When we were born, the idea of such a small, powerful computer was a sci-fi dream, and now these smart-devices are everywhere, transforming personal health, relationships and business transactions so completely that life without these seems impossible. We're entering a new era of technology that's bound to reshape the lives of our children predominantly. Yes, this is the era of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is one of the most talked subjects these days, and recent advances in technology have made AI even closer to reality than most of us can imagine. In Simplest terms AI is: "The capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior" Artificial intelligence is a program that does a task and its performance gets better every time it does that task.

In 2011, IBM stole the artificial intelligence show when Watson, a talking cognitive computer, won Jeopardy! By feeding the computer millions of pages of unstructured data -- that is to say, no numbers or values neatly organized in spreadsheets -- the company "taught" Watson everything he needed to thoroughly whack human Jeopardy! For the first time ever, a computer with some sense of understanding of the world was not only on display, it was on television. At present, some 80,000 developers and 500 businesses are using this cloud to create the next generation of smart apps that can make use of language, speech, vision, and data that seem sure to become powerful, useful pieces of software. It's as though we are sitting on the precipice of a time when it will become easy -- perhaps even boring -- to speak to your computer as you might speak to a coworker, and to have that speech turned into useful action.

A day after Microsoft launched its "AI teen girl Twitter chatbot," Twitter taught her to be racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far below the baseline of ethical botmaking. "The makers of @TayandYou absolutely 10000 percent should have known better," thricedotted, a veteran Twitter botmaker and natural language processing researcher, told me via email. "It seems like the makers of @TayandYou attempted to account for a few specific mishaps, but sorely underestimated the vast potential for people to be assholes on the internet."

A designer in Hong Kong made a robot in the form of actress Scarlett Johansson, and Margot E. Kaminski sees a host of interesting legal and ethical issues emerging from its creepy-beautiful self. To start with, who has the right to make a robot in the shape of an existing person? Is this a protected form of expression? "What if instead of making the Scarlett Johansson robot without the actress's permission," Kaminski asks, "a robot manufacturer legally licensed her face and trotted out millions upon millions of ScarJos to serve as personal assistants?"

Should you always do what other people tell you to do? Clearly not. So should future robots always obey our commands? At first glance, you might think they should, simply because they are machines and that's what they are designed to do. But then think of all the times you would not mindlessly carry out others' instructions – and put robots into those situations. There are plenty of benign cases where robots receive commands that ideally should not be carried out because they lead to unwanted outcomes.

Software is already pervasive in our society, but artificial intelligence software raises unique concerns even among the technological elite. The recent announcement that tech titans, including Elon Musk, have committed 1 billion to an artificial intelligence research center out of concern for what AI may become denotes an important question: Will AI software obey the law of the land and adhere to our ethical standards? It is true that AI software is increasingly autonomous and potentially self-modifying, but it is our view of AI as a hegemonic, monolithic entity that drives our fear of it. Just as there is no one "software" entity, there will be no one AI entity. So here is a new viewpoint on how AI will be kept in check -- more AI.

Fear of our jobs being replaced by machines dates all the way back to the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and maybe even earlier. But as new machines, computers, and robots are developed and jobs are lost, we have learned new jobs are created: programmers, code-writers, and so on, and society adapts. However, as technology continues to advance, the artificial intelligence capabilities of some of these new "machines" make them seem more human than ever. As a lawyer, it makes you wonder: Can these new iPeople be held liable? Think about the bank teller and the fear he must have experienced when the invention of the ATM was announced, or the cashier when self-checkout was introduced.

Tay, Microsoft Corp's so-called chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to engage with millennials on Twitter, lasted less than a day before it was hobbled by a barrage of racist and sexist comments by Twitter users that it parroted back to them. TayTweets (@TayandYou), which began tweeting on Wednesday, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it, according to its Twitter biography. But it was shut down by Microsoft early on Thursday after it made a series of inappropriate tweets. A Microsoft representative said on Thursday that the company was "making adjustments" to the chatbot while the account is quiet. "Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways," the representative said in a written statement supplied to Reuters, without elaborating.

When addressing free speech rights, the Supreme Court has tended to protect creativity and has been unsympathetic toward the idea that fiction can cause harm. But is a robot with somebody's face unharmful fiction? The court allows lawmakers to ban child pornography, but not purely virtual child pornography, reasoning that fictionalized pornography doesn't actually harm a real child. Lower courts have split, however, on whether it is permissible to arrest somebody for photoshopping an image of a real child's face onto adult pornography. No child would have been actually harmed in the making of the image.

Developments in technology over the past few years have revolutionised the way consumers operate, and this is starting to have some pretty interesting effects on the legal industry. A particularly exciting technological development is the emergence of online access to free legal help. One free help site which holds immense potential to transform the legal industry is the site created by a 19 year-old student called Joshua Browder. The site helps to advise claimants on a range of low-level legal issues such as reclaiming Payment Protection Insurance (PPI), seeking compensation for flight delays and fighting parking tickets. This differs from other online legal advice sites such as AskALawyer and Lawyers Online because instead of relying on real life legal professionals to provide advice to site users, Browder's site uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to advise potential claimants.