Artificial intelligence is already helping determine your future – whether it's your Netflix viewing preferences, your suitability for a mortgage or your compatibility with a prospective employer. But can we agree, at least for now, that having an AI determine your guilt or innocence in a court of law is a step too far? Worryingly, it seems this may already be happening. When American Chief Justice John Roberts recently attended an event, he was asked whether he could forsee a day "when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision making". He responded: "It's a day that's here and it's putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things". Roberts might have been referring to the recent case of Eric Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison at least in part by the recommendation of a private company's secret proprietary software.

Sherlock Holmes is famed for his ability to connect the dots between seemingly unrelated pieces of information. Now scientists have developed an AI system that can match the super-sleuths crime solving capabilities. Valcri scans millions of pieces of data to suggest how and why a crime may have been committed, freeing investigators to work on building their case. Valcri was conceived as a way to provide early warnings of impending criminal activity. But the system can also take on the more routine work of law enforcement agencies.

UK police are trialling a computer system that can piece together what might have happened at a crime scene. The idea is that the system, called VALCRI, will be able to do the laborious parts of a crime analyst's job in seconds, freeing them to focus on the case, while also provoking new lines of enquiry and possible narratives that may have been missed. "Everyone thinks policing is about connecting the dots, but that's the easy bit," says William Wong, who leads the project at Middlesex University London. "The hard part is working out which dots need to be connected." VALCRI's main job is to help generate plausible ideas about how, when and why a crime was committed as well as who did it.