If you leave your iPad untouched for a few days, you probably do not need to worry about much more than a flat battery and a backlog of emails. But with artificial intelligence, computers could soon have their own set of'rights' that could let them sue you for neglect, according to a leading scientist. Professor Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician at Oxford University, has suggested that as AI leads to our devices developing their own consciousness, they may need their own laws to protect them. Advances in artificial intelligence could lead to computers and smartphones developing consciousness and they may need to be given'human' rights. He claims that if technology is conscious, it could also then be deemed as being alive, and so could win the right to be governed by laws on human rights.

With huge leaps taking place in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), right now, experts have started asking questions about the new forms of protection we might need against the formidable smarts and potential dangers of computers and robots of the near future. But do robots need protection from us too? As the'minds' of machines evolve ever closer to something that's hard to tell apart from human intelligence, new generations of technology may need to be afforded the kinds of moral and legal protections we usually think of as'human' rights, says mathematician Marcus du Sautoy from the University of Oxford in the UK. Du Sautoy thinks that once the sophistication of computer thinking reaches a level basically akin to human consciousness, it's our duty to look after the welfare of machines, much as we do that of people. "It's getting to a point where we might be able to say this thing has a sense of itself, and maybe there is a threshold moment where suddenly this consciousness emerges," du Sautoy told media at the Hays Festival in Hay-on-Wye, Wales this week.

California recently enacted a strict gender-equality law, the Fair Pay Act, which puts the burden of proof on a company to show that it has not shortchanged an employee's salary based on gender. It's a powerful tool to address a wrong that has already happened. But can discrimination be prevented in the first place? Even managers who don't think they are biased may be--and just their word choices can send a signal. A new wave of artificial intelligence companies aims to spot nuanced biases in workplace language and behavior in order to root them out.

An Oxford University professor said computers will soon be eligible to the same civil rights humans currently have. The statement was made in observation to advancements in computing, with artificial intelligence already having a semblance to the human consciousness. Marcus du Sautoy, a professor at Oxford and author of "What We Cannot Know, "asserts that it is now possible to measure consciousness. In a Telegraph report, he also said the future of "living" technology is within sight. The advancements could lead to devices developing their own consciousness; this qualifies technology to have "human rights."

Could secretive augmented reality startup Magic Leap be working on artificial intelligence for robotics, too? A brief mention in a lawsuit the company filed this week against two former employees indicates as much. In the suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Magic Leap alleges that Gary Bradski--who had been Magic Leap's senior vice president of advanced perception and intelligence and has long worked in robotics and AI--worked on proprietary technologies for the company and "was aware of and involved in projects and plans that involved deep-learning techniques for robotics." Magic Leap has raised over a billion dollars thus far for its technology, which mixes sharp-looking digital imagery with the real world around you, and has said it will be building this technology into a headset (it hasn't yet released any details about when this might be available or how much it will cost, but Wired recently got to try out such a headset--see "Magic Leap Has a Headset but Its Technology Is Still Mysterious"). The company has said it's creating a new optical chip that relies on silicon photonics in order to make its augmented-reality images work, so the idea that it's also poking around in robotics, or at least robotics-related AI, would fit in with its efforts to explore a range of technologies.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. Imagine this coming from your iPhone: "I am, Siri, a living being with feelings. Your Mac RoboBook might one day sue you for keeping it cooped up in your dank bedroom. Your Samsung Galaxy RoboNote might take you to the International Court of Justice because you insist on keeping it in your back pocket, right next to your flaccid rump. Please, I'm not (entirely) under the spell of troubled delirium. I've been reading the thoughts of Marcus du Sautoy, an Oxford University professor for the Public Understanding of Science. As the Telegraph reports, du Sautoy was speaking Sunday at the Hay Literary Festival in the UK. He explained that in his book "What We Cannot Know," he wonders when a gadget will be said to be conscious. There was a time when defining consciousness was a difficult thing. You'll be stunned into a prickly paralysis, however, when I tell you that science now thinks it can measure it. "We're in a golden age," said du Sautoy. We now have a telescope into the brain and it's given us an opportunity to see things that we've never been able to see before."

Prof du Sautoy added: "In babies there is something called the mirror self-recognition test, a moment where a child recognises the image in the mirror is themselves and has a sense of self. "I think there is something in the brain development which might be like a boiling point. It may be a threshold moment. "Philosophers will say that doesn't guarantee that that thing is really feeling anything and really has a sense of self. It might be just saying all the things that make us think it's alive. But then even in humans we can't know that what a person is saying is real. "Consciousness is like a box that we all have and inside this box we all have something called a beetle.

Earlier this week, ProPublica published a damning article on the use of algorithms in the criminal justice system. In the article, titled "Machine Bias", they studied how a widely used algorithm differs in how accurately it predicts the recidivism of different races. And their findings are troubling: the algorithm systematically under-predicts the recidivism of white criminals and over-predicts the recidivism of black criminals. This has important consequences, since recidivism -- a criminal's propensity to commit a future crime -- is a large factor in determining sentencing and rehabilitation requirements. As with all things statistical, it is important to get the nuances correct.

Inc.'s 11th annual 30 Under 30 list features the young founders taking on some of the world's biggest challenges. In 2013, a high-frequency trader named Michael Coscia was arrested in New Jersey for an activity called "spoofing"--essentially manipulating the market by flooding trading systems with future orders he had no intention of completing. He was fined 6 million--with the possibility of jail time. It was the first such prosecution under a new set of financial regulations from the 2010 banking reform law called the Dodd-Frank Act. That was an aha! moment for David Widerhorn, 28, and it became his reason for founding Neurensic.

Similar to word2vec's skipgram negative-sampling (SGNS) algorithm, we'll start by trying to discriminate pairs of (context j, word i) that appear in the corpus from those randomly sampled from a'negative' pool of words and contexts.