Artificial Intelligence: the view from the White House

Those interested in legal services and technology need to keep their eye on developments in artificial intelligence (AI). In the course of preparing a national US strategy, a committee of the National Science and Technology Council has drafted a report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, which is worth reading as a crib to the latest issues. This is much better written than you might expect from a committee (or, indeed, machine) authorship. The report eschews fanciful speculation about the future and is largely concerned with what it terms'narrow AI' 'which addresses specific application areas such as strategic games, language translation, self-driving vehicles and imagine recognition'. In particular, it looks at'machine learning' which it distinguishes from older'expert system' approaches. Machine learning is concerned to analyse bodies of data and'derive a rule or procedure that explains the data or can predict future data'.