Machines are learning to process simple commands by exploring 3-D virtual worlds. Devices like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home have brought voice-controlled technology into the mainstream, but these still only deal with simple commands. Making machines smart enough to handle a real conversation remains a very tough challenge. And it may be difficult to achieve without some grounding in the way the physical world works. Attempts to solve this problem by hard-coding relationships between words and objects and actions requires endless rules, making a machine unable to adapt to new situations.

Artificial Intelligence is colossally hyped these days, but the dirty little secret is that it still has a long, long way to go. Sure, A.I. systems have mastered an array of games, from chess and Go to "Jeopardy" and poker, but the technology continues to struggle in the real world. Robots fall over while opening doors, prototype driverless cars frequently need human intervention, and nobody has yet designed a machine that can read reliably at the level of a sixth grader, let alone a college student. Computers that can educate themselves -- a mark of true intelligence -- remain a dream. Even the trendy technique of "deep learning," which uses artificial neural networks to discern complex statistical correlations in huge amounts of data, often comes up short.

Opaque and potentially biased mathematical models are remaking our lives--and neither the companies responsible for developing them nor the government is interested in addressing the problem. This week a group of researchers, together with the American Civil Liberties Union, launched an effort to identify and highlight algorithmic bias. The AI Now initiative was announced at an event held at MIT to discuss what many experts see as a growing challenge. Algorithmic bias is shaping up to be a major societal issue at a critical moment in the evolution of machine learning and AI. If the bias lurking inside the algorithms that make ever-more-important decisions goes unrecognized and unchecked, it could have serious negative consequences, especially for poorer communities and minorities.

Any ammunition storage location, full of explosives collected in one place, makes a tempting target. For an attacker, the hard part is getting an explosive inside the perimeter to set it off. Drones are the ideal mechanism for this mayhem. Relatively cheap and expendable, a drone's major limitation is how much weight it can carry. In this case, the aerial vehicle seems to have transported a Russian-made ZMG-1 thermite grenade.

After reports earlier this week that iRobot would sell data gathered about a user's home from Roomba vacuums, company CEO Colin Angle insists that iRobot will "never" sell customer data, ZDNet reported. The promise is in stark contrast to what Angle appeared to suggest earlier in the week in an interview with Reuters during which the executive said the company could use mapping data gathered by its robotic vacuums and sell them to companies looking to gain insight about how people use smart home devices. Read: Are Smart Home Devices Safe? "There's an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared," Angle told Reuters on Monday, though he did suggest such a data sharing program would require a user to opt in. In a statement to ZDNet, Angle walked back that plan. "First things first, iRobot will never sell your data. Our mission is to help you keep a cleaner home and, in time, to help the smart home and the devices in it work better," he wrote.

Male territoriality is a pretty well-defined scientific concept. Some animals mark their domain with rocks or urine, others attack intruders (and we've all seen guys who pick fights at the bar). Researchers at Stanford University Medical Center have taken a closer look at the roots of this rage in the mouse brain, and in a study published today in Neuron, they pinpoint the brain cells that give rise to male territorial aggression. They also found that in some cases, the mice know when fighting would be a faux pas. The neurons in question are clustered in the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH), located deep in the center of the brain in a region that plays a role in many hormonally-controlled activities--things like fear, eating and sexual activity. It's old news that the VMH is involved in aggression, but the Stanford researchers narrowed the culprits down to approximately 4,000 cells with receptors that detect sex hormones.

Amazon employs 45,000 robots, but they all have something missing: hands. Squat wheeled machines carry boxes around in more than 20 of the company's cavernous fulfillment centers across the globe. But it falls exclusively to humans to do things like pulling items from shelves or placing them into those brown boxes that bring garbage bags and pens and books to our homes. Robots able to help with so-called picking tasks would boost Amazon's efficiency--and make it much less reliant on human workers. It's why the company has invited a motley crew of mechanical arms, grippers, suction cups--and their human handlers--to Nagoya, Japan, this week to show off their manipulation skills.

Does Siri have trouble with your accent? A project is turning to crowdsourced voice donations to overcome this problem, and iron out some of the other inherent problems with voice recognition. Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa are trained on huge databases of recorded speech. But if those don't contain enough samples of a particular accent or dialect, the voice assistants will struggle to understand people who speak that way. So Mozilla – the foundation behind the Firefox web browser – is turning to crowdsourcing to create voice recognition systems that avoid these problems.

By now our future is clear: We are to be cared for, entertained, and monetized by artificial intelligence. Existing industries like healthcare and manufacturing will become much more efficient; new ones like augmented reality goggles and robot taxis will become possible. But as the tech industry busies itself with building out this brave new artificially intelligent, and profit boosting, world, it's hitting a speed bump: Computers aren't powerful and efficient enough at the specific kind of math needed. While most attention to the AI boom is understandably focused on the latest exploits of algorithms beating humans at poker or piloting juggernauts, there's a less obvious scramble going on to build a new breed of computer chip needed to power our AI future. One datapoint that shows how great that need is: software companies Google and Microsoft have become entangled in the messy task of creating their own chips.