Asimov was essentially an optimist, but he realised that future AI devices, and their designers, might need a little help keeping on the straight and narrow. Hence his famous Three Laws, which have influence in science and technology circles to this day. Now, almost 80 years later, legal academic and artificial intelligence expert Frank Pasquale has added four additional principles. He's given RN's Future Tense podcast the lowdown. Here's what you need to know.

Are you average in every way, or do you sometimes stand out from the crowd? Your answer might have big implications for how you're treated by the algorithms that governments and corporations are deploying to make important decisions affecting your life. "What algorithms?" you might ask. The ones that decide whether you get hired or fired, whether you're targeted for debt recovery and what news you see, for starters. Automated decisions made using statistical processes "will screw [some] people by default, because that's how statistics works," said Dr Julia Powles, an Australian lawyer currently based at New York University's Information Law Institute.