"As humans, we are highly biased," says Beena Ammanath, the global head of the Deloitte AI Institute, and tech and AI ethics lead at Deloitte. "And as these biases get baked into the systems, there is very high likelihood of sections of society being left behind--underrepresented minorities, people who don't have access to certain tools--and it can drive more inequity in the world." Projects that begin with good intentions -- to create equal outcomes or mitigate past inequities -- can still end up biased if systems are trained with biased data or researchers aren't accounting for how their own perspectives affect lines of research. Thus far, adjusting for AI biases has often been reactive with the discovery of biased algorithms or underrepresented demographics emerging after the fact, says Ammanath. But, companies now have to learn how to be proactive, to mitigate these issues early on, and to take accountability for missteps in their AI endeavors.

This year's Stanford HAI virtual fall conference took place on 9-10 November. It comprised a discussion of four policy proposals that respond to the issues and opportunities created by artificial intelligence. The premise is that each policy proposal poses a challenge to the status quo. These proposals were presented to panels of experts who debated the merits and issues surrounding each policy. The event was recorded and you can watch both days' sessions on YouTube.

Whether you love or hate it, artificial intelligence is here to stay. The question is -- particularly in Japan, which is facing a severely aging population and shrinking of its workforce -- will AI perform tasks that are beneficial to society as a whole? AI has seen phenomenal success with a variety of tasks, such as performing facial recognition and piloting autonomous vehicles, but there are obvious concerns about the negative impacts of the technology on society, such as people losing their jobs to automation, as well as the dangers of new-generation weapons. "It is crucial to have design methodologies for AI that are truly beneficial to humans," Hideki Asoh, deputy director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Center at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, said in a recent interview. The beneficial AI movement, promoted by distinguished researchers and leaders in the AI community, including professors Max Tegmark at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stuart Russell at the University of California, Berkeley, is gaining worldwide attention in the discussion of AI safety.

If you're worried about the future and where technology might lead us, 2017 didn't help. The warnings kept rolling in about potential job losses from automation and machine learning. More than 375 million of us will need to completely change occupations to avoid being replaced by robots, a recent report estimated. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence keeps getting smarter: The world got its first robot citizen, another robot learned to do backflips, and DeepMind's AI has mastered chess. It doesn't need to be so frightening, says Tim O'Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O'Reilly Media.

Just hours before the first US Presidential debate -- on a day when stupidity seemed to be on the top of everyone's mind -- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke passionately about artificial intelligence (AI) as a cornerstone of Microsoft's next horizon of innovation. It was a strange juxtaposition of realities: the world as we know it, grounded in the banal and the predictable, versus the world as Nadella envisions it, fueled by AI in every app, every interaction, everywhere. During the second keynote on the opening day of Microsoft's Ignite conference here, Nadella explained how his company is pursuing AI and deep learning to empower every person and every institution "to solve the most pressing problems of our society and our economy." Nadella made his remarks to a packed crowd at Philips Arena, just across the street from the Georgia World Congress Center where the Ignite conference kicked off today. About 23,000 people, primarily IT professionals, are attending the five-day event.