There are 40 million people in slavery today. SDG 8.7 is a commitment to end modern slavery, with the ambition to reduce that number by 10,000 people every day. James Cockayne, Director, Centre for Policy Research, United Nations University, is confident that we are "nowhere near" that target. The reasons for this systemic and enduring failure are the result of the "mispricing" of labour, where true social costs are not quantified. Worse still, companies are rewarded for driving down their labour costs.

No one should trust Artificial Intelligence (AI). Trust is a relationship between peers in which the trusting party, while not knowing for certain what the trusted party will do, believes any promises being made. AI is a set of system development techniques that allow machines to compute actions or knowledge from a set of data. Only other software development techniques can be peers with AI, and since these do not "trust", no one actually can trust AI. More importantly, no human should need to trust an AI system, because it is both possible and desirable to engineer AI for accountability. We do not need to trust an AI system, we can know how likely it is to perform the task assigned, and only that task.

Inc. shut down a project it had been developing for four years, a recruitment tool driven by machine learning. The concept was a simple and appealing one: at its core, the project aimed to develop an algorithm that would sort incoming job applications to isolate the short list for managers to use in making their final selections. Anyone who has been involved in such a process knows that isolating the top five or ten resumés from dozens of applicants is a time-consuming job. Any process that brings logic and speed to this stage of the recruitment chain can only be a good thing. But algorithms are only as good as the data used to drive them, and in the Amazon case the machine "learning" was based on patterns in applications submitted to the firm in the previous ten years.

While these bring tremendous benefits, AI also raises concerns, ranging from security, to human rights abuses. Speaking in Paris last weekend, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres praised AI but cautioned that "technology should empower not overpower us" and that the world needs to set policies that contain unintended consequences or malicious use of frontier technologies. UN News asked Eleonore Pauwels, Research Fellow on Emerging Cybertechnologies at United Nations University (UNU), about AI – what it is, how it works, and what she sees happening in the next few years. In its current form, called "deep learning", AI is a growing set of autonomous and self-learning algorithms she told us, capable of performing tasks it was commonly thought could only be done by the human brain. At its core, AI produces powerful predictive reasoning while minimizing the noise from unpredictable and complex human behaviour.

The waste from discarded electronic gadgets and electrical appliances has reached severe levels in East Asia, posing a growing threat to health and the environment unless safe disposal becomes the norm. China was the biggest culprit with its electronic waste more than doubling, according to a new study by the United Nations University. But nearly every country in the region had massive increases between 2010 and 2015, including those least equipped to deal with the growing mountain of discarded smartphones, computers, TVs, air conditioners and other goods. On average, electronic waste in the 12 countries in the study had increased by nearly two thirds in the five years, totaling 12.3 million tons in 2015 alone. A worker arranges used electronic equipment at a repair shop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.