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.

A fellow writer recently told me that when he began his career, he was always hunting for a scoop, a story no one else had. Now, with a couple decades experience, he does the opposite. "I look for a story that's already been done 10 times," he said, "with the aim of making the 11th the one everyone would rather read." Lurking behind that notion is an important fact about popular art: It relies on the familiar. Successful pop artists aren't necessarily the most daring or sophisticated, but the best have the skill to take what they've heard and make it fresh.

As what was once mere data evolves into actionable intelligence, the context that binds that data becomes ever more essential. With no context around those four letters, you might not understand the reference or make any sort of connection. But if you add just one word to "java," such as "development," "island," or "coffee," the reference changes completely--and that's with just a single word of context. This is the type of active context and connection that the Brainspace engine provides. "Context is a very important part of what we do. When we analyze documents, we take the context into consideration," says Ravi Sathyanna, vice president of technology and product management at Brainspace.

DLA Piper will use artificial intelligence technology by Kira Systems for due-diligence document review in mergers and acquisitions. Kira's machine-learning software searches texts in contracts, then creates a summary and analysis, according to a press release announcing the deal. Such software is designed to get smarter as it is used. Jonathan Klein, chair of DLA Piper's U.S. mergers and acquisition practice, said in the press release that the technology will make due diligence faster and more efficient, and will mitigate risk throughout the due diligence practice. "We believe that this innovative technology will do for corporate transactional work what e-discovery has done for litigation," he said. DLA Piper already tried the software in its corporate, intellectual property and technology practices.

In a talk in Pittsburgh in 1997, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould allegedly characterized humans as "the primates who tell stories." Psychologist Robyn Dawes went much further, suggesting humans are "the primates whose cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story." To be sure, we love a good story. Research suggests that anecdotes can be as persuasive as hard data, and that jurors are influenced by the quality of the prosecution's and defense's "stories" when deciding whether to find a defendant guilty. Even in science, we seek explanations, not mere descriptions; in history, we want a good narrative, not a mere sequence of events. Or do they offer something more?

The fear of machines taking over jobs was once primarily the fear of factory workers. Robots can handle mundane jobs because there is little thinking involved. But now AI is allowing machines to think. Enter ROSS, a creation of the Jeopardy playing Watson and derivative of the very same AI system. With regards to legal research, ROSS's creators say that it can read through the entire body of law and return a cited answer, and not a list of answers.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) ordered BSI Bank Singapore to shut down recently on 24 May 2016. This serious action is due to their compliance oversight in money laundering which resulted in a criminal case. This is also a stark reminder of the compliance challenges that financial institutions are facing today. They had attracted millions of dollars of regulatory fines in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. A distinguished law firm, Baker and McKenzie, commissioned a survey of 424 senior executives from financial institutions.

Artificial Intelligence has made great advances in recent years, with computer scientists developing cars without drivers, planes without pilots and mobile phones which can double up as a personal assistant. The legal profession is proving to be rich territory in the AI field too. Joshua Rozenberg meets computer scientists at the University of Liverpool, who are using'computational argumentation' to digitally decide the results of legal cases, proving that AI can be just as discerning as a court judge.

RMIT's Centre for Innovative Justice, Victoria Legal Aid and the National Directors of Legal Aid Commissions are holding a forum to showcase new approaches and provide a glimpse of current work in design thinking, artificial intelligence and the law, including a demonstration of the new online dispute resolution platform Rechtwijzer 2.0. We aim to cultivate a community of practice and spark collaboration between disciplines to improve access to justice.

This paper studies two issues concerning relevance in structured argumentation in the context of the ASPIC+ framework, arising from the combined use of strict and defeasible inference rules. One issue arises if the strict inference rules correspond to classical logic. A longstanding problem is how the trivialising effect of the classical Ex Falso principle can be avoided while satisfying consistency and closure postulates. In this paper, this problem is solved by disallowing chaining of strict rules, resulting in a variant of the ASPIC+ framework called ASPIC*, and then disallowing the application of strict rules to inconsistent sets of formulas. Thus in effect Rescher & Manor's paraconsistent notion of weak consequence is embedded in ASPIC*. Another issue is minimality of arguments. If arguments can apply defeasible inference rules, then they cannot be required to have subset-minimal premises, since defeasible rules based on more information may well make an argument stronger. In this paper instead minimality is required of applications of strict rules throughout an argument. It is shown that under some plausible assumptions this does not affect the set of conclusions. In addition, circular arguments are in the new ASPIC* framework excluded in a way that satisfies closure and consistency postulates and that generates finitary argumentation frameworks if the knowledge base and set of defeasible rules are finite. For the latter result the exclusion of chaining of strict rules is essential. Finally, the combined results of this paper are shown to be a proper extension of classical-logic argumentation with preferences and defeasible rules.