company would identify items in users' pictures, and then offer them image overlays from brands related to these objects. It's the visual equivalent of buying advertising space based on keywords in Google searches -- but instead of looking for textual data in searches like "headphones" or "shoes," it's looking for the objects themselves. The patent application was filed in January last year, published by the US patent office earlier this month, and first spotted by Business Insider. Although it includes details about the advertising system described above, its primary purpose is outlining a more general system of "object recognition based photo filters."

Its frustrating when people claim algorithms are unbiased because while that may be true in some sense it ignores important problems that may arise in real world contexts where they are trained and deployed by fallible humans on imperfect data. For the most part I believe algorithms are unbiased. The main places these regulations are targeted, insurance companies, have unbiased ground truth on claims and accident rates. It's silly to ban machine learning across many industries and applications, instead of banning it in the specific places it is causing problems (which is what, exactly?) There are actually principled ways of addressing bias in data. These methods are totally broken.

"We are in a new era, one in which we are building systems that can't be grasped in their totality or held in the mind of a single person." George Hotz has a gift for bending complex technologies in the direction of his own desire. As a teenage nobody, Hotz earned notoriety for being the first hacker to unlock Apple's iPhone -- much to the annoyance of AT&T, who had exclusive-ish networking rights at the time. Several years later, he became the focus of a Sony lawsuit for releasing hacked Playstation 3 software to the world. And last December, he discussed his latest project with Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance -- a patched together home-made driverless car. When asked what compels him to crack open these complicated technologies Hotz said, "I want power.

Maitreya One, a black futurist and hip-hop artist living in Harlem, steps off the Greyhound bus on a warm morning in Montgomery, Alabama. I walk up to him and give him a hug. Maitreya is a civil rights link from the past to the future--and one of the few African-American transhumanists I know. He is stepping off one bus in Montgomery--whose roots are tied to the spectacular Freedom Riders who challenged segregation laws in the early 1960s--and onto another: the Immortality Bus, whose mission is to spread radical science and promote transhumanist rights. Like others in the burgeoning transhumanism movement, Maitreya supports becoming a cyborg in the future, and he knows the coming controversy over such aims may end up as challenging as the civil rights era battles over racism. To transhumanists--some who want to become new biological species and others who want to become machines--a new civil rights age is looming.

Google acquired Kifi, an app for collecting links from across the Internet, which teams could then collaborate on. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. The Kifi service and data will not become part of Google. The service will remain fully functional for existing users for a few more weeks, before its shut down. The company is no longer accepting new registrations. The team at Kifi will be joining the Spaces team at Google.

New technology could lead humans to relinquish control over decisions to use lethal force. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as "killer robots," are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction toward reality. The unmanned Sea Hunter gets underway. At present it sails without weapons, but it exemplifies the move toward greater autonomy.