Articles on AI and ethics/society

Media reports and opinions about future AI

McKinsey Quarterly's report on AI and potential job losses: Four fundamentals of workplace automation (Nov 2015)
The World Economic Forum's report on AI: The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond (Jan 2016)
Swiss bank UBS's report on implications of the fourth industrial revolution: Extreme Automation and Connectivity (Jan 2016). Here's a Guardian article about the report.
Deloitte's State of the State report for 2016/17 predicts that 861,000 UK public sector jobs could be lost to automation by 2030 (see pp16-17). (Frey and Osborne contributed to the report.) Here's a Guardian article about the report.

David Autor's (2015) paper arguing against predictions about large-scale technology-driven job losses: Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation
John Danaher's (2015) response to Autor: Why haven't robots taken our jobs? The Complementarity Effect.
Another piece by Danaher (2015), with a discussion of (and support for) Autor's arguments for a 'polarising' effect of technology on jobs: Automation and Income Inequality: Understanding the Polarisation Effect

Frey and Osborne's 2015 paper on societal/economic impacts of new technologies: Technology at work: The future of automation and employment.

The UN International Labour Organisation's 2016 report on the impact of automation on jobs in South-East Asia: ASEAN in transformation. This report estimates that 56% of the total workforce of ASEAN countries are at risk of displacement by robots.
A study from the US National Bureau of Economic Research (Acemoglu and Restrepo, Working Paper No. 23285, 2017), Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor markets. This reports a regression analysis that looks at the influence of robots on unemployment levels and wages. In the US areas studied, the authors estimate that 'one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5 percent' - and that these influences are distinct from the impact of imports from China and Mexico, the decline of routine jobs, offshoring, and several other factors. (Here's an article on the study in the New York Times.)

Wachter et al.'s 2016 report arguing that current EU legislation providing a 'right to explanation' of automated decision mechanisms is insufficient, and calling for a watchdog to assess whether such decisions are discriminatory: Why a Right to Explanation of Automated Decision-Making Does Not Exist in the General Data Protection Regulation. (Alan Turing Institute / University of Oxford)

An article about possible EU legislation to classify advanced robots as 'electronic persons' (June 2016)