Artificial Intelligence: Evolving Risks and Responsibilities

From speech recognition, big data analysis and machine learning to bold new healthcare advances, financial and business advice, talking computers, robots and self-driving cars, the rapid development and adoption of artificial intelligence ("AI") is becoming widespread in more and more areas of daily life. While unleashing opportunities for businesses and communities across the world, AI technologies have also brought about a host of new risks. The implications of AI for companies' legal and ethical responsibilities are now being discussed among governments and a variety of business and non-governmental groups worldwide. A raft of new voluntary ethical codes and even some legislative proposals relating to AI have also started to appear. The trend is that while companies and other organizations that develop, implement or use AI systems are and will be expected to comply with existing data privacy and other legal norms, they will soon have to adhere to a number of new transparency and other ethical expectations as well--the outlines of which are beginning to converge.