Richard Susskind spoke at a Vanderbilt Law School conference about the impact of technology on the legal profession. You don't have to look far to see how technology has changed the way people live their lives. Many patients check in with WebMD before going to their doctor's office. TurboTax has replaced accountants in some households. A new app even offers repentant churchgoers with a smartphone alternative to the confessional, complete with a drop-down menu of potential sins that need to be forgiven.

A United Nations meeting this week in Geneva is debating the future of autonomous weapons--the controversial weapons systems capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. Delegates from about 90 countries are discussing the far-reaching technical, legal, and ethical questions that these robotic weapons raise, and at the end of the week-long meeting they hope to agree on what to do next. For a group of arms control activists that has long been concerned about autonomous weapons, the next step countries should take is clear: they should ban these weapons. That's the goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that was formed in late 2012 and whose steering committee includes groups like Human Rights Watch and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. On Monday Human Rights Watch released a memorandum to the delegates in Geneva calling for countries to "adopt an international, legally binding instrument that prohibits the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."

The biggest leak in history has connected more than 70 current and former world leaders to tax evasion schemes that channel billions of pounds into secretive off-shore accounts. This is how the data was analysed. The Panama Papers show that law firm Mossack Fonseca helped hundreds of clients, with connections to some of the most powerful people in the world, launder money, dodge tax and potentially avoid sanctions. The papers themselves were leaked to news organisations by an unknown person and have been shared with more than 100 news organisations and 400 journalists – the investigation has been ongoing for almost a year. The process of making the raw data accessible for journalists involved converting it to digital formats, high-performance computers, and algorithms to find well known names among the thousands of details. While the actual leaked documents have not been published -– the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) say the full list of companies linked to the papers will be revealed in May – how much data they contain is known.

New managed legal services, technology and advisory firm Ethien has hired Osborne Clarke consultant and former Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer partner Paul Taylor as its head of business solutions as it also announces a new strategic partnership with RAVN Systems. Taylor, who joined OC as a partner in its digital business team in 2007, will work with Ethien's law firm and in-house legal clients to develop solutions that help improve quality and efficiency and reduce risk within legal services delivery. He will also act as Ethien's general counsel. For the past three years Taylor has worked on service delivery improvement within OC, designing many of the solutions developed for the firm's clients. This involved the development of integrated solutions allowing OC's lawyers to collaborate directly with in-house counsel on a common work platform.

After the somewhat awkward experience last month of having an AI Twitter bot go full-on racist in a few hours once it interacted with humans, Microsoft have released a new AI experiment on to the internet - CaptionBot. The idea is that you upload a photo to the service, and it tries to automatically generate a caption that describes what the algorithm sees. You are then able to rate how accurately it has detected what was on display. It learns from the rating, and in theory, the captions get better. The bot, from Microsoft's Cognitive Services team, is the result of some hefty research into how to model objects in photographs so that a computer can understand them.

New entrants to the legal profession will be competing head on against Kim, the virtual assistant from Riverview Law, and Ross, IBM Watson's'super-intelligent' attorney, in delivering services to clients. Ross, unlike most of us, has the ability to research every resource of legal knowledge in seconds, and, even more impressive to the older ones among us, remember it. There's no doubt that clients will always value negotiating skills, judgement, ethical standards and reassurance from their lawyers but if the apprentice style of learning at the expert's knee is going to be overtaken by Kim and Ross, how will the profession generate the experienced advisers that clients seek to consult? Clients seek good value for money from their law firms and those expectations change over time. In the past, certain tasks were seen as good value for money. Now, as tasks become more familiar, technology enables a more efficient delivery.

A week later, she was accidentally activated during testing, and within minutes had succumbed to a "kush" induced freakout. Tay is now offline, and her account made private, much like any parent will do when their teenager gets into trouble on the internet. What went wrong with Tay? No one should find it surprising that releasing a machine learning chatbot on social media, in the guise of a teenage girl no less, would result in a wave of interactions designed to test the limits of the technology -- and anyone who has ever spoken to Siri, Cortana or any other virtual assistant knows that one of the first tests involves saying the most profane statements you can think of. Microsoft was certainly aware of this; their VA, Cortana, is often subject to sexual harassment, and so she has been designed to fight back.

I, like a number of HR industry analysts, have been uncomfortable about some of the uses of algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies that have been exploding on the HR scene in recent years. The single greatest concern is that individuals who have no training in statistics, correlation/causation distinctions, legal risk associated with machine generated recommendations, etc. might use these new technologies and expose their company to great risk and/or adversely impact the livelihoods of many innocent potential workers. In a nutshell, many of the new, cool, supercharged recruiting solutions can quickly and mechanically identify other potential job seekers with similar characteristics to current employee groups that have shown some measure of success or retention with the company. While on its surface that sounds admirable and cost-effective, the problem with these tools is that they rely on a test database which only includes existing employees. If a company has failed to hire many women or minorities in the past, then very few of them will appear in the solution's data population and thus will generate a statistically insignificant subset of individuals to establish a meaningful pattern.

As robotics and 3-D printing technologies become more accessible to home tinkerers, men are (of course) building robots of beautiful women. Anyone who's turned on a TV in the past decade shouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the first--and creepiest--examples of this development involves movie star Scarlett Johansson. News broke on Friday about a Hong Kong designer who made a robot that looks just like the award-winning actress--although Ricky Ma, the robot's creator, wouldn't name the actress he modeled the bot on, choosing instead to call it Mark 1. It took Ma eighteen months and over 50,000 to complete the project, which he constructed on his patio with a 3-D printer and software that he taught himself how to use. The question, however, is one of precedent.

Google has received tons of gushy press for its bubble-shaped self-driving car, though it's still years from the showroom floor. But for years John Deere has been selling tractors that practically drive themselves for use on farms in America's heartland, where there are few pesky pedestrians or federal rules to get in the way. For a glimpse at the future, meet Jason Poole, a 34-year-old crop consultant from Kansas. After a long day of meetings earlier this month and driving five hours across the state to watch his little girl's softball game, he was still able to run his John Deere tractor until 2 a.m. The land is hilly on Poole's family farm, so he drives the first curved row manually to teach the layout to his tractor's guidance system and handles the turns himself.