Supreme Court of the United States
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Watson is helping heal America's broken criminal-sentencing system
The American criminal-justice system's sentencing system is among the fairest and most equitable in the world ... assuming you're wealthy, white and male. Everybody else is generally SOL. During the past three decades, America's prison population has quadrupled to more than 2.3 million people. Of those incarcerated, 58 percent are either black or Latino (despite those groups constituting barely a quarter of the general US population). The racial disparity in America's justice system is both obvious and endemic, which is why some courts have started looking for technological solutions. But can an artificial intelligence really make better sentencing recommendations than the people who designed it? We're about to find out.
Supreme Court unanimously rules that software patents can't cover abstract ideas
From now on companies will have to be a little more specific when filing software patents. The United States Supreme Court today ruled in favor of CLS Bank, a company that was accused by Alice Corporation of violating several of its patents relating to computer-based trading systems. Twice lower courts have found that Alice's patents were invalid and now the highest court in the land has settled the dispute once and for all. In one of the two group opinions supporting the unanimous decision, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that "merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention."
