British military drones bringing death from above could be capable of firing on targets without the need for a human operator. A new drone being developed by French and British military contractors for use by the RAF, is being built with capabilities of selecting and engaging targets using artificial intelligence. While human intervention is required under international law, the Taranis drone could potentially become fully autonomous if the laws change, taking humans out of the loop and leaving the decision-making to the machines. A new drone being developed by French and British military contractors for use by the RAF, is being built with capabilities of selecting and engaging targets using artificial intelligence, removing the need for humans in the decision-making process. Developed by BAE Systems, the Taranis drone is named after the Celtic god of thunder and is designed to stealthily approach and attack targets, without being detected.

Are you a lawyer, a law student, or an incoming law freshman? If you are any of the three, better think twice of your career path now because a new generation of lawyers – in the form of robots – will win all future court cases. You might want to rethink that choice, buddy. It appears that the J.D. lawyers have earned is no match to this robot. Powered by IBM's cognitive computer program Watson, the robot named ROSS can read through all law transcripts including court decisions to provide an answer relevant to the case being decided.

At the recent LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions' InterAction Share event in London, I shared with delegates my insight and advice in relation to the rise of smart technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots in the legal ecosystem and how these technologies are being, and will be, deployed in the industry. By addressing all of the above, it naturally led to my tackling the challenging question "what is the next legal frontier?" It's important to realise and understand that it is inevitable that the roles of lawyers, general counsel, marketers, business development, social media and CRM specialists etc. are going to change in light of such overwhelming technological advances. The question that is hotly debated today is whether advanced technologies will support or replace lawyers. Well, the research speaks volumes.

By all accounts, Elon Musk may be one of the smartest people alive. But he surprised more than a few people this week at the 2016 Code Convention in California when he stated his belief that we are not really real, but rather computer generated entities living inside a more advanced civilization's video game. Responding to a question from journalist Josh Topolsky, Musk said, "The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photo realistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality. "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now.

For those thinking of law school, keep in mind that technology may revolutionize the profession before you earn that J.D. In the research-driven, labor-intensive legal profession, the age-old question of man vs. machine is being answered as some law firms have begun to use an "artificially intelligent attorney" to research and hash out legal issues – a trend that legal minds predict will displace some human lawyers. Called ROSS, the robot lawyer uses IBM's cognitive computer program Watson to learn from experience to gain speed when answering legal questions, according to its creators. It can read through the entire body of law to return a cited answer, monitor the law to recognize other court decisions that could affect the case at hand, and even glean conclusions from more than one billion legal documents per second, they add. Its creation comes on the heels of a 2014 analysis that predicted artificial intelligence will cause "structural collapse" of law firms by 2030. As for the robo-lawyer, one law professor said the technology will displace some workers.

I saw the future of the legal industry in a warehouse in Shoreditch. That perhaps sounds like an unusual thing to say about a 700 billion global market, but after visiting a legal tech company yesterday in London's most dynamic quarter the true scale of what could happen to the legal sector was laid bare. What I saw is not the end for all lawyers, but instead an AI whirlwind hitting the current world of paralegals and junior associates, whose working lives may very well be about to turn upside down. Such a change will, or at least could, shake the economic model of law firms that has existed for decades to its very foundations. And by that I mean the end of large-scale leverage, i.e. the practice of using several junior lawyers to every equity partner and through which some law firms have been able to become incredibly profitable.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to help reform policing and criminal justice practices nationwide, experts say. However, one challenge to deploying widespread artificial intelligence is refining the data to avoid reinforcing historic biases. The White House and the University of Chicago have teamed up with police departments across America to "start fixing" biases with the data collected over the years by the criminal justice system by building new ways of looking at the data, said director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago Riyad Ghani. "We think that AI and machine learning… combined with all the data that exists can help solve these problems," Ghani said. The United States locks up more people per capita than any other nation, and artificial intelligence and machine learning can create predictive modeling and find patterns in behaviors of the officers and those being arrested, explained Ghani.

Those artificial intelligence programs being created by Google and other brain trusts are getting more clever by the day. When they're not beating game masters in a Go tournament they're composing new, original music. But leave it to the government to try to make the best use of new technology. We can't be satisfied with simply replacing our chess grand masters and Beyonce' with a snazzy new algorithm, so at least one expert in the Obama administration is pondering a new idea. Maybe they could replace judges in the courtroom. Artificial intelligence might soon become a standard part of criminal justice proceedings.

The Financial Times is reporting that Adidas is going to bring back production to its native Germany for the first time in 30 years. It's spent the last six months testing a robotic factory with automated production lines creating soles and uppers separately before stitching them together. Spurred on by the results, the company is working on a large facility near Ansbach which will begin making sneakers for sale at some point next year. Another facility will be built in the US, although both are expected to produce just a tiny fraction of the 301 million pairs the firm made last year. The paper explains that a robot production line takes about five hours to create each pair of sneakers from scratch. By comparison, it apparently takes "several weeks" to do the same job in an Asian factory with human workers.

Sales of drones are soaring - and so are the concerns about how easily these devices can be hacked. Researchers have discovered that manufacturers are unknowingly leaving digital doors unlocked that give hackers an opportunity to wreak havoc on the system. The team found three different vulnerabilities in the devices that allowed them to send rogue commands from a laptop to disrupts its normal operation, land it or send it crashing to the ground. Researchers have discovered that manufacturers are unknowingly leaving digital doors unlocked that give hackers an opportunity to wreak havoc on the system. The students performed wireless network penetration testing on a popular hobby drone and developed'exploits' from the vulnerabilities found to disrupt the process of operators to control flights.