Picture the scenario - a sentient machine is "living" in the US in the year 2050 and starts browsing through the US constitution. Having read it, it decides that it wants the opportunity to vote. Oh, and it also wants the right to procreate. Pretty basic human rights that it feels it should have now it has human-level intelligence. "Do you give it the right to vote or the right to procreate because you can't do both?" asks Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington.

The head of Britain's digital espionage agency has apologized for the organization's historic prejudice against homosexuals, saying it failed to learn from the treatment of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing. In a rare public speech, GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan told a gathering organized by the rights group Stonewall that the agency's ban on homosexuals had caused long-lasting psychological damage to many and hurt the agency because talented people were excluded from working there. "The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times and the pressures of the Cold War, but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologize for it," Hannigan said Friday at the conference organized by Stonewall, which campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. The speech offered a poignant tribute to Turing, the gay computer science pioneer and architect of the effort to crack Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher. Turing was convicted of indecency in 1952 and stripped of his security clearance.

One of the first key takeaways from Vanderbilt Law School's conference on Thursday about artificial intelligence is that the term doesn't carry much value in the scientific community. "A.I. is whatever we can't do this year," David Lewis, a speaker who holds a PhD in computer science, said in between panel sessions. Lewis estimated we're currently experiencing the second or third wave of "A.I. hype," in which everyone uses the term to describe their technology. That's happened before, he said, and then it went out of style as a marketing buzzword. "By 2020, it'll have a negative connotation again," he predicted.

It is a federal crime to shoot down aircraft, and this week, the FAA confirm that that includes drones. This is great news for anyone who has a drone, and for anyone who doesn't want errant bullets falling from the sky, and it's bad news for anyone eager to pump a quadcopter full of lead. From Forbes' John Goglia, who confirmed this with the FAA: According to the FAA "regardless of the situation, shooting at any aircraft -- including unmanned aircraft -- poses a significant safety hazard. An unmanned aircraft hit by gunfire could crash, causing damage to persons or property on the ground, or it could collide with other objects in the air. To reach this justification, the FAA turned to 18 U.S.C. 32, a law that in part expands "United States jurisdiction over aircraft sabotage to include destruction of any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States."

AI is here - although Microsoft's blunder with Tay, the "teenaged girl AI" embodied by a Twitter account who "turned racist" shows that we obviously still have a long ways to go. The pace of advancement, mixed with our general lack of knowledge in the realm of artificial intelligence, has spurred many to chime in on the emerging topic of AI and ethics.…

Have trouble achieving a work-life balance? Well, Google Calendar might be able to help. On Wednesday, Google released Goals, a new feature for Google Calendar that uses machine intelligence to help users find time in their busy schedule to accomplish personal goals, such as exercising, reading more, or learning a new skill. Goals is on the Google Calendar mobile app, and can be used to tackle specific, categorized goals, or to create and pursue a custom personal goal. The new feature is now available everywhere that Calendar is. For those of us who live and die by what's on our calendars, stating our goals is a good start to achieving them.

Sydell calls upon Latanya Sweeney's 2013 study of Google AdWords buys made by companies providing criminal-background-check services. Sweeney's findings showed that when somebody Googled a traditionally "black-sounding" name, such as DeShawn, Darnell or Jermaine, for example, the ad results returned were indicative of arrests at a significantly higher rate than if the name queried was a traditionally "white-sounding" name, such as Geoffrey, Jill or Emma. Important to note is that the algorithm doesn't actually look at arrest rates. Even if the ad indicates that somebody may have been arrested, it's entirely possible that nobody with that name exists in the background-check company's database at all. Professor Sweeney found this out firsthand when she Googled her own name.

One of the first key takeaways from Vanderbilt Law School's conference on Thursday about artificial intelligence is that the term doesn't carry much value in the scientific community. "A.I. is whatever we can't do this year," David Lewis, a speaker who holds a PhD in computer science, said in between panel sessions. Lewis estimated we're currently experiencing the second or third wave of "A.I. hype," in which everyone uses the term to describe their technology. That's happened before, he said, and then it went out of style as a marketing buzzword. "By 2020, it'll have a negative connotation again," he predicted.

On Tuesday's episode of "The Daily Show," correspondents Jessica Williams and Ronny Chieng took a humorous yet hard-hitting look at a form of bigotry not often discussed: sexual racism. "Racism affects nearly every aspect of life, even -- and it truly pains me to say this -- f**king," host Trevor Noah said as he introduced the segment. Williams and Chieng specifically looked at how some groups, like black women and Asian men, faced undue discrimination in the world of online dating. "There is kind of a systemic racial bias pretty much in every dating site I've ever looked at," Christian Rudder, co-founder of OKCupid and author of the dating statistics book "Dataclysm," told the duo. "We found that 82 percent of non-black men have some bias against black women… And Asian men get the fewest messages and the worst ratings of any group of guys."

The Journalism Department at Emerson College and the Emerson Engagement Lab recently invited William Li to give a talk to introduce machine learning to journalism and communications students. This is a live blog account of the talk by Catherine D'Ignazio. William Li is a 2015–2016 Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a 2016 PhD computer science graduate from MIT. He develops and applies machine learning methods to answer social science questions computationally and to promote public understanding of law, politics, and public policy. His projects include predicting the authors of unsigned Supreme Court opinions, visualizing the complexity of our laws, and discovering ideas from large collections of public comments on proposed regulations. William has also worked on recommender systems, speech recognition, and user activity prediction at Apple and Mitsubishi Electric. He did his master's degrees at MIT in computer science and the Technology and Policy Program, founded the MIT Assistive Technology Club, and has taught classes that involve civic collaborations with organizations such as the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, Greater Boston Legal Services, and the Cambridge Commission for People with Disabilities. William Li introduces the topic and that he wants to make the session very interactive.