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.

A Microsoft executive said Friday that the company was "deeply sorry" for the "unintended offensive and hurtful" tweets the company's Tay chatbot delivered earlier this week. "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," Peter Lee, the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft Research, wrote in a blog post. While that echoes the message that Microsoft delivered earlier, Lee attempted to show how Tay wasn't simply unleashed onto the Internet without preparation. Tay was the outgrowth of a similar Microsoft chatbot known as XiaoIce, which is already "delighting" 40 million people in China, Lee explained. "The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment?" Lee wrote.

AI as management assistant: The artificial intelligence program AlphaGo got a lot of attention for beating 18-time Go world champion Lee Sedol four out of five games last week. The significance of this achievement is rooted in the extraordinary number of possible moves in Go: 2.08168199382 … 10170, reportedly more than the number of atoms in the universe. That's too many possibilities for brute computing force to handle (which is how IBM's Deep Blue beat chess master Garry Kasparov 20 years ago). Yet AlphaGo, created by Google DeepMind, formerly British AI company DeepMind Technologies, mastered the 2,500-year-old board game on its own in a matter of months. "It started by studying a database of about 100,000 human matches, and then continued by playing against itself millions of times," reported science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel at NPR. Go bragging rights are nice for Google, but what does AlphaGo's victory mean for management?

Computers may have become smart enough to beat humans in the world's most complicated board game, but occasionally, they get confused by something as simple as a name. Due to the nature of certain computer systems, some names will bring up error messages or even crash websites, potentially blocking users from entering important information. Names may just be too long for particular online forms to bear, or for people with the last name'Null,' the problem lies in the language of programming. Computers may have become smart enough to beat humans in the world's most complicated game, but sometimes, they get confused by something as simple as a name. People with the last name'Null,' have grown accustomed to the difficulties presented by the word.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your shapeshifting Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. HEBI Robotics, who we like because they make snake robots that also work as legs for non-snake robots, have just released a new modular robot actuator that's geared towards general-purpose robotics and looks pretty awesome: This series of powerful robot module allow engineers, researchers, and industrial integrators to quickly and easily create world-class custom robots of any configuration. These actuators are packed with sensors that enable controllable position, velocity, and sensitive torque control as well as three axis inertial measurement.