If you lie awake at night worrying about the'threat' of Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world, then take heart from a recent episode involving robot waiters in China. Three restaurants in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou have been forced to fire all of their robot staff after their utter incompetence began costing them money. Two of the restaurants have closed completely after discovering the clumsy waiters could not perform simple tasks like taking orders, pouring drinks and carrying soup, reports say. The slacking robot team also kept breaking down and after a string of complaints the third restaurant mentioned above decided to sack all but one and bring back human employees, the Workers' Daily newspaper reports.

But that hasn't stopped one of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms from investing in a Los Angeles storage start-up. Clutter Inc. has movers pack people's belongings and then haul them to a storage facility until they're needed. It doesn't bring in a huge number of customers, but the ones who do sign up pay a couple of hundred dollars a month and remain customers for a long time, said Omar Hamoui, a partner at Sequoia Capital. That helps explain why Hamoui's firm recently invested 20 million in Clutter, just six months after leading a 9-million infusion for the company. "This is more of a high-value subscription business than a one-off purchase," Hamoui said.

We have bad news if you were hoping to live out your anime dreams and watch a Ghost in the Shell VR movie on your phone: it's not going to happen. Production IG has revealed that Virtual Reality Diver will only be shown in 31 internet cafés across the Kanto region (Tokyo, Yokohama and nearby areas) this May. Reportedly, it just became too big and ambitious to offer as a mobile app. That's somewhat understandable given its 15-minute length (a 360-degree clip that long is going to chew up a lot of space), but it's bound to be frustrating if you were hoping to return to the classic series on a mobile VR headset.

We're hearing a lot about automated machine learning lately, inspired in part by growing demand and the shortage of data scientists. But like many innovations, automated machine learning did not simply appear out of the blue; it is the product of at least twenty years of development. Before Unica Software launched its successful suite of marketing automation software, the company's primary business was predictive analytics, with a particular focus on neural networks. In 1995, Unica introduced Pattern Recognition Workbench (PRW), a software package that used an automated grid search to optimize model tuning for neural networks. Three years later, Unica partnered with Group 1 Software (now owned by Pitney Bowes) to market Model 1, a tool that automated model selection over four different types of predictive models.

I'm happy to announce that Malo Bourgon, formerly a program management analyst at MIRI, has taken on a new leadership role as our chief operating officer. As MIRI's second-in-command, Malo will be taking over a lot of the hands-on work of coordinating our day-to-day activities: supervising our ops team, planning events, managing our finances, and overseeing internal systems. He'll also be assisting me in organizational strategy and outreach work. Prior to joining MIRI, Malo studied electrical, software, and systems engineering at the University of Guelph in Ontario. His professional interests included climate change mitigation, and during his master's, he worked on a project to reduce waste through online detection of inefficient electric motors.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is accepting applicants to two summer programs: a three-week AI robustness and reliability colloquium series (co-run with the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute), and a two-week fellows program focused on helping new researchers contribute to MIRI's technical agenda (co-run with the Center for Applied Rationality). The Colloquium Series on Robust and Beneficial AI (CSRBAI), running from May 27 to June 18, is a new gathering of top researchers in academia and industry to tackle the kinds of technical questions featured in the Future of Life Institute's long-term AI research priorities report and project grants, including transparency, error-tolerance, and preference specification in software systems. The goal of the event is to spark new conversations and collaborations between safety-conscious AI scientists with a variety of backgrounds and research interests. Attendees will be invited to give and attend talks at MIRI's Berkeley, California offices during Wednesday/Thursday/Friday colloquia, to participate in hands-on Saturday/Sunday workshops, and to drop by for open discussion days: Scheduled speakers include Stuart Russell (May 27), UC Berkeley Professor of Computer Science and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Tom Dietterich (May 27), AAAI President and OSU Director of Intelligent Systems, and Bart Selman (June 3), Cornell Professor of Computer Science. The 2016 MIRI Summer Fellows program, running from June 19 to July 3, doubles as a workshop for developing new problem-solving skills and mathematical intuitions, and a crash course on MIRI's active research projects.

Last year Google was awarded a patent for a system that would enable the user to allocate tasks to "a plurality of robotic devices" via the cloud, giving rise to speculation that the company is building a robot army. In a patent registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Google describes how a "computing component" (such as a PC or mobile phone) could communicate with robots over a network to allocate tasks and receive information.

Last week this space saw much of the largest fintech funding rounds taking place outside the U.S. That trend continues this week, with some San Francisco-grown AI thrown into the mix. This week we witnessed a major push forward in the process of collaboration between financial institutions (FIs) and startups. This week's top fundraising company was part of a startup accelerator based in Hong Kong. We also found a company creating artificial intelligence capable of accurately and reliably predicting stock market trends.

NATO-led mission in Afghanistan has confirmed that the US military will investigate into the US drone strikes in southeastern Afghanistan that killed 17 people last week. Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, spokesman for the US-led coalition, told Al Jazeera on Monday, that they will conduct an investigation into the air strikes carried out in the Paktika province. "Currently there is no evidence of civilian casualties, however, we are conducting a thorough investigation into the strikes," Cleveland, who is part of the Operation Resolute Support, said. Relatives and tribal elders demanded for an investigation on Saturday claiming that the air raids hit civilians, not members of armed groups. However, Afghan officials told Al Jazeera that the people killed in the attack had links to the Taliban.

Nobody wants a robot apocalypse. From the mechanical worker's revolt in R.U.R. (the play that gave us the word "robot") to the bleak, nuke-scarred hellscapes of the Terminator and Matrix films, the idea of humanity destroyed by tools of its own creation is compelling, if still the domain of fiction. To keep the apocalypse firmly in the realm of the speculative, today the International Committee of the Red Cross released an unusual statement for a humanitarian group: "Decisions to kill and destroy are a human responsibility." The Red Cross isn't encouraging human decisions to kill and destroy. Instead, it's arguing that if such decisions are going to be made (and little in human history suggests they won't be), then it's really important that it is actual humans with that authority and power, not lethal autonomous weapon systems.