Benjamin Valdez, a rideshare driver with Uber and Lyft in the Los Angeles area, used to drive seven days a week when the gig was more lucrative--but he says he makes far less per ride these days. When Valdez started driving, around nine years ago, he told me that he could earn anywhere from 60 to 85 to drive from West Hollywood to downtown Los Angeles at peak surge, a roughly 6-to-10-mile trip depending on the specific route. Now, if "the stars align," he can earn between 25 and 35 for the same trip. "It's gotten harder and harder to make money," he said. In recent years, rideshare drivers like Valdez have experienced shrinking incomes as the companies continue to increase their cut from each ride.

An academic and a lawyer have teamed up to develop a robot lawyer, which, if successful, will make legal advice affordable to people from all backgrounds, while revolutionizing the legal sector. Robots could take on significant parts of a lawyer's work, reducing the costs and barriers to access to legal services for everyone, rather than just those who can afford the high costs. The project, at the University of Bradford, is initially working on a machine learning-based application to provide immigration-related legal advice, but if successful, it could be replicated across the legal sector. The project was devised by Yash Dubal, immigration lawyer and director at AY&J, and Dhaval Thakker, associate professor at the faculty of engineering and informatics at the University of Bradford. It will harness complex knowledge graph technology and deep learning algorithms to analyse case law and learn from it.

An academic and a lawyer have teamed up to develop a robot lawyer, which, if successful, will make legal advice affordable to people from all backgrounds, while revolutionising the legal sector. Robots could take on significant parts of a lawyer's work, reducing the costs and barriers to access to legal services for everyone, rather than just those who can afford the high costs. The project, at the University of Bradford, is initially working on a machine learning-based application to provide immigration-related legal advice, but if successful, it could be replicated across the legal sector. The idea has received government backing in the form of a £170,000 grant from Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. Legal firm AY&J Solicitors is providing a further £70,000 as well as the vital knowledge of lawyers.

Veena Dubal is an unlikely star in the tech world. A scholar of labor practices regarding the taxi and ride-hailing industries and an Associate Professor at San Francisco's U.C. Hastings College of the Law, her work on the ethics of the gig economy has been covered by the New York Times, NBC News, New York Magazine, and other publications. She's been in public dialogue with Naomi Klein and other famous authors, and penned a prominent op-ed on facial recognition tech in San Francisco -- all while winning awards for her contributions to legal scholarship in her area of specialization, labor and employment law. At the annual symposium of the AI Now Institute, an interdisciplinary research center at New York University, Dubal was a featured speaker. The symposium is the largest annual public gathering of the NYU-affiliated research group that examines AI's social implications.

Veena Dubal is an unlikely star in the tech world. A scholar of labor practices regarding the taxi and ride-hailing industries and an Associate Professor at San Francisco's U.C. Hastings College of the Law, her work on the ethics of the gig economy has been covered by the New York Times, NBC News, New York Magazine, and other publications. She's been in public dialogue with Naomi Klein and other famous authors, and penned a prominent op-ed on facial recognition tech in San Francisco -- all while winning awards for her contributions to legal scholarship in her area of specialization, labor and employment law. At the annual symposium of the AI Now Institute, an interdisciplinary research center at New York University, Dubal was a featured speaker. The symposium is the largest annual public gathering of the NYU-affiliated research group that examines AI's social implications.

How artificial intelligence is changing the workplace is starting to get the attention of congressional lawmakers at a time when some employment attorneys are sounding alarms about the need for legislation. The House Education and Labor Committee plans to hold hearings on machine learning's impact on workers and their jobs after Congress returns from recess in September. However, while a hearing is usually a precursor to legislation, employers using AI-based tools and tech companies developing those programs probably don't need to worry about new bills anytime soon. The focus on Capitol Hill remains on trying to understand what the effect of artificial intelligence on workers could be. The rise of algorithms and machine learning technology is already changing the way people work.