World of Warcraft is an institution. After 12 years, Blizzard's seminal MMO is still running, and although player counts have fallen since its 2010 peak, there were still 5.5 million active accounts last September. Germany has always been a key market for the company, consistently ranking among the top five countries, and to celebrate the game's sixth expansion, Legion, Blizzard has given players a treat. In the heart of Cologne, Germany, home to the annual Gamescom convention, the developer has transformed the 14th century festival hall Gürzenich into a WoW locale. At the venue's launch event on Wednesday, fans were invited to wander around a recreation of "The Fel Hammer," a starting zone in the new expansion.

This week saw the eruption of a vendor spat when NVIDIA, developer of GPUs widely used in the AI/machine learning market, alleged foul play against Intel in recent comparative benchmark results involving Intel's Xeon Phi processors. While NVIDIA makes some fair points about the methodology employed by its rival, Intel announced impressive news of its own on the AI/Xeon Phi front. First, let's look at NVIDIA's criticism of Intel that came in the form of a blog post by Ian Buck, vice president of accelerated computing, who declared that Intel compared Xeon Phi to out-of-date NVIDIA benchmarking data. "Intel used Caffe AlexNet (benchmarking) data that is 18 months old, comparing a system with four (NVIDIA) Maxwell GPUs to four Xeon Phi servers," Buck wrote. "With the more recent implementation of Caffe AlexNet, publicly available here, Intel would have discovered that the same system with four Maxwell GPUs delivers 30 percent faster training time than four Xeon Phi servers. In fact, a system with four Pascal-based NVIDIA TITAN X GPUs trains 90 percent faster and a single NVIDIA DGX-1 is over 5x faster than four Xeon Phi servers."

Okay, they didn't literally run for any hills. But the EFF wrote a very panicked blog post warning of the dangers to come if an AI trained to hack wasn't parented properly. The histrionic post made a few headlines, but missed the point of the competition entirely. If the AI playing Def Con's all-machine Capture The Flag had feelings, they would've been very hurt indeed. The seven different AI agents were projects of teams that hailed from around the world, coming together to compete for a 2 million purse.

It is surprising how much ink is spilled on theories that banking is about to be wiped out by a tsunami called fintech, resulting in the alleged mass closure of banks and unemployment of financial services professionals. Last time I was in New York, Wall Street was intact and thriving and specialized financial crime lawyers like myself were busier than ever. First, the law stands in the way of fintech displacing even one dollar of financial services. A fintech company is not a Brooklyn pizza stand – it cannot survive without being connected to the financial system, which requires a banking partner and a banking relationship. In other words, fintech cannot disrupt anything unless the banks and lawyers (as regulators) let them.

Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft--the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web--to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. I don't want to be an alarmist, but there's a chance we're running out of swear words. Over the years, our language has become more coarse, and dropping F bombs and other profanities has been fully integrated into our daily exchanges. As use of the words becomes more acceptable, they lose their power.

Ohio's toll road, a heavily traveled connector between the East Coast and Chicago, is moving closer to allowing the testing of self-driving vehicles. Testing is likely to begin within 12 months, and possibly before the end of the year, the Ohio Turnpike's executive director told The Associated Press. Officials overseeing the roadway have spent more than a year looking at the possibilities, said Randy Cole, the turnpike's director. Vehicles drive along the Ohio Turnpike in Strongsville, Ohio: Officials plan to allow self driving cars to use the route before the end of the year in a bid to teach them how to drive in bad weather. As autonomous vehicle technology improves, it's easy to imagine a world where these vehicles have no need for a human operator which would have a huge impact on those who driving for a living.

When was the last time you asked your computer something? There's Siri, Google, and Cortana of course, but these systems, clever as they may be, are the thin end of a newly emerging wedge of remarkable new approaches to computer learning and marketing. If you need proof that we are entering a new era of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) you need to look no further than Google's DeepMind project. Early this year DeepMind, Google's AI computer, developed initially in London, challenged and beat South Korean Grandmaster Lee Sedol at the ancient game of Go. Why this challenge is so important requires you to think back to the Deep Blue computer, which finally beat Gary Kasparov at chess in the 1990s. Deep Blue had it easy.

WHEN Germany occupied Poland during the second world war, a young Pole was scratching a living under false papers as a car mechanic. The man, Stanislaw Lem, who was to become one of world's most famous science fiction writers, used to "mend" German vehicles so they would break down. The habit never left him. With Summa Technologiae, his masterwork of non-fiction which has been translated into English for the first time, Lem has taken Western civilisation for a spin – with spectacular consequences. The book will be a fabulous shock to those who know only his science fiction, such as Solaris or The Cyberiad.

Soft robots aren't easy to make, since they require a completely different set of components from their rigid counterparts. It's even tougher to scale down the parts they typically use for locomotion. A team of researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, however, successfully created a 15-millimeter soft micromachine that only needs light to be able to move. The microrobot is made of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers (LCEs), smart materials that change shape when exposed to visible light. Under a light source, the machine's body contracts like a caterpillar and forms waves to propel it forward.

The only thing certain about the global economy is uncertainty. Thanks to political unrest, terrorist attacks, and the repercussions of Brexit, caution is the dominant mindset of investors in every market, according to the latest quarterly global report on venture capital trends published jointly by KPMG International and CB Insights. This is the fourth consecutive quarter where investors pulled back despite a total 27.4 billion invested across 1,886 deals--seven of which were in the 1 billion unicorn range. After a high at this time last year, the total number of deals declined an additional 6% from the first quarter of 2016. Although the percentage may appear incremental, startup and earlystage company growth are important to the global economy.