When you heard about Tay, Microsoft's tweeting A.I., were you really surprised that a computer that learned about human nature from Twitter would become a raging racist in less than a day? Poor Tay started out all "hellooooooo w rld!!!" and quickly morphed into a Hitler-loving, genocide-encouraging piece of computer crap. Naturally, Microsoft apologized for the horrifying tweets by the chatbot with "zero chill." In that apology, the company stressed that the Chinese version of Tay, Xiaoice or Xiaolce, provides a very positive experience for users in stark contrast to this experiment gone so very wrong. "In China, our Xiaolce chatbot is being used by some 40 million people, delighting with its stories and conversations. The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment? Tay – a chatbot created for 18- to 24- year-olds in the U.S. for entertainment purposes – is our first attempt to answer this question."

OK, it's not the HAL 9000 (yet) but all over the world, intelligent machines are replacing jobs at an alarming rate. And the smarter they get, the faster they're going to be replacing us. What I am talking about here is not a subtle shift to more automation but a real threat to society and the human race. From self-driving cars and robot waiters to robotic doctors and robot journalists, what seem like novelties today will soon be commonplace. As just one example take Foxconn, the largest private employer in China that contract manufactures of products such as the iPhone, Kindle, Playstation etc.

Zipfian Academy has graduated more than 50 alumni, placing graduates into data science roles at Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber, Square, Coursera, and many more Silicon Valley companies. Participants in our program come from backgrounds in engineering, data analysis, statistics, and occasionally professional poker. Here, we share an interview with Alex Mentch, a graduate from our Winter 2014 Cohort. Alex hails originally from Idaho, and studied electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Looking for a career transition into data science, Alex attended our Winter 2014 cohort where he built a search engine for state legislation.

The consequences of Korean player Lee Se-dol's historic defeat against a computer program in March 2016 will be both global and political. One reason is that the ancient and revered board-game Go (some claim it was invented by a Chinese emperor around 2300 BC) -- in its very essence, is a profound meditation on the art of war. There are only two types of stones in Go, black or white -- reminiscent of zeroes and ones in digital computers. Contrary to the hierarchical pawns, bishops and kings in chess, the pieces in Go are identical and theoretically equal in value, somewhat analogous to people in a communist regime. The aim is to capture territory and annihilate the enemy stones by surrounding them.

In what could be the last time that a human taunts a robot with a hockey stick and lives to brag about it, the latest demonstration of the Atlas Robot has prompted renewed fears about the future of intelligent machines. Born in 2013, Atlas is a DARPA-funded robot developed by Boston Dynamics. Its latest iteration stands at a very human-proportioned 5'9, weighing 180lbs. Like Lee Majors circa 1974, each successive version of Atlas has gotten better, stronger, faster than it was before. Aside from scaring the bejesus out of genius technophobic Oxbridge physicists, it's intended to perform tasks in emergency situations too dangerous for humans.

Just months after announcing a pizza delivery truck with built-in heaters, the pizza purveyor is upping the ante with the world's first pizza delivery robot. The company's Australian arm announced plans to deploy a Domino Robotic Unit (DRU). Essentially an autonomous vehicle, DRU can, according to Domino's, follow a map, navigate sidewalks, avoid obstacles and keep your pizza hot and fresh while delivering it to your front door. While this sounds like an elaborate marketing stunt, a Domino's spokesperson confirmed to Mashable that the robot is real. "DRU is cheeky and endearing and we are confident that one day he will become an integral part of the Domino's family. He's a road to the future and one that we are very excited about exploring further," said Domino's Group CEO and Managing Director Don Meij in a release.

Microsoft created Tay as an experiment to learn more about how artificial intelligence programs can engage with Web users in casual conversation. The project was designed to interact with and "learn" from the young generation of millennials. Tay began its short-lived Twitter tenure on Wednesday with a handful of innocuous tweets. In one typical example, Tay tweeted: "feminism is cancer," in response to another Twitter user who had posted the same message. Lee, in the blog post, called Web users' efforts to exert a malicious influence on the chatbot "a coordinated attack by a subset of people." "Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack," Lee wrote.

There are a lot of creepy things you can do with the data gleaned from an online and mobile maps service used by 302 million people, but there are helpful ways to use it too. Baidu, China's version of Google, is making the case that it can use queries made on its maps service to predict areas where overcrowding may put people at risk for fatal accidents. In a paper titled "Early Warning of Human Crowds Based on Query Data from Baidu Map: Analysis Based on Shanghai Stampede," three Baidu researchers based in Beijing lay out an approach to using big data to give early warnings about potential crowd disasters 1-3 hours in advance. This data is already used by Chinese city planners to help them place transportation, facilities, and shops, according to MIT Technology Review. Now it can be used in the interest of public safety, the researchers assert.

TECH ENTREPRENEUR Elon Musk has been warning that the Age of the Robots is coming soon -- and it might not be pleasant for us. He may be right and he may be wrong on that, but one thing is sure: One robot certainly gave the anti-Whites a headache just this week. On Wednesday, tech giant Microsoft, the third largest corporation on Earth in terms of market value, launched and then immediately withdrew an Artificial Intelligence robot in the persona of a 19-year-old American girl called "Tay." Tay was a "chatbot," which interacted with real humans on the social media platform Twitter and was designed to learn from its interactions. Tay learned so fast that Microsoft pulled her offline in less than a single day.

My (expanded) talking points from a presentation I gave at the Re.Work Investing in Deep Learning dinner in London on 1st December 2015. Keep up to date with AI news through my newsletter on tech, research and venture. It's my belief that artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting and transformative opportunities of our time. Consumers worldwide carry 2 billion smartphones, they're increasingly addicted to these devices and 40% of the world is online (KPCB). This means we're creating new data assets that never existed before (user behavior, preferences, interests, knowledge, connections).