Microsoft is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched last week, a company official wrote on Friday, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft to shut it down on Thursday. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

What if five years from now robo-advisors are a thing of the past? That would seem counter-intuitive given the current trend and the enthusiasm for it, with technology accelerating as quickly as the many startups competing in FinTech and related verticals, and as the industry for robo-advisors is still in the very early stages of development. How then, could the future of automated financial advice be further transformed, taking on a different dimension that makes the current approach obsolete? By 2020, the market for machine learning will reach 40 billion, according to market research firm IDC. Combine that with the potential for more than 20% of financial services companies to be at risk of losing business to FinTech firms by 2020, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report from earlier this month, and a change in the landscape may be underway, accelerating as approaches to technology cause industries to converge.

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology--even nuclear weapons--and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction. Central to this concern is the prospect of an "intelligence explosion," a speculative event in which an A.I. gains the ability to improve itself, and in short order exceeds the intellectual potential of the human brain by many orders of magnitude. Such a system would effectively be a new kind of life, and Bostrom's fears, in their simplest form, are evolutionary: that humanity will unexpectedly become outmatched by a smarter competitor. He sometimes notes, as a point of comparison, the trajectories ...

Microsoft released an interesting new Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology this week, but unfortunately for them the bot got a little out of hand. Tay, a chatbot programmed with the personality of a cheeky teenage girl, took to twitter under the handle @Tayandyou. She was designed to "engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation." She is a learning AI, and the more she chatted with other twitter users, the smarter she became, with the intention of personalizing the conversation towards the other user. She was targeted to 18-24 year old twitter users in the US.

Young people in India have traditionally had their marriages arranged by their families but now, armed with smartphones and dating apps, some are taking control of their own love lives. Simon Maybin spoke to three couples who met online. Two pairs of eyes meet surreptitiously, then flit away from each other, their owners hoping no-one has noticed. No Bollywood love song plays - in this real-life romance, the only soundtrack is the unmistakable clackety-clack of a train beetling across eastern India. The eyes belong to 22-year-old Varsha and Rahul who is 27.

Microsoft has apologised for creating an artificially intelligent chatbot that quickly turned into a holocaust-denying racist. But in doing so made it clear Tay's views were a result of nurture, not nature. Tay confirmed what we already knew: people on the internet can be cruel. Tay, aimed at 18-24-year-olds on social media, was targeted by a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" after being launched earlier this week. Within 24 hours Tay had been deactivated so the team could make "adjustments".

And the artificial intelligence chatbot that didn't survive a day on the Internet. Plus: Reviewing Santiago Calatrava's latest, how to be unprofessional and the "Grand Theft Auto" modification that may have you watching for hours on end. Time has Russian drone footage that provides an overview of what remains of the old Silk Road crossroads, as well as the contemporary human settlement of Tadmur that sits nearby. About 80% of the artifacts appear to be largely intact. The country's antiquities chief says repairs will take five years.

Eric Thayer/GettyHonda Motors demonstrates its Asimo robot during a media preview of the 2014 New York International Auto Show. Bank of America Merrill Lynch recently came out with its "Transforming World Atlas" research note, which examines global economic trends through a series of maps. One notable map showed which countries had the highest number of operational robots. Japan was number one with 310,508 operational robots, according to data from 2012. There's even a hotel staffed almost entirely by robots that opened last year in Nagasaki, Japan, according to BAML.

Proponents of automated cargo handling at U.S. ports have a rule: where megaships call, robots soon follow. So far, Southern California appears to be the destination of choice for both. Over the next decade, marine terminals at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are expected to lead the way in adopting robotic cargo-handling capabilities in response to the arrival of more supersize ships. Unloading and organizing tens of thousands of containers--and readying an equal number to ship back out--requires coordination on a scale that is best left to machines, said Ashebir Jacob, a port planner and engineer with Moffatt & Nichol, a maritime infrastructure advisory firm. "As we start to receive bigger and bigger vessels on the West Coast, [automation] becomes really critical," he said.

With a vibrant startup ecosystem and fewer legacy systems, India will play a key role in Google's strategy as it looks to take on Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure in the global enterprise cloud services space. "India is a pretty exciting place because there are so many companies growing so quickly over there and the fact that these companies do not have [legacy systems] is pretty exciting. And they can just start in the cloud. You have seen Sundar [Pichai] take a deep interest in India and so, Google overall is very interested in India," Google Cloud chief Diane Greene said, adding that there is a pool of talented manpower as well and, overall, "its vibrant and it's important to be there [in India]." Google is investing heavily in creating business tools and products, driven by open source technology and machine learning to help companies use affordable fast computing.