What would be your legal rights when coming up against a robot? Who would you sue if artificial intelligence denied you promotion, or even a job in the first place? What if your neighbour's future house-cleaning robot blew a fuse and crashed through your hedge or front window? A legal team from Otago University is going to try to find the answers to these questions. Robot'Nao' addresses the opening ceremony of the 2016 RoboCup China Open in Hefei, China.

Not so long ago, the consumer electronics show (CES) was the place to exhibit the latest in computers, mobile devices and other electronic gadgets. It still is although the accent is changing. Every year, this Las Vegas tech fest attracts a rising tide of automotive suppliers taking space both inside and outside the convention centre halls. This month's management briefing turns the spotlight on some of those exhibitors operating in the brave new auto world of voice control, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Among those unveiling autonomous driving concepts at CES included Chrysler, Toyota, Honda and Faraday Future.

Sometimes things work out of the box. Such occasions present an opportunity to get better. Object detection using Haar feature-based cascade classifiers is more than ax decade and a half old. OpenCV framework provides a pre-built Haar and LBP based cascade classifiers for face and eye detection which are of reasonably good quality. However, I had never measured the accuracy of these face and eye detectors.

Have you ever been attacked by trolls on social media? In December a mocking tweet from white supremacist David Duke led his supporters to turn my Twitter account into an unholy sewer of Nazi ravings and disturbing personal abuse. It went on for days. Faced with a torrent of hate and abuse, people are giving up on social media, and websites are removing comment features. Who wants to be part of an online community ruled by creeps and crazies?

There are plenty of articles out on the internet talking about how 2017 will be the year of AI and how it will change the way in which we drive our cars, organize our homes with the internet of things (IoT), and live our lives. But much of the progress made in developing AIs could never have been made had it not been for video games spurring developers on. Video game AIs have come a long way from when Nintendo sent Goombas marching at Mario in a set path and are certainly now capable of carrying out complex commands. But AI developers are now trying to create AIs that can actually think, learn and develop their own personalities as opposed to following a script with branching paths. This can not only affect how we interact and play video games, but help create better AI to change how we live our day to day lives. Of course, we have already managed to create AI which can learn.

As the great Kenny Rogers once said, a good gambler has to know when to hold'em and know when to fold'em. At the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh this week, a computer program called Libratus may finally prove that computers can do this better than any human card player. Libratus is playing thousands of games of heads-up, or two-player, no-limit Texas hold'em against several expert professional poker players. Now a little more than halfway through the 20-day contest, Libratus is up by almost $800,000 against its human opponents. So victory, while far from guaranteed, may well be in the cards. A win for Libratus would be a huge achievement in artificial intelligence.

Taking artificial intelligence a step further, a new Socially-Aware Robot Assistant (SARA) took the participants of the World Economic Forum (WEF) here by surprise by understanding their spoken words and non-verbal behaviour to build a relationship. Developed by students and professors of prestigious Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a research project, SARA became a key exhibit at the WEF annual meeting held in this ski resort town last week. CMU President Subra Suresh, who was here for the WEF, said the university would also take SARA to other parts of the world, which may include India, for exhibition and eventually, it may be licensed to some company or organisation for commercial use, but any decision on that will be taken by the persons concerned and professors at the university. "With technology advancing so fast, one of the opportunities for us is whether we can combine robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning etc to create tools that will have positive impact on society. This is how SARA has come out," Suresh told PTI in an interview here on the sidelines of the WEF meet.

Techies around the world would have been hard-wired for insights last week as the DLD17 conference in Munich and the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos ran concurrently. The former – populated by academics and innovators – was marked by a frisky anticipation over technological possibilities, while the latter – made up of politicians and business leaders – succumbed to fear and uncertainty over global events, even as the sun shone outside. Chinese premier, Xi Jinping, speaking in Davos, said: "Unlike the industrial revolution, our fourth technological revolution is unfolding at an exponential, and not linear, pace". One statistic that came out of the meeting was how Hollywood box office takings have been outpaced by App revenues – even though they didn't exist before 2008. Premier Xi opened his address with a quote from Charles Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", to highlight the many contradictions facing modern society.

You are driving along and your car's brakes suddenly fail. If it swerves to the left, three old men and two elderly women will die. If the car veers to the right, it kills a woman doctor, two babies and a boy and girl. This question is part of MIT Media Lab's "moral machine," a platform for gathering peoples' opinions on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars. In the coming age of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), such life and death decisions and many other complicated ones will increasingly be made by machines rather than people.

That's the opinion of Stephen Hawking along with other leaders in the AI field, noted in a 2014 article in The Independent. Much of the media portrays a negative perception of AI, publishing articles and airing news segments about the technology with images of The Terminator. However, not many members of the media are asking what can be done to reap the benefits of the technology and avoid the risks. Those questions require a deeper look, which is why the IEEE Standards Association formed the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, for which I serve as vice chair. In the past year, the initiative brought together more than 100 experts to collaborate on the report "Ethically Aligned Design."