California has been in a drought for almost five years now, making water an extraordinarily precious resource--one that Californian residents and governments are eager to protect. On Wednesday, California suspended its mandatory drought restrictions, saying that the state is turning over responsibility of the water restrictions to individual communities, letting them set their own restrictions based on their water budgets, with the state only stepping in if the budgets are unrealistically optimistic. But how can a community keep track of its water budget? IBM's Watson program has already beaten Jeopardy!, invented its own recipes, assisted in treating patients with chronic conditions, and is currently used by over 80,000 developers. Now, in partnership with environmental analytics company OmniEarth, Watson will help save the existence of humans on Earth--or at least in California.

These days, everybody is talking about the importance of artificial intelligence in the world of cars. Living in Silicon Valley, I've had my fair share of experiences with autonomous vehicles (that's a topic for another day), but today that's not my point. While AI could undoubtedly revolutionize the way we travel, there are a lot of other practical ways it could help to make our lives more efficient and less monotonous. Unlike controlling a multi-ton chunk of metal and glass, controlling more predictable pieces of equipment–such as lawnmowers and snowblowers–could help to alleviate the burden of maintaining one's property year-round. These pieces of equipment follow very simple paths, generally don't have a lot of obstacles to overcome, and are low-speed. Imagine it as a smarter Roomba for outdoors (although let's hope they'd be better than the very poor-performing Roomba).

In Einstein's general theory of relativity, there's no conceptual distinction between the past and the future, let alone an objective line of "now." There's also no sense in which time "flows"; instead, all of space and time is just there in some four-dimensional structure. None of these facts are easy to accept, because they're in direct conflict with our subjective experience of time. But don't feel too bad: They're hard even for physicists to accept, an ongoing tension that places physics in conflict not just with common sense but also with itself. As much as physicists talk about time symmetry, they do not allow themselves to invoke the future, only the past, when seeking to explain occurrences in the world.

On a very warm afternoon in April, the image of a bald young white man's head floated on a gray screen at the Kitchen, in Chelsea. The man spoke in a tone that shifted worryingly between aggressive and confessional, punctuating his lines with two disembodied hands. "And I could have been your haruspex, sexy," he said at one point, snarling. "I could have read omens in your extricated liver." There were pale red marks beneath his eyes, a five-o'clock shadow on his jaw.

From New York National Guard: "A bomb disposal robot, piloted from a distance, examines a downed drone with explosive material tethered to it during training." Looks like that bomb was ... frozen in its tracks. Look, I'm not going to beat the lede from the New York National Guard, so here it is in full: The remote-controlled robot bumped across the divots of the grassy field until it reached the downed toy drone. Its camera gazed up and down as it examined the explosive device nearby, in a Taylor Swift lunch box tethered to the drone. The drone, the robot, the lunch box, and the explosive device were part of an exercise called Raven's Challenge.

At the Stanford shopping center in Palo Alto, California, there is a new sheriff in town – and it's an egg-shaped robot. Outside Tiffany & Co, an unfortunate man holding a baby finds himself in the robot's path. It bears down on him, a little jerkily, like a giant Roomba. The man dodges but the robot's software is already trying to avoid him, so they end up on a collision course. "I've seen Terminator," the man says, half to himself and half to the amused crowd, "and that is some Skynet-ass shit."

An internet pioneer who first taught the world how to find friendship, love, and sex online a quarter century ago is trying to determine at what point artificial intelligence develops emotional intelligence, and he thinks he can do it with an art contest. About 31 different robots competed for 100,000 in prizes at the first annual International Robot Art Competition. The vote was based on 2,200 votes cast on Facebook as well as judgment from six art critics who have experience working with technology. The fan and judge favorite was TAIDA from the National Taiwan University. TAIDA won first place and 30,000 for several Pointillism-style works, including a still life of fruit, landscape of the Taiwan coast, and a portrait of Albert Einstein.

The artificial intelligence revolution is clearly happening. A.I. will transform medicine, give us all super-smart virtual assistants, fight crime and a thousand things more. In order for A.I. to work its miracles, it's going to need data. And I'm predicting that we'll willingly give that data. Do you use Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa?

Spring may finally have arrived for artificial intelligence, Google executives said Friday. Speaking at the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, executives said that artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced to the point where they are proving genuinely useful, through such technologies as speech recognition and language translation. But there remains great room for improvement. "We've seen extraordinary results in fields that hadn't really moved the needle for many years," said John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering for Google. "I think we're in an AI spring right now."

North Dakota State University agricultural researcher John Nowatzki points to a mechanical panel of a Hermes 450 drone before the aircraft took off from the Hillsboro, N.D. airport on Friday, May 20, 2016, to collect agriculture data. The drone can fly higher and longer than other aircraft currently being used for commercial purposes in the United States. The 20-foot long drone can fly for 20 hours.