From healthcare and education to finance and policing, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly embedded in people's daily lives. Despite being posited by advocates as a dispassionate and fairer means of making decisions, free from the influence of human prejudice, the rapid development and deployment of AI has prompted concern over how the technology can be used and abused. These concerns include how it affects people's employment opportunities, its potential to enable mass surveillance, and its role in facilitating access to basic goods and services, among others. In response, the organisations that design, develop and deploy AI technologies – often with limited input from those most affected by its operation – have attempted to quell people's fears by setting out how they are approaching AI in a fair and ethical manner. Since around 2018, this has led to a deluge of ethical AI principles, guidelines, frameworks and declarations being published by both private organisations and government agencies around the world.

A lip-reading app from Irish startup Liopa is said to represent a breakthrough in the field of visual speech recognition (VSR), which trains AI to read lips without any audio input. Liopa's product, SRAVI (Speech Recognition App for the Voice Impaired) is a communication aid for speech-impaired patients. It is likely to be the first lip-reading AI app available for public purchase, according to an account from Vice/Motherboard. Researchers driven by a range of potential commercial applications including surveillance tools have been working for years to teach computers to lip-read, and it has proven a challenging task. Liopa is working to certify SRAVI as a Class I medical device in Europe, hoping to complete the certification by August.

The future of work has always been a hotly debated subject. The heat has been turned up recently with advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). One view, expressed by Stowe Boyd, lead researcher at GigaOM Research, is that robots will yield a net reduction in jobs for humans, "The central question of 2025 will be: What are people for in a world that does not need their labor, and where only a minority are needed to guide the'bot-based economy?" This view believes that there will be less demand for human labor in the future, resulting in a net reduction in human jobs over time. An alternative view, however, is that technology is not destiny, and that throughout history, technology has been a job creator overall, not a job destroyer.