Facebook is looking at adding facial recognition to its highly anticipated smart glasses that are planned to hit the market next year. At an all-staff meeting, Facebook Reality Labs director Andrew Bosworth said the company was examining the technology's legal and privacy ramifications, BuzzFeed reports. He cautioned the benefits and risks were obvious, 'and we don't know where to balance those things.' Facial recognition would help a user recognize someone whose name they've forgotten, Bosworth theorized, or if they have face blindness. Facebook Reality Labs director Andrew Bosworth said the company was examining the legal and privacy ramifications of adding facial recognition technology to its upcoming smart glasses.

On July 31, 2019, DeepMind published a research letter in Nature (via AI in Healthcare) about a clinically applicable approach to the continuous prediction of acute kidney injury (AKI). The predictive model was developed on a longitudinal dataset comprised of 703,782 adult patients across 172 inpatient and 1,062 outpatient sites. It "predicted more than half (55.8%) of all inpatient episodes of acute kidney injury and 90.2% of all acute kidney injuries that required dialysis. The lead-up time was 48 hours, and the model had a ratio of two false alerts for every true alert." TechCrunch reported on the study in an article titled "DeepMind touts predictive health care AI'breakthrough' trained on heavily skewed data."

Each new year provides the opportunity for reflection upon how far we have come and how far we still have to go, on both a personal and societal level. It was also the year that it took you at least a few minutes to realise the customer agent answering your queries in that little chat-box wasn't human, when you picked up a VR headset from your local toyshop for the price of a pizza, when you found yourself in far too many political arguments around the water-cooler, and when you began seriously questioning whether a computer might someday take your job -- maybe for the second time that year. We will see continuing tensions within and between countries, as 20th century nationalist sentiments push resentfully against 21st century supranational integration. There will be moments when it feels like only technology can save us, followed by events which remind us of how perilous our inventions can be when we still barely understand them. The following is not investment or professional advice of any kind, and is intended only to promote discussion and reflection on some of the rising trends and ideas of our time.

We are in the midst of perhaps the largest societal disruption in history. Digitalisation is changing the way we work, consume, communicate, think, live. The industrial revolution in the 18th Century took about 80 years. It resulted in mass urbanisation and mass technological, economic, societal, social, environmental, geostrategic and political change. Digitalisation goes beyond this in many ways.

This year, several leading researchers have sounded warnings about the risks of using the CRISPR gene-editing technique to modify human1 and other species' genomes in ways that could have "unpredictable effects on future generations"2 and "profound implications for our relationship to nature" (see go.nature.com/jq5sik). Concerns are coming from the silicon sector as well. Last year, the physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy the human race. And in 2013, former Royal Society president Martin Rees co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, UK, in part to study threats from advanced AI. Leaders of the scientific community are ready to share the responsibility for these powerful technologies with the public. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and others wrote last year of CRISPR that "the decision of when and where to apply this technology, and for what purposes, will be in our collective hands".

Jerry Kaplan is widely known as an Artificial Intelligence expert, technical innovator, serial entrepreneur, and bestselling author. He is currently a Fellow at The Center for Legal Informatics at Stanford University and a visiting lecturer in the computer science department, where he teaches social and economic impact of Artificial Intelligence. Kaplan founded several technology companies over his 35-year career, two of which became public companies. As an inventor and entrepreneur, he was a key contributor to the creation of numerous familiar technologies including tablet computers, smart phones, online auctions, and social computer games. Kaplan is the author of three books: the best-selling classic Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure; Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2015); and Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know (2016). In 1998, Kaplan received the Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Northern California. He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among others. He received a BA degree from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Jerry will be speaking at the Gigaom AI Now in San Francisco, February 15-16th.