It won't be a surprise if most people familiar with artificial intelligence equate it to Watson. IBM Watson became an overnight star when it participated in the quiz show Jeopardy!, defeating former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. That was some four years ago. But now when artificial intelligence is slowly climbing the mainstream technology ladder, will enterprises intelligently use cognitive computing in 2016? Well, even Watson will find it difficult to answer.

This week my audience greatly appreciated the Motherboard post "Joke-Telling Robots Are the Final Frontier of Artificial Intelligence", so I decided to spend a few words on humor and artificial intelligence. Why allowing an artificial intelligence to joke is important? I like the honest way Bloomberg asks for the same question in a post which is now 4 years old, but is still a good read: Can a computer be taught to be funny? It doesn't seem nearly as important an endeavor as getting computers to identify malignant tumors or prevent airplanes from crashing, but being able to model humor is a key problem in attempting to model human thought. As Motherboard explains "Some specialists even see humor as the final frontier for artificial intelligence, because it requires mastery of sophisticated functions like self-awareness, empathy, spontaneity, and linguistic subtlety."

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) ethics board, established when Google acquired London AI startup DeepMind in 2014, remains one of the biggest mysteries in tech, with both Google and DeepMind refusing to reveal who sits on it. Google set up the board at DeepMind's request after the cofounders of the 400 million research-intensive AI lab said they would only agree to the acquisition if Google promised to look into the ethics of the technology it was buying into. Business Insider asked Google once again who is on its AI ethics board and what they do but it declined to comment. A number of AI experts told Business Insider that it's important to have an open debate about the ethics of AI given the potential impact it's going to have on all of our lives. Artificial intelligence is the field of building computer systems that understand and learn from observations without the need to be explicitly programmed.

The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday . Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent Web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values.

The United States announced earlier this month that it had used both drones and manned aircraft to kill at least 150 al-Shabab fighters in Somalia, a move the Pentagon says was necessary to stop an imminent attack on US and African Union forces in the country. Critics of the US drone programme however, argue such strikes create more enemies than they kill. With the number of fighters joining al-Shabab having nearly doubled since 2013, how can the armed group be defeated? In this week's Arena, Somalia's former special envoy to the US Abukar Arman, who has called drone strikes a "priceless propaganda tool" for al-Shabab, is in debate with the country's former deputy prime minister Ahmed Abdisalam Adan, who says the strikes are needed. Follow UpFront on Twitter @AJUpFront and Facebook.

Cynomix is an advanced technology developed for four years under DARPA's Cyber Genome program. It was evaluated by DARPA and MIT Lincoln Labs, and rated as the highest among all DARPA teams in its category. The goal of DARPA's Cyber Genome program was to map the genome for malware, under the premise that while over 300,000 malware strains are released daily, most are variants of a manageable number of malware families. Cynomix was conceived as a technology for identifying the unique genetic markers held in common for each malware family, and for clustering them using machine learning algorithms applied to big data sets. These algorithms cluster thousands of labeled malware ingested daily, which enables Cynomix to stay current with the newest emerging threats. This approach gives Cynomix unmatched powers of detection by analyzing a broad sampling of malware in the wild, without having to see every minor malware variation.

Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, has issued an apology for the behaviour of Tay, the company's new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that was unveiled earlier this week. Within 24 hours of going online, Tay was grounded after trolls on Twitter quickly corrupted it into a machine that spewed racist, sexist and xenophobic slurs. "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," Lee wrote in a blog post. "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." Developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams, Tay was created to conduct research on "conversational training."

Microsoft created Tay as an experiment to learn more about how artificial intelligence programs can engage with Web users in casual conversation. The project was designed to interact with and "learn" from the young generation of millennials. Tay began its short-lived Twitter tenure on Wednesday with a handful of innocuous tweets. In one typical example, Tay tweeted, "feminism is cancer," in response to a Twitter user who had posted the same message. Lee, in the blog post, called Web users' efforts to exert a malicious influence on the chatbot "a coordinated attack by a subset of people." "Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack," Lee wrote.

Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week. The company released an official apology after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade, likening feminism to cancer and suggesting the Holocaust did not happen. Related: Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users fed the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday . Following the disastrous experiment, Microsoft initially only gave a terse statement, saying Tay was a "learning machine" and "some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it."

Flirtey, the startup that did the first FAA-sanctioned drone delivery in a rural area, has replicated the feat in an urban setting. It sent out an autonomous hexacopter on a half-a-mile flight to an empty house in Hawthorne, Nevada on March 10th, carrying food, water and a first-aid kit in a box attached to a rope. It's probably not the most secure way to transport fragile objects, though, so Amazon might have to devise another method to deliver TVs or anything breakable. The drone flew with zero human intervention -- there was a pilot on standby in case things go awry, but the team programmed its flight path beforehand.