For the first time, lawyers can apply legal analytics to cases heard in New York County Supreme Court ("New York County"). Lex Machina, a subsidiary of RELX, the British information corporate formerly known as Reed Elsevier, is announcing today the publication of data on 119,000 cases. The data is based on both dockets (analogous to the abstracts of academic papers) and documents (the full papers). Numerically, this caseload is not a massive expansion to the 4.5m cases already in Lex Machina's database, but Karl Harris, Lex Machina's CEO, argues it is an important milestone because New York County is such a significant jurisdiction. Lawyers are not renowned for an addiction to statistics and maths.

Calum is an author and speaker about artificial intelligence, and its likely future impact on society. His work is informed by the experience of a 30-year career in business. You can see some of his talks here. If you are new to the idea that machine consciousness and superintelligence may be with us soon (in decades rather than centuries), his novel Pandora's Brain and his non-fiction books Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity are great places to start.

According to Louis Rosenberg, the founder and CEO of Unanimous AI, one of the defining turning points in the evolution of AI was the famous moment that Deep Mind beat the reigning Go champion. Whilst its predecessors had been good at playing games, what Deep Mind was good at was playing people. This ability to predict how people will act makes it an incredibly useful tool, so it's no wonder that AI is gradually creeping into our lives. Often, this is without us even realising, crunching data, providing insights, and turning them into useful information. On the one hand, this is massively beneficial to humanity.

This is really just half a book, as the first half is a decent review of current technology and trends, and the second half contains unsubstantiated, poorly rationalized prognostications. The predictions are not really credible because the author expresses lack of understanding and abundance of shallow thinking, undermining the entire second half. For example, the author seems compelled to mention Bitcoin and 3D printing, without grasping their true impact or tractability in future economies. They are among the latest tech buzzwords, so rah, rah. Another case, did you know that Google Wikipedia omniscience?

In an engaging TED talk recorded recently, economist David Autor points out that in the 45 years since the introduction of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), the number of human bank tellers doubled from a quarter of a million to half a million. He argues that this demonstrates that automation does not cause unemployment – rather, it increases employment. He says ATMs achieved this feat by making it cheaper for banks to open new branches. The number of tellers per branch dropped by a third, but the number of branches increased by 40%. The ATMs replaced a big part of the previous function of the tellers (handing out cash) but the tellers were liberated to do more value-adding tasks, like selling insurance and credit cards.

Best-selling author Calum Chace writes fiction and non-fiction books about artificial intelligence. He is a regular speaker on AI and related technologies and runs a blog on the subject at www.pandoras-brain.com. Prior to becoming a full-time writer and speaker, Calum had a 30-year career in business, as a marketer, strategy consultant and CEO. He maintains his interest in business by serving as chairman and coach for growing companies. Calum studied philosophy at Oxford University, where he discovered that the science fiction he had been reading since boyhood was actually philosophy in fancy dress.

For his 4th appearance on the show, we talk with author Calum Chace about the future of AI, big data, machine learning, security, privacy, bad credit, and the joys of politics in the US and UK. Review The Future Episode 64 - Calum Chace on Is it Time to Start Worrying About AI?

I picked up this book over the weekend after seeing an ad on reddit. Wasn't sure what to expect because I haven't read any Calum Chace books before. Until seeing the ad I hadn't even heard of him. Anyway, economic survival is something I've been thinking about, and despite trying to find predictions, forecasts and timelines I mostly found nothing. So I gave this book a chance and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of thought put into it.

As well as his new upcoming book "The Economic Singularity" that Calum is nice enough to be sharing a review copy of. So what is "Singularity" you ask? Well there are many types Wikipedia puts it this way... Because the capabilities of such a superintelligencemay be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence. "I don't like the term'singularity' when applied to technology. A singularity is a state where physical laws no longer apply because some value or metric goes to infinity, such as the curvature of space-time at the center of a black hole. No one can predict what happens at a singularity."