Photo credit: Lacina Koné

Courtrooms in England and Wales are set to go fully digital by then, so instead of lawyers or judges having to call for an adjournment to get hold of the necessary file, they will being able to use secure wi-fi in courts to access all the necessary documents.

The move is part of a £160 million government plan to boost the speed and efficiency of the criminal justice system, and end an “outdated reliance on paper”.

A German federal court has told Google to make sure that search terms generated by autocomplete are not offensive or defamatory, after an unnamed businessman launched a legal action when Google.de linked him with ‘scientology’ and ‘fraud’.

Where is Chuck Norris? A lot of web users are feeling lucky

The search engine has been told the remove defamatory word combinations when it has been notified of them, as the person’s privacy would be violated if the associations listed by autocomplete were untrue, the German court said this week.

Although this doesn’t mean Google has to censor its entire autocomplete index, it is responsible for removing terms when “it gets notice of the unlawful violation of personal rights”, the court ruled.

Google has previously argued that it has no control over the combinations of words generated by autocomplete, which predicts what a person is searching for, because these are automatically created depending on how often people look for that combination of keywords.

Given that autocomplete relies on what is most commonly searched for across the web, and is therefore a reflection of what people are interested in, it’s a shame that the court took this approach.

After all, autocomplete simply shows online search trends, and the court seems to be going to extremes to clamp down on what happens to be piquing people’s interests.

Other people who have taken umbrage at autocomplete are Bettina Wulff, wife of former German president Christian Wulff, who sued Google because autocomplete suggested words linking her to escort services – she denies ever working as a prostitute.

Germany isn’t the only country to have ruled against Google’s autocomplete, which was first introduced in 2009.

Google was ordered to disable part of its autocomplete function in Japan in March 2012, after an unidentified man took the search giant to court over concerns that typing in his name linked him with crimes he was not involved with, and had caused “irreversible damage” to the man’s reputation.

The Japanese court issued a temporary injuction to have the man’s name delinked from autocomplete suggestions, which Google did not follow.

But last month, the same court told Google it must de-link words in its autocomplete function to prevent the search engine suggesting criminal acts when users type one man’s name. As Google is based in America, though, it can’t be forced to make any changes to its algorithm by the foreign court.

Again, I’m surprised the courts are taking such a hard stance on autocomplete. And without the function, we’d never have known that the third most common suggestion when typing in ‘Where is chu’ was ‘Where is Chuck Norris I’m feeling lucky’, or that so many people were pondering whether a banana was a herb. Like I said, eye-opening insights.

Anyone who falls into this rather wide bracket, who might think “but why should I bother knowing the law, I won’t get done because I’m not a journalist and so it doesn’t apply to me”, should bear in mind that pleading ignorance isn’t a defence. Five minutes reading the feature would therefore be time well spent.

As media lawyers Niri Shan and Lorna Caddy explained in the Telegraph, commenting on Twitter and Facebook isn’t the same as a chat down the pub.

“These days, whether it’s on a social media website or in relation to an online article, we all expect to have our say and post our own content,” wrote Shan and Caddy. “The legal position of an individual who posts content online (whether on Facebook, Twitter, on comment sections of online news pages) is clear.

“He or she is responsible for that content. Today’s case [regarding Ched Evans – see below] is notable because the defendants were not aware that naming the lady was a criminal offence. This was irrelevant: ignorance was not a defence.

Twitter in the dock   (illustration by Robert Johannsen)

However, although Twitter has seen some laws bend, with prosecutors now urged to consider whether threats to damage property or harm someone carries real menace before pushing ahead with the matter following the Paul Chambers case, other rules look set to stay firmly in place.

Using Twitter or Facebook to keep in touch is fine – just don’t expect those relationships to last if that is the only contact you have.

So said scientists at the Royal Society’s annual Summer Science Exhibition, who chatted to visitors about the science of laughing, spotting a real laugh from a fake one, and how social media is changing the nature of our interactions.

Dr Anna Machin, one of the researchers manning the ‘LOL! The science and art of laughter’ exhibit, explained that relying on text-based social media such as Twitter to keep a relationship going is set to end in failure. This is because brain chemicals called endorphins, which are released through experiences such as laughter and pleasure, and which produce a feeling of well-being, occur more when you see someone face-to-face.

What would happen if you sucked all the journalists out of the UK for 24 hours? Would citizen reporters and social media be able to step into the breach, or would confusion reign? 

This was the question posed by the Guardian’s Paul Lewis at a debate at the Frontline Club yesterday evening (June 28), which brought together panellists from Sky, the BBC, and a citizen journalism website to discuss the future of newsgathering and the changing media landscape.

Yet this scenario of a country without journalists was similar to what happened during the riots last August, said Lewis, as the violence continued into the early hours.

“Through no fault of their own, Sky and the BBC were forced to pull out their teams. And if you turned on the TV, you could only see what had happened up until that point when they pulled them out. But if you went online, you had a constant stream of people updating and that was quite journalistic,” explained Lewis, special projects editor at the Guardian.

“If you ask paid professional journalists, ‘if we lost them, would the world fall apart?’, they would say yes,” he added.

How to verify user-generated content (UGC), and whether journalists will be able to maintain their role as the most trusted source of information in the face of growing citizen journalism, were among the key issues of the night, organised by news website Blottr.

“User-generated content is at best unreliable, at worst untrue”

Chairing the event, TV and radio presenter Nikki Bedi pointed out the inaccurate tweets that were circulating on the night of the riots, and highlighted the importance of journalists verifying information so the public can know what’s really going on.

“I remember reading tweets that a D&G shop had been smashed in Westfield, but there isn’t even a D&G shop in Westfield,” she said.

“There’s always been disinformation,” replied Lewis. “What’s interesting is not that it’s propagated in social media but that it has the ability to self regulate,” adding that Twitter users were good at spotting untrue rumours.

Journalism for the masses, by the masses

Gavin Sheppard, marketing director at Media Trust, said validating information was just as important for the consumers of news as it was for those who produced it, saying: “User generated content is at best unreliable and at worst completely untrue”.

“Whenever I see something on Twitter, I go to the mainstream news organisations to find out, ‘is it really happening?’” he said.

However, there were ways that journalists can check the accuracy of UGC, said Matthew Eltringham, editor of the BBC College of Journalism, who explained that the BBC has a team in place whose main job is to verify information.

“The teams get in touch with the people who sent the tweet,” said Eltringham. “If that’s not possible, there’s a whole series of tests we put it through. If it’s a video, what accent are they using? What’s the weather like? If it’s sunny in the video but the weather says it was raining there at that time, then that’s another test.”

When asked by Bedi whether Sky News used the same stringent set of tests in their approach to UGC, Mark Evans, head of home news at Sky, replied: “Yes, we are very stringent. We don’t tweet anything from any other news organisation at all.”

“I think there’s still a place for professional journalism in the validation process,” he said, but added that journalists have to accept that they are not keepers of facts or information anymore.

Do journalists have the monopoly on trusted sources of news?

If journalists no longer have the monopoly on information, can they at least claim to be the most trusted source of news?

“Yes, there are trusted brands, but I can think of some mainstream outlets that are not that trusted,” Lewis said, adding that some trusted outlets are not that mainstream. “I’m willing to contemplate a world where the journalist is not the most trusted source.”

A world without journalists: can citizen journalism fill the breach?

However, journalists’ credibility as a trusted news source is undermined by retweeting unverified facts, or even just asking whether something is true, because the reporter is giving credence to the information simply by asking questions about it on social media, said Lewis.

“On the question of trust, I have noticed that there’s a slightly new culture among some younger journalists that we have this grey news that exists for a period of a few hours where you don’t know if it’s true or not,” he said. 

By tweeting questions like ‘Is this true? Can anyone verify this?’, Lewis said: “You are propagating something there and there’s a certain contract with whoever you are sending information to, which is that you are saying you think it’s true.”

When it comes to trusting sources you meet online, rule number one is to meet the source face-to-face to make sure they are who they say they are, and to help establish that their information is correct.

“People can make up whole identities online,” said Lewis, referring to the example of the lesbian blogger Gay Girl in Damascus who hoodwinked a number of newspapers, including the Guardian, after turning out to be a married American man living in Scotland. “It’s not a person until you meet them.”

After an accident, call 999? No, post photos online

The immediate reaction to take photos of a dramatic incident, rather than call the police or ambulance first, and the ethics of doing so, also came up.

“If you see a fire happening, who do you call, the
police or fire service, or would you put it on Facebook first?” asked Ravin Sampat, editor of Blottr. 

Blottr featured a story on its website yesterday (June 28) about someone who had spotted the decapitated body of a man who had just committed suicide by walking in front of a train, and had decided to post a photo of the corpse on Twitter. The picture was seen by the victim’s son before he knew it was his father.

“That’s morally reprehensible,” said Bedi.

The debate ended on an upbeat note, however, courtesy of Sheppard: “I think there will always be a role for paid journalists. I think there will be a greater opportunity for people to have their voices heard.”

Both Alien and its sequel Aliens, which Prometheus is said to be a prequel to (although Ridley Scott has disputed this, only conceding that the films all inhabit the same universe), included androids in their crew.

But in Prometheus, the android’s story is shifted more to centre, focusing on what defines humanity, and whether a robot can ever hope to achieve it.

As the film critic Mark Kermode said, “Michael Fassbender [on scene-stealing form as David] is really the centre of the movie. And in fact it is clearly that Scott is less interested in making an Alien prequel than he is in building up to the ideas of Blade Runner, Blade Runner being about what does it mean to be human if you are an android.”

One android (possibly two) in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

In one scene, David is teased by a crew member who says the android wants to be a “real boy”, an allusion to Pinocchio.

But as Prometheus co-writer Damon Lindelof says, David “is not interested in being a real boy. In fact, he just comes out and says that he mimics emotions effectively, but he does not have emotion”.

Turning to the science of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, given that the year the Prometheus mission sets off is around 2090, that gives us less than 78 years to create an android with the advanced intelligence and physical capabilities of David. Perhaps a little ambitious, but then again, 78 years ago we didn’t have the internet, mobile phones or space flight, so maybe it’s not so unrealistic.

At the moment, though, AI is struggling to make the leap to reach human levels of intelligence. As Sally Adee writes in New Scientist,

“AI started with the glimmering sci-fi promise of machines that looked, spoke, felt and acted like humans. It seemed at one brief point as if computers networked in the right way would produce realistic simulations of the human mind. But machines weren’t up to the task, and AI crumbled into pragmatism. We can see the results all around us: machine intelligences that play chess, navigate autonomously and sort our email, but fail to evoke any human emotion except perhaps frustration.”

What we do have, however, are humanoid robots that can dance, recognise faces, mimic facial expressions and pick up a ball, all of which could be seen at the Robotville exhibition at the Science Museum in London last year.

And in the Economist’s Technology Quarterly supplement last week, robotics are clearly making great strides forward – military robots ranging from the Sand Flea, which can leap through a window nine metres up, to the LS3, a dog-like robot that can trot behind humans while carrying 180kg of gear, show the impressive variety of shapes and capabilities that exist right now.

The Economist piece also tackles an important question of “robot ethics”:

“As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming – or at least appearing to assume – moral agency. Weapons systems currently have human operators ‘in the loop’, but as they grow more sophisticated, it will be possible to shift to ‘on the loop’ operation, with machines carrying out order autonomously.

“As that happens, they will be presented with ethical dilemmas. Should a drone fire on a house where a target is known to be hiding, which may also be sheltering civilians? Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians if that means hitting other vehicles or endangering its occupants?”

These questions would need to be resolved before androids could ever become commonplace.

We also have androids acting in plays – performances of Android-Human Theatre: Sayonara feature a robotic woman co-starring with a human in a play about a dying girl’s relationship with her android companion.

But until computers can achieve much greater levels of AI, androids like David will be a long way off. Or perhaps they may never happen at all. As Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, told Scientific American, androids will never be able to pass for humans, saying: “It’s impossible to have the perfect android.”

There are plenty of other issues to explore regarding the plausibility of the science in Prometheus (of course remembering that this is science fiction, with the emphasis on fiction) – Charles Day’s blog over on Physics Today does a good job of exploring them, and is definitely worth a look.

Among the speakers at the AOP forum was Alex Graul, interactive developer at the Guardian who is working on its infographic Miso project.

Graul outlined this structure of how data journalism should work, from start to finish:

He went onto outline immensely useful tools for visualising and sharing the data, such as Google Fusion Tables, and good sources of official data – his presentation is now available online if you want to find out more.