Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users. The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014. XiaoIce has had more than 40 million conversations apparently without major incident.

Everyone in business wants to know what's going to happen in the future, and for some time now Ford has been investing in futurism, an evolving academic and professional discipline. The need for this was particularly evident after the Business Insider Transportation team in New York spent a few days at the New York Auto Show, asking everyone to predict was will happen in 2016 -- and beyond. The car business these days is all about change: automakers becoming "mobility providers," electric cars potentially displacing gas-powered vehicles, even autos driving themselves. Heck, even Apple may get in on the action. For nearly a decade, Sheryl Connelly has been Ford's manager of global consumer trends and futuring.

A fully loaded fireproof mini tankbot has proved size really doesn't matter. Called Uran-9, this mini tank bot stands just a few feet taller than a human and is fully loaded with a machine gun, missiles and a 30-millimeter cannon that fires 350 to 400 rounds per minute. A Russian defense organization created this unmanned vehicle to provide reconnaissance and fire support to infantry and counter-terror units. Uran-9 stands just a few feet taller than the average human being, but there is no need to be any bigger as the machine does not transport soldiers. This vehicle will assists infantry units and counter-terrorism groups by reaching places soldiers are unable to travel.

A mesmerising simulation of the sun has provided the most accurate representation of its magnetic field to date. The hypnotic map shows the complex and turbulent forces that shapes the ball of plasma, causing violent solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Researchers hope the model could help solve a long-standing mystery about our star; if the magnetic lines on the surface are so chaotic, how is it that it has a unified magnetic field? A mesmerising simulation of the sun has provided the most accurate representation of its magnetic field to date. The hypnotic map shows the complex and turbulent forces that shapes the ball of plasma, causing violent solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

As many of you know by now, on Wednesday we launched a chatbot called Tay. 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. Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values. I want to share what we learned and how we're taking these lessons forward. For context, Tay was not the first artificial intelligence application we released into the online social world.

The Henn-na Hotel in Japan just got more futuristic. Walking up to the front desk, customers are greeted with the familiar bow and the typical "Welcome" spiel from a typical Japanese woman. Henn-na means either "flower" or "it's weird," depending on your interpretation. Service bots and AI are used to help customers in retail stores like Lowe's. Why shouldn't they help guests check into a room?

Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening beyond that. YUVAL NOAH HARARI, Lecturer, Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

The world of computing has followed Moore's Law for generations. The "law," which was developed by researcher Gordon Moore in the 1970s, says that the number of transistors that can be squeezed into a set amount of space will double every two years. It's been a reliable gauge ever since. Moore's Law may be nearing its end, however. Tom Simonite at the MIT Technology Review writes that Intel has declared in a regulatory filing what insiders have suspected: The company is slowing the release of new chips in a manner that doesn't keep pace with the law.

One day after trolls transformed Microsoft's chatbot Tay into a ditzy, Holocaust-denying monster, the company has issued an apology for failing to realize that people on the internet are dicks. "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, the corporate vice president for Microsoft Research, with what one imagines was a look of pained bewilderment unique to someone who just learned that 4chan exists. As anyone who followed the debacle will tell you, the most astonishing thing about it was not the revelation that trolls will troll--that's a given--but rather that Microsoft somehow didn't anticipate the very real possibility of rampant trolling. As we developed Tay, we planned and implemented a lot of filtering and conducted extensive user studies with diverse user groups. We stress-tested Tay under a variety of conditions, specifically to make interacting with Tay a positive experience.

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft is "deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets" generated by its renegade artificial intelligence chatbot, Tay, which was abruptly taken offline Thursday after one day of life. The company said it will bring Tay back after engineers can plan better for hackers with "malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," according to a blog post Friday by Peter Lee, vice president of Microsoft Research. Tay launched Wednesday with little fanfare. The experiment was aimed at 18- to 24-year-olds communicating via text, Twitter and Kik, and its AI mission was largely to engage social users in conversation. Tay was modeled on a successful chatbot launch in China, Xiaolche, that has been embraced apparently without incident by 40 million users, the post notes.