Whatever the ultimate impact may be of a report by UK experts in algorithmic bias, the document already has succeeded where many analyst reports have failed. The new report, on bias in algorithmic decision making, comes from the government-funded Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. It takes the position that AI decision making must be ethical to be successful, and AI ethics must be viewed as impacting individual people -- because it does. Thinking about AI ethics in terms of industries, regions, demographics and data sets is an easy out. It lets everyone involved spread harms across faceless multitudes.

The next time you beat your keyboard in frustration, think of a day when it may be able to sue you for assault. Within 50 years we might even find ourselves standing next to the next generation of vacuum cleaners in the voting booth. Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future. Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government's chief scientist. The paper covering robots' rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.