It's well known that we in the tech sector love our acronyms. We also like re-badging stuff.What was once ASP (application service provision) morphed into SaaS (software as a service) and then became part of the cloud computing eco-system. And so it is at the moment with AI (artificial intelligence). There have been a number of pronouncements recently, particularly from private practice firms, about their adoption of AI. But is the truth more weighted towards the "artificial" than the "intelligence"?

Ever since humans invented technology, those new developments came along with fears about the unknown consequences of their impact. Consistently, one of those fears has been whether technology would replace humans in certain places. A great example was last month's Legal Service Jam, where I was lucky to mentor a group of legal workers in the adoption of service design tools to re-invent their profession. I couldn't help but notice a certain level of anxiety around the topic of professional uncertainty in the face of technological advancement. Many of us were there that day to think about how technology could disrupt a stereotypically old-fashioned industry, but many raised concerns: Are we not working towards replacing ourselves? Naturally, change is inevitable and those who realize this and adapt to it early enough, will reap the rewards.

Devin Butts walked the tiled halls of the Pueblo Mall early one Friday morning in April, amazed at what he saw. The mall, the main shopping center for the city of Pueblo in southern Colorado, was larger than anything the 25-year-old was used to while living on the streets of quiet prairie towns in north central Texas. He wandered through T-shirt stores and schlocky gift shops, past American flag-adorned beer bongs and marijuana-emblazoned "Rocky Mountain High" shirts, not noticing how employees warily eyed his baggy jeans and the tattoos peeking out from the sleeves and collar of his Bob Marley T-shirt. Or maybe he'd learned from experience to ignore the looks. Butts inquired at shop after shop. Often he received an apologetic shake of the head. Sometimes he was told to fill out an application online, no easy feat for someone who didn't own a computer.

In the midst of a continuing refugee crisis across much of the globe, June 20 marks World Refugee Day, an occasion that seeks to raise awareness for the plight of refugees across the world. And thanks to a partnership between Blippar, the augmented reality and artificial intelligence company, and UN refugee agency UNHCR, that awareness is going digital. Currently, the Blippar app allows people to "blipp," or scan objects they want to learn more about, thereby accessing informational or entertaining content about the world around them. As part of the new campaign, Blippar is asking users to show their support for refugees by blipping their hands. This scan of support translates into an instant signature on the UNHCR #WithRefugees petition, which requests that national governments act with solidarity and shared responsibility when it comes to the migrant crisis.

"Lawyers say nothing will ever replicate the trusted adviser role, but at the end of the day general counsel may decide to sacrifice those relationships if artificial intelligence can do the job," he said. "It will accelerate the trend of inhouse corporate teams to do more work for themselves. "Within 10-15 years, current buyers of legal services probably won't need law firms, as we currently understand them, at all." Advances in e-discovery, document automation, compliance and contract analysis were already claiming the responsibilities of junior lawyers but in another decade the number of senior lawyers would also likely shrink in response to artificial intelligence, such as IBM's legal robot "Ross" as well as machine-learning systems such as Google Brain and Google DeepMind, Mr Dwyer said. Rather than be on a back foot, director at law firm consultancy Janders Dean, Justin North said technology could also be an enabler that help firms get closer to clients.

When learning was still a predominantly human undertaking. "If a dataset can be downloaded from the web, regardless of whether it originated from a breach or other illegal activity, it is considered to be in the public domain and falls under the IRB exemption for public domain datasets." This is only one of many staggering assessments Kalev Leetaru got in response to his requests to data scientists and researchers, universities, research institutions, and research funders, asking them to elaborate on how they assured that their use of big data sets were ethically tenable. Leetaru, Senior Fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, was confronted with a plethora of answers – almost all explaining why the addressed would be unable to explain their reasoning. All this at a time when a number of high profile studies had to be retracted after publication in reaction to a firestorm of criticism by other researchers (who have a more accurate ethical compass, apparently).

We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert A. Simon predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world's chess champion. That didn't happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky's 1970 prediction that "in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being," we still consider that a feat of science fiction. The pioneers of artificial intelligence were surely off on the timing, but they weren't wrong; AI is coming.

Tech Insider recently published an article about the first artificially intelligent lawyer. ROSS – the name of the artificial intelligence (AI) – can search court rulings from 13 years ago, along with opinions about the case at hand and its significance to past court verdicts. ROSS also sifts through all of this information and provides the user with only highly relevant data. ROSS even operates in plain language, which is a huge step in artificial intelligence, as current systems search and process data in list form, which is not how court rulings and cases are documented. ROSS was recently'hired' at a bankruptcy firm, and several other firms have requested the AI lawyer as well.

Various land-use configurations are known to have wide-ranging effects on the dynamics of and within other city components including the transportation system. In this work, we particularly focus on the complex relationship between land-use and transport offering an innovative approach to the problem by using land-use features at two differing levels of granularity (the more general land-use sector types and the more granular amenity structures) to evaluate their impact on public transit ridership in both time and space. To quantify the interdependencies, we explored three machine learning models and demonstrate that the decision tree model performs best in terms of overall performance--good predictive accuracy, generality, computational efficiency, and "interpretability". Results also reveal that amenity-related features are better predictors than the more general ones, which suggests that high-resolution geo-information can provide more insights into the dependence of transit ridership on land-use. We then demonstrate how the developed framework can be applied to urban planning for transit-oriented development by exploring practicable scenarios based on Singapore's urban plan toward 2030, which includes the development of "regional centers" (RCs) across the city-state.

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.