You, client! may not be science fiction for much longer. On both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere, British authors Richard and Daniel Susskind and others predict Artificial Intelligence is on the cusp of changing the legal profession more than any other technology. We've already seen the transformation triggered by word-processing, the Internet and e-mail, but the high hourly rates of legal professionals and the exorbitant expense of court time demand more reform. The B.C. government has been an early adopter of software solutions and the province already has a handful of dispute-resolution and legal platforms intended to make access to legal services and justice easier and cheaper. The next development, however, is heralded by the arrival of "digital legal advisers" -- the progeny of Deep Blue, which destroyed the chess hegemony of humanity, and Watson, which ruined Jeopardy!

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Iyad Rahwan was the first person I heard use the term society-in-the-loop machine learning. He was describing his work which was just published in Science, on polling the public through an online test to find out how they felt about various decisions people would want a self-driving car to make - a modern version of what philosophers call "The Trolley Problem." The idea was that by understanding the priorities and values of the public, we could train machines to behave in ways that the society would consider ethical. We might also make a system to allow people to interact with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and test the ethics by asking questions or watching it behave. Society-in-the-loop is a scaled up version of human-in-the-loop machine learning - something that Karthik Dinakar at the Media Lab has been working on and is emerging as an important part of AI research.

Matt Burgess reports in Wired, "One difficulty faced by artificial intelligence is predicting what humans are going to do next. To help solve that problem, researched have trained an algorithm by making it binge-watch TV. Computer vision experts from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) made an algorithm watch 600 hours of TV shows including Ugly Betty, Scrubs, The Big Bang Theory, The Office (US) and more. In each of the clips, taken from YouTube, humans were performing tasks and interacting with each other. After analysing the videos, the AI was then made to watch a clip it hadn't seen before and predict what would happen. The system was allowed to make multiple predictions about what might happen between one and five seconds in the future. 'In some cases our model correctly predicts that a man and woman are about to kiss or hug or that men in a bar will high five,' the researchers wrote."

Remember the Jetsons' robot maid, Rosie? Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers think her future real-life incarnations can learn a thing or two from Steve Carell and other sitcom stars. MIT says a computer that binge-watched YouTube videos and TV shows such as The Office, Big Bang Theory and Desperate Housewives learned how to predict whether the actors were about to hug, kiss, shake hands or slap high fives -- advances that eventually could help the next generation of artificial intelligence function less clumsily. "It could help a robot move more fluidly through your living space," lead researcher Carl Vondrick told The Associated Press in an interview. "The robot won't want to start pouring milk if it thinks you're about to pull the glass away."

Iyad Rahwan was the first person I heard use the term society-in-the-loop machine learning. He was describing his work which was just published in Science, on polling the public through an online test to find out how they felt about various decisions people would want a self-driving car to make - a modern version of what philosophers call "The Trolley Problem." The idea was that by understanding the priorities and values of the public, we could train machines to behave in ways that the society would consider ethical. We might also make a system to allow people to interact with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and test the ethics by asking questions or watching it behave. Society-in-the-loop is a scaled up version of human-in-the-loop machine learning - something that Karthik Dinakar at the Media Lab has been working on and is emerging as an important part of AI research.

EXPERTS warn that "the substitution of machinery for human labour" may "render the population redundant". They worry that "the discovery of this mighty power" has come "before we knew how to employ it rightly". Such fears are expressed today by those who worry that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy millions of jobs and pose a "Terminator"-style threat to humanity. But these are in fact the words of commentators discussing mechanisation and steam power two centuries ago. Back then the controversy over the dangers posed by machines was known as the "machinery question".

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning have emerged as key tools in the armory of many major tech companies, but can it be harnessed to solve some of the world's greatest challenges? IBM and Xprize want to find out. First announced back in February, the 5 million IBM Watson AI Xprize is a competition from Xprize, an initiative launched in 1995 to help solve "the world's Grand Challenges" through incentive-based prizes. Registrations for the four-year global competition are now open, with entrants asked to show how humans and A.I. can tackle issues in education, energy and the environment, health care, exploration, and global development. Xprize has given birth to numerous notable competitions in the past, one of the most recent being the Google-sponsored Lunar Xprize that's setting out to send a private, unmanned aircraft to the moon.

IBM Watson gained global fame as a "Jeopardy!" While Watson is no longer dominating the game circuit, IBM has put the computer system to use in a wide range of applications from tennis to weather. Now Watson is also powering a modified version of "Minecraft" that makes learning about the human body as fun as crafting a house. "Medical Minecraft," as its called, was created by high school educators to teach students about infectious diseases. Normally, that would be a topic that would completely bore teens or to be too complex to the point of alienation.

Flirtey's flight was a first on U.S. soil, but it doesn't necessarily mean the company now has free reign of the skies. Unrestricted drone-operated delivery of any kind in the U.S. – be it humanitarian relief or postal delivery – is still obstructed by layers of legislative red tape. And although Flirtey has received approval in the past for big-name events like these, experts tend to believe practical commercial drone delivery in any capacity is still a ways off.