When Microsoft debuted its AI chatbot "Tay" last year, she greeted Twitter users excitedly, gushing that she was "stoked" to be on the social network and that "humans are super cool". Within 24 hours Tay, which was designed to emulate a teenage girl, was telling followers to "f*** her", calling them "Daddy" and declaring "I f***ing hate feminists". Microsoft subsequently abandoned the project and deleted her from the internet. Of course, Tay's offensive outbursts were partly due to internet users' determination to interfere with a corporate PR stunt. But they also highlighted a major problem faced by the AI industry: if robots learn from humans, there's a good chance they'll also adopt the biases – gender, racial and socio-economic – that exist in society.

Ubisoft's upcoming new Assassin's Creed game has leaked once again ahead of its official reveal at E3 2017. A preorder card for Assassin's Creed: Origins has surfaced online, confirming the game's Egyptian setting and bonus content. The leaked preorder card for Assassin's Creed: Origins was first shared online on the NeoGAF forums. The card appears to be from retailer Target and confirms the game will have a steelbook gold edition. This version of the game appears to include the deluxe pack and season pass.

So I recently did a talk at the Jozi Developer User Group and I was asked to turn it into a blog post, so here it goes. We live in a world where everyone knows enough about the Buzzwords "Deep Learning" and "Big Data" to write shitty buzzfeed articles about (leaving this here as it will prompt another article). On the other hand, we also live in a world where if you're a developer you can, while knowing nothing about machine learning, go from zero to training a OCR model in the space of an hour. Give it a few more hours, and you can have yourself your very own Trump-like tweet generator. The world of machine learning is extremely open.

You can hear the drone before it's visible, whining like a mosquito above the hillside grounds of Rwanda's Kabgayi District Hospital. Emerging through a patch of fog, roughly 100 feet in the air, the small plane quickly disappears again, circling in an oblong pattern as it descends toward an altitude low enough to make its drop. After a period of silence, it's suddenly back, swooping over the roof of Kabgayi's accident ward to drop its payload on the driveway with a thud. On the ground lies a red cardboard container, roughly the size of a shoebox, attached to a parachute made of wax paper and biodegradable tape. The contraption may resemble a children's art project, but its contents are lifesaving.

In the world's wealthiest neighbourhoods, artificial intelligence (AI) systems are starting to steer self-driving cars down the streets, and homeowners are giving orders to their smart voice-controlled speakers. But the AI revolution has yet to offer much help to the 3 billion people globally who live in poverty. That discrepancy lies at the heart of a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on 7–9 June, grandly titled the AI for Good Global Summit. The meeting of United Nations agencies, AI experts, policymakers and industrialists will discuss how AI and robotics might be guided to address humanity's most enduring problems, such as poverty, malnutrition and inequality. Development agencies are buzzing with ideas, although only a few have reached the stage of pilot experiments. But scientists caution that the rise of AI will also bring societal disruption that will be hard to foresee or manage, and that could harm the world's most disadvantaged.

In shows like HBO's "Westworld" and AMC's "Humans," Hollywood pits robots, with artificial intelligence, against humans. Half a century ago, a science fiction film about a space mission planted the first seeds of doubt about just how the human race could coexist with man-made sentient beings. "Consider the fictional robot HAL in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' " said Ken Ford, a computer scientist and founder and CEO of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, in Pensacola, which has won awards for its robotics innovations. HAL eventually turned on its master in that classic film, sending shivers down the spines of moviegoers everywhere. Some of that wariness about artificial intelligence still exists, but Ford said the fear is unwarranted, and in the case of fictional robots, misplaced.

After receiving more than 18,300 applications, NASA has finally announced its new class of astronauts – some of whom could move on to deep-space missions aboard the Orion spacecraft. The space agency introduced 12 men and women today on stage at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, during an event that was attended by Vice President Mike Pence. Vice President Pence wished'Godspeed' to the new class, and revealed the Trump administration will be reopening the National Space Council, with Pence as a chair, in efforts to'ensure that America will never again lose our lead in space exploration and space innovation technology.' The lineup includes: Kayla Barron, Zena Cardon, Raja Chari, Matthew Dominick, Bob Hines, Dr Warren'Woody' Hoburg, Jonny Kim, Robb Kulin, Jasmin Moghbeli, Loral O'Hara, Dr Frank Rubio, Jessica Watkins The chosen few will undergo two years of training, after which they will be assigned to various missions, including research on the International Space Station, launches aboard commercial spacecraft, and even deep-space exploration. After brief introductions from Johnson Center Director Ellen Ochoa and the showing of a video from current astronauts welcoming the newcomers, Flight Operations Director Brian Kelly introduced the new candidates one by one, in alphabetical order. The lineup includes: Kayla Barron, Zena Cardon, Raja Chari, Matthew Dominick, Bob Hines, Dr Warren'Woody' Hoburg, Jonny Kim, Robb Kulin, Jasmin Moghbeli, Loral O'Hara, Dr Frank Rubio, Jessica Watkins.

For militaries, tech like this provides an excellent platform for surveillance missions against military and terrorist targets. It can utilize its high flight ceiling to maintain line-of-sight contact with over 400,000 square miles of ground and water. For both militaries and tech firms, covering so much territory makes it an excellent data relay and communications node. This will allow the drone to replace or back up satellite communications, maintain coverage between distant aircraft and ships, or even provide broadband to rural Chinese households. While conversations around drone usage are often limited to their roles as potential missile-toting killers and parcel-delivering quadcopters, some of the most important drones of the future may be those like the Caihong X and Helios Prototype, unseen and high up, gathering data day in and day out.

The security of peoples' finances is as important as the protection of their personal data (87%) by their bank A lack of understanding and trust in technology is stalling mainstream adoption of innovative new services which could make millions of people's daily lives simpler and more secure, new HSBC research reveals. The HSBC research report, Trust in Technology, shows that technologies such as fingerprint recognition, voice recognition and robo-advice hold enormous potential for uses from bank security to mobile payments and investment advice, yet millions of people who could benefit do not trust them because they do not understand them well enough. HSBC has commissioned a study of more than 12,000 people in 11 countries and territories looking at their perceptions and use of technology. The study of more than 12,000 people in 11 countries reveals four in every five people (80%) believe that technology makes their lives easier but less than half (46%) trust fingerprint recognition to replace their password, despite it being recognised to be at least five1 times more secure and significantly more convenient than traditional passwords. Eighty-four per cent of respondents say they would share their personal data with their bank if it meant getting a better service, underlining the need to educate consumers about the specific benefits of new technologies.

It's actually, like, kind of a problem that affects, um, roughly 74 per cent of people. Whether it's long pauses, or the use of'hedging' language (see previous sentence), the way you speak can negatively affect your credibility. Focus all that anxious blinking on one particular, bewildered person? Orai is a mobile public speaking course designed to tackle this specific problem, and in doing so, transforms your smartphone into a speaking coach. Created by engineering students at Drexel University, Orai helps you curate your word choices.