The ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit) and Better Images of AI (BIoAI) are delighted to announce a competition to reimagine the visual communication of how work is changing in the digital age, including through the adoption of AI. Digit has undertaken a significant five-year research programme culminating in insights about real-world digital transformations currently impacting people's daily lives. The research undertaken by Digit between 2020 and 2025 points to the fact that adoption of technologies like AI is still patchy across the UK, and investment in digital skills is low. There are examples of AI being used to substitute or automate repetitive tasks, but this has not, as yet, resulted in significant job losses. Furthermore, technology adoption is facilitating experimentation with how, when, and where people work which presents new opportunities, but also challenges to our existing institutional and regulatory governance frameworks.

Modern AI technology like Large language models (LLMs) has the potential to pollute the public information sphere with made-up content, which poses a significant threat to the cohesion of societies at large. A wide range of research has shown that LLMs are capable of generating text of impressive quality, including persuasive political speech, text with a pre-defined style, and role-specific content. But there is a crucial gap in the literature: We lack large-scale and systematic studies of how capable LLMs are in impersonating political and societal representatives and how the general public judges these impersonations in terms of authenticity, relevance and coherence. We present the results of a study based on a cross-section of British society that shows that LLMs are able to generate responses to debate questions that were part of a broadcast political debate programme in the UK. The impersonated responses are judged to be more authentic and relevant than the original responses given by people who were impersonated. This shows two things: (1) LLMs can be made to contribute meaningfully to the public political debate and (2) there is a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society.

This article is part of the Policing and Technology Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the relationship between law enforcement, police reform, and technology. On Sept. 18 at noon Eastern, Future Tense will host "Power, Policing, and Tech," an online event about the role of technology in law enforcement reform. Public scrutiny around data-driven technologies in the criminal justice system has been on a steady rise over the past few years, but with the recent widespread Black Lives Matter mobilization, it has reached a crescendo. Alongside a broader reckoning with the harms of the criminal justice system, technologies like facial recognition and predictive policing have been called out as racist systems that need to be dismantled. After being an early adopter of predictive policing, the Santa Cruz, California, became the first city in the United States to ban its use.

Australian workers could end up thousands of dollars richer each year by quitting their jobs and reskilling to enter the technology industry, new research has revealed. The nation is to poised to undergo a tech jobs boom over the next five years, a report launched by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Thursday claimed. The news comes as Australia's economy goes from bad to worse, posting the slowest annual growth since the year 2000, with the prospect of a jobs boom offering a sliver of hope for workers frustrated by continuing wage stagnation. An estimated 100,000 new information technology (IT) roles will be created by 2024, bringing the total to about 792,000, the report titled Australia's Digital Pulse 2019 and commissioned by the Australian Computer Society (ACS) said. While reskilling into the IT industry could give the average Australian worker an $11,000 salary increase, the nation is likely to struggle to find workers with the skills to meet the oncoming tech jobs tsunami, the report warned.

The opening up of data is the necessary step to promote Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption across all UK economy sectors. According to Margot James, minister of state for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport "The full benefits to society and the economy that can come from Artificial Intelligence (AI) can only be realised if it is widely used,". Additionally in terms of planning, "That means government working together with industry to seize the prize of a reported additional £232bn on GDP by 2030." "Data is a critical part of our national digital infrastructure and fundamental, of course, to AI," said James. "Without access to good quality data from a range of sources, AI technologies cannot deliver on that promise of better, more efficient and seamless services. Government is really committed to opening up more data in a way that makes it reusable and easily accessible."

The UK, which spends more than £2bn on video surveillance each year, is to mark National Surveillance Camera Day on 20 June as part of the National Surveillance Camera Strategy. The aim of the national event is to raise awareness about surveillance cameras and to encourage debate about the use of surveillance cameras in modern society by highlighting how they are used in practice, why they are used and who is using them. The initiative by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC) and the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy (Crisp) is also aimed at starting a nationwide conversation about how camera technology is evolving, especially around automatic face recognition and artificial intelligence (AI). The organisers hope that the resultant public debate will help inform policy-makers and service providers regarding societally acceptable surveillance practices and legitimacy for surveillance camera systems that are delivered in line with society's needs. As part of the initiative, the SCC is encouraging surveillance camera control centres to throw their "doors open" so that the public can see how they operate.

Great public debates have sparked our imagination since the days of ancient Greece. This intellectual tradition will take on new life at the IBM Think conference in San Francisco, when IBM Research and Intelligence Squared U.S. host a live public debate on Monday, February 11 between a human and an AI. At the center is IBM Project Debater, the first AI system that can debate humans on complex topics. To do this effectively, the system must gather relevant facts and opinions, form them into structured arguments, and then use precise language in a clear and persuasive way. Project Debater's first live public debate took place in June before a small audience.

By means of the famously cited '10 man' Dartmouth Summer Conference, the research field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was already established in 1956. The elite workshop was attended by John McCharty (Dartmouth College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories), amongst others. However, the public debate about AI has just begun. After more than half a century of intensive research and development, the technology finally made it into mainstream business: Netflix and Amazon are recommending films and books to you. Due to massive amounts of big data, generated by millions of individual users, it is calculated whether you could potentially like'Bird Box' when you already watched'La Casa del Papel' and'Narcos'.

The Digital Republic Bill recently gave a unique assignment to the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) which is to lead a reflection on the ethical and societal matters raised by the rapid development of digital technologies. While algorithms are frequently at play in our everyday lives, only 31% of French people believe that they know precisely what it is all about*: the CNIL thus made the decision to open up in 2017 a large public debate on algorithms and artificial intelligence. Public institutions, associations, companies, research centers: around 40 partners take action to give body to this large and open public debate. Some of the partners of the wide public debate facilitated by the CNIL have favored a sector-based approach according to each of their fields of expertise. The outcomes of the growing use of algorithms will be analyzed for the justice system and the legal profession through several initiatives.

Positive news on the AI front recently when the US and UK governments both started public debate on the future of artificial intelligence. While there has been a lot of coverage on AI in the press over the recent months, it is very encouraging to see the governments of two of the leading contributing countries to this technology start taking its development seriously enough to have open public debates on the issues. Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) is one of the'Eight Great Technologies' identified by the UK Government in 2012. A national strategy for RAS innovation from a'RAS Special Interest Group' has been published by Innovate UK. "Robots are now beating humans at even the most complex games, like Go. Artificial intelligence will play an increasing role in our lives over the coming years. From navigation systems to medical treatments and from new manufacturing techniques to unmanned vehicles, new applications are rapidly being developed that involve robotic decision making. It is important that the UK is ready with the research, innovation and skills to be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities and manage any risks. The global market for the AI sector is expected to grow to 2-6 trillion by 2025."