The new Google logo is displayed at the Google headquarters on September 2, 2015 in Mountain View, California. Technology investors who bought shares of Alphabet last year on optimism that new CFO Ruth Porat would increase fiscal discipline were disappointed Friday. They pushed the Google parent's GOOGL shares down 5% to 737.77 on heavy trading volume, a day after learning that the company's investments in what it calls Other bets remain a drag on short-term profits. The category posted a first-quarter operating loss of 802 million, while generating sales of just 166 million, just a tiny fraction of overall revenue of 20 billion. Alphabet's money-losing moonshots take shine off Google's ad business Other bets include expensive, speculative projects such as building a self-driving car or bringing fiber-optic Internet cables into neighborhoods.

Artificial intelligence made short work of Go, a 3,000-year-old Chinese board game with more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe, so how it will fare taking on a video game classic like Doom? AI researchers are going to find out, and have announced a new challenge looking for computers that know how to handle a rocket launcher, with the best bots set to duke it out in a deathmatch later this year at the Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) Conference. At first glance, this might sound like a walk in the park. After all, if you've ever played a first-person-shooter against computer enemies, you'll know they can be as fast and accurate as, well, a computer. But the bots you've played will have had access to the game's inner workings -- they're looking at the world like Neo in The Matrix, with perfect knowledge of maps, weapons, and the positions of other players. For the "Visual AI Doom Competition," artificially intelligent bots will only have the same information as a human: they'll see the screen in front of them, and nothing more. "There are all sorts of video games that humans play way better than computers."

It's fun to ponder a future filled with self-driving cars, a world with breezy commutes where robot navigators have made deadly crashes a thing of the past. But how far off is that future, really? Last month, Google suggested that this driverless utopia may actually be much further away than many people may realize. In a speech at SXSW in Austin, Google's car project director Chris Urmson explained that the day when fully autonomous vehicles are widely available, going anywhere that regular cars can, might be as much as 30 years away. There are still serious technical and safety challenges to overcome. In the near term, self-driving cars may be limited to more narrow situations and clearer weather.

The ability of machines to accurately comprehend written language took another step forward thanks, in part, to Harry Potter. What could this tale provide to the field of artificial intelligence? Artificial language comprehension may be improved by reading Harry Potter, if the results of a new study are developed. Maluuba is a Canadian company centered on teaching machines how to learn, and researchers there now utilize the works of J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was one of the hundreds of books studied by machines designed to study artificial intelligence.

Researchers in Nebraska tested a new tool on Friday that could eventually help in fighting grass fires -- drones. A team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln flew an unmanned aircraft over the prairie at the Homestead National Monument of America on Friday, dropping ping pong-like balls filled with a chemical mixture to ignite brush-clearing grass fires. Local and federal officials are interested in the technology because it could help clear overgrown vegetation in rugged, hard-to-reach terrain, said Michael Johnson, a spokesman for the National Park Service. The balls are filled with a chemical powder, potassium permanganate, before they're loaded into the drone. During flight, the aircraft pierces the ball with a needle and injects it with another chemical, glycol, before releasing it.

Editor's note: Digital Trends has partnered with WebVisions, the internationally recognized design, technology and user-experience conference, to help bring luminary Douglas Rushkoff to this year's event in Portland, Oregon. As part of our partnership, we're also pleased to feature select content from WebVisions' insightful blog, Word. This week, contributor Mark Wyner wonders how we go about teaching artificial intelligence right from wrong. Twitter has admitted that as many as 23 million (8.5 percent) of its user accounts are autonomous Twitterbots. Many are there to increase productivity, conduct research, or even have some fun.

Baidu, China's most popular search engine, like its US-based counterpart Google, is heavily investing in autonomous driving technologies and today it officially announced the launch of a self-driving car R&D center in Silicon Valley, right in Google's backyard. The company expects its team will grow to over 100 researchers and engineers by the end of the year. The company already moved several of its staff from its newly-created Autonomous Driving Unit (ADU) to Sunnyvale and recently hired a Tesla Autopilot software engineer. Liang Heng, a PhD graduate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford,joined Tesla's Autopilot team last year after CEO Eon Musk called for "hardcore software engineers" to join the company's effort to make the next generation of Autopilot fully autonomous. Now he leaves the automaker only 5 months later to join Baidu's autonomous driving team as a'Software Architect'.

The World Economic Forum published a paper this week titled "The Future of Jobs," in which it predicts the "Fourth Industrial Revolution." This revolution will consist of robots--such as 3-D printing machine, biotech and nanotechnology--replacing human jobs. . WEF's report introduces several new statistics, but the most startling is the one on robot-induced unemployment. It is estimated that technology could eliminate 5.1 million jobs by 2020. There have already been some companies that are using robots to guide people, teach and even serve.

Poacher hunters follow a path created by PAWS, an AI-driven app. Humans tend to do pretty terrible things to the environment. And those who go about illegally killing animals and cutting down trees are downright criminal, and can be difficult to stop. So, the National Science Foundation has turned to artificial intelligence to help out. It's not the only time we've turned to technology to help fight poachers.

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.