Jordan Furlong shares salient, focused and actionable thoughts about the future relationship between Gen AI and the legal profession. Furlong states that the more you study how Generative AI works, the more parallels emerge with how lawyers think — and that has implications. With Gen AI getting better every day, we need to get our act together, fast.
This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, conferences, industry white papers and reports, academic papers and speeches, and central bank actions on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources, and as available, indicate links to alternate free versions. Five highlights from this post: Wall Street Banks, Executives and U.S. Regulators Raise Warnings over Lack of AI Security; Expecting job replacement by GenAI: effects on workers’ economic outlook and behavior; The Economics of Transformative AI; Artificial intelligence and human capital: challenges for central bank; and Rising Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Financial Operations
Kyle K. Courtney [he is a lawyer for libraries] spotlights the eBook Study Group, a national coalition of legal and policy experts focused on fair digital access for libraries, who applaud the 106–38 passage of long-awaited legislation by the Connecticut House of Representatives that will make eBook licenses more consistent with the library mission and better serve library users across the state. This effort is a benchmark for libraries and advocates in jurisdictions throughout the country who are battling restrictive licensing terms imposed by publishers.
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: License Plate Reader Company Flock Is Building a Massive People Lookup Tool, Leak Shows; Senators want TSA to scale back facial recognition at airports; How Signal, WhatsApp, Apple, and Google Handle Encrypted Chat Backups; Deepfakes, Scams, and the Age of Paranoia; Does One Line Fix Google?
The U.S. as an Authoritarian State: Danger to the Global Rule of Law – Donald J. Trump’s second term as President of the United States has stunned the world. As Catherine Morris documents, commentators increasingly say the U.S. has now crossed the Rubicon into authoritarian territory. Morris addresses the impact on the legal system, legal …
Software is ubiquitous, powering almost every aspect of our lives. The computerised systems in your car alone incorporate tens of millions of lines of code. The increasing digital transformation of our society means that demand for more and better software is likely to continue into the future. Researchers, technologists and data scientists Iván Alfonso and Jordi Cabot. highlight a critical dilemma with the acceleration of AI in all facets of our lives. There are not enough human programmers to build all this software. This means that more and more of the software you use every day is built with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). Software developers are already very familiar with tools such as GitHub Copilot, a kind of ChatGPT for programmers. It works something like a smart autocomplete tool to increase the productivity of human programmers. But we are now witnessing a more radical revolution, where AI “agents” are poised to carry out many types of development tasks on behalf of human programmers. Agents are programs that use AI to perform tasks and achieve specific objectives for a human user. AI agents can learn and make decisions with some level of autonomy, though they are still under human supervision.
Assistant Professor and Cataloging & Discovery Librarian at Murphy Library, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Mike Olson’s research focuses on the intersection of information systems and social critique. In this timely and insightful article Olson discusses why and how library catalogs have always been battlegrounds where content is not merely described but debated. President Trump’s January 20, 2025, Executive Order 14172 directing the renaming of longstanding geographical designations “Mount Denali” and “Gulf of Mexico” to the politically loaded “Mount McKinley” and “Gulf of America” reveal the naked truth of what cataloging has always been: a battlefield where meaning is contested and conquered.
Censor, purge, defund: how Trump is following the authoritarian playbook on science and universities – Professor of Operational Research Christina Pagel has mapped 35 of the Trump administration’s attacks on science and universities to the authoritarian playbook – and considers what it means for attacks still to come. Pagel states that the attacks on science …
This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, conferences, industry white papers and reports, academic papers and speeches, and central bank actions on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources, and as available, indicate links to alternate free versions. Five highlights from this post: The Finance Sector Is Hitting an Inflection Point With AI; Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market; China’s central bank vows to promote applications of AI large language models; AI and the Extended Workday: Productivity, Contracting Efficiency, and Distribution of Rents; and The AI supply chain – We find that the LLM agents display mixed performance in these general tasks. They lack the awareness to learn from mistakes and the capacity for self-correction. LLMs’ performance in the most complex cognitive subtasks may not be the limiting factor for their deployment in real-world environments. Instead, it would be important to evaluate the capabilities of AGI-aspiring LLMs through general tests that encompass multiple cognitive tasks, enabling them to solve complete, real-world applications.
Climate and DEI Deleted From Government Websites, Federal Workers Fired, Colleges Erase Programs, Law Firms Blackballed, Holocaust Denied – “Colleges have been a conservative target for years. Under President Trump, it’s total warfare on all aspects of higher education — from student life to hiring to athletics.” This March 2, 2025 update by Sabrina I. …