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January 13, 2018 00:02 IST Updated: January 13, 2018 00:13 IST Data protection legislation should be about protecting people, not innovation “What do judges know that we cannot teach a computer?” There is a substantial public sentiment that distrusts legal rules and state structures and looks to technology for solutions. After all, many trust their smartphones more than they trust their government. But what may seem as a fairly modern libertarian opinion, voiced in pitch decks and technology conferences, and buoyed by the success of the information economy, has much deeper roots. Such ambitions of a technology centric society were voiced more than forty years ago by John McCarthy, an influential computer scientist and professor at Stanford who coined the term, “artificial intelligence”, and nurtured it into a formal field of research. It was not that such assertions were without prominent challengers, noticeably Joseph Weizenbaum whose 1976 book titled Computer Power and Human Reason ...

As the U.S. loses interest in multilateralism in trade, India should actively try to arrest the organisation’s slide C. Rammanohar Reddy DECEMBER 26, 2017 00:15 IST Less than 25 years after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created, its future as a body overseeing multilateral trade rules is in doubt. The failure of the recent ministerial meeting at Buenos Aires is only symptomatic of a decline in its importance. Too ambitious? When the WTO was born in 1995, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), it was given a large remit overseeing the rules for world trade. It was also given powers to punish countries which violated these rules. Yet, in what must be an unusual development in the history of international institutions, the WTO has been felled by the weight of the extraordinary ambitions placed on it. As a consequence, since the late 2000s, the organisation has been unable to carry out its basic task of overseeing a successful conduct of multilater...