Do you live in a Smart Home? Can you control your lighting, heating, and electronic devices with nothing more than a smartphone? It's no secret that demand for smart homes and devices has gone from novelty to necessity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants like Siri and Alexa have exploded in popularity and have been accepted into millions of homes. Many consumers have come to not only accept the help of these devices but have come to rely upon them. Can you even begin to imagine life today without social media, smartphones, or GPS systems?

In February of this year, the Department of Defense (DoD) issued five Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence (AI): Responsible, Equitable, Traceable, Reliable and Governable. The DoD principles build off recommendations from 2019 by the Defense Innovation Board and the interim report of the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI). The defense industry and others in the private sector have also been considering ethical issues regarding AI, including the issue of whether businesses should have an AI code of ethics. When cyber first became an issue about 22-years ago, the trend was to raise awareness and think through the consequences. Similarly, now we are developing awareness of the issues and beginning to think through the consequences of AI.

Truly, it triggered the worst of times. What was thought to be the most stable of industries – finance – was brought to its knees. It triggered a new era of corporate financial scrutiny. The oft-quoted term'more for less' was permanently inscribed on the heads of all legal professionals. During the great recession in the West, companies started to look at all areas to cut costs to survive.

Ed. note: This is the first article in a two-part series about AI, its potential impact on how organizations approach security, and the accompanying considerations around implementation, efficacy, and compliance. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) on track to help the world streamline and solve against tasks that are better left to a machine? One might think so, given everything we've seen and heard about the impact of AI on our society -- from our phones telling us the best way to drive home, to chatbots on e-commerce sites answering product questions, to devices as small as a thermostat or as large as an electric vehicle removing friction from everyday life. Now AI is entering the space of cybersecurity, promising to bring greater speed and accuracy in detecting and responding to breaches, user behavior analysis, or predicting new strains of malware. AI and machine learning technologies can help protect organizations from a continuously evolving threat landscape -- but AI is not just for sophisticated attacks, AI can also help protect against classic attack scenarios.

Well, if technology keeps trending as it does, it'll be a sector teeming with as many innovative and efficient solutions as other industries. According to a Deloitte Insight report, the next two decades could see more than 100,000 law jobs become automated. The sooner lawyers can learn to incorporate AI into their day-to-day, the easier time they'll have remaining relevant. Fortunately, making that transition won't be as complicated as it might sound. Some envision AI as make-believe smarter-than-human robots.

Does Artificial Intelligence Need a General Counsel? As AI software evolves, it learns, and sometimes that evolution is not what the developers expect. What happens to developers of software when AI evolves in a way that results in an unintended violation of national laws?

A rtificial intelligence (AI) has moved from the silver screen and into our homes and businesses. Without even knowing it, most people encounter some manifestation of AI in their daily lives. From intelligent personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa to integrated AI systems such as IBM's Watson, AI has already had -- and will continue to have -- a profound impact on the way we work, play, and live. As attorneys immersed in the technology space, we have witnessed, assessed, and counseled how technology, including AI, will affect the legal profession and the role of general counsel. Although technological changes are often incremental, the sum of those changes with respect to the increased adoption of AI will be enormous.

Kent Walker, vice president and general counsel with Google Inc., from right, Colin Stretch, general counsel with Facebook Inc., and Sean Edgett, acting general counsel with Twitter Inc., swear in to a House Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017. Technology has advanced rapidly along several related fronts. In just the last few years, there have been dramatic improvements in robotics, sensors, and machine vision, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now perform better, per Stanford's AI Index, than humans on multiple dimensions, including image recognition, speech recognition, translation, and strategy games such as Go, Poker and chess. In pursuit of profits from AI-enabled business models, firms are now investing lots of money in these technologies. Worldwide industrial robotics shipments have increased from an annual average of about 100,000 units prior to 2010 to almost 300,000 annual shipments by 2016.

Kent Walker, vice president and general counsel with Google Inc., from right, Colin Stretch, general counsel with Facebook Inc., and Sean Edgett, acting general counsel with Twitter Inc., swear in to a House Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017. Technology has advanced rapidly along several related fronts. In just the last few years, there have been dramatic improvements in robotics, sensors, and machine vision, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now perform better, per Stanford's AI Index, than humans on multiple dimensions, including image recognition, speech recognition, translation, and strategy games such as Go, Poker and chess. In pursuit of profits from AI-enabled business models, firms are now investing lots of money in these technologies. Worldwide industrial robotics shipments have increased from an annual average of about 100,000 units prior to 2010 to almost 300,000 annual shipments by 2016.

Machine learning software has been touted as the next wave of innovation, promising to help governments and businesses make faster and more accurate decisions. But human rights activists and technology groups warned Wednesday that creating systems that discriminate should be treated as a violation of human rights. It came with the release at the RightsCon conference of the so-called Toronto Declaration on preventing machine learning from being used to support discrimination. Machine learning systems – sometimes called artificial intelligence – are more than pattern recognition software, say adherents of the declaration. Used wrongly – deliberately or inadvertently -- by data scientists and software developers, they can violate privacy, data protection, freedom of expression, participation in cultural life and equality before the law.