They are wise-cracking companions, able to communicate in more than six million languages. Others are bent on enslaving or destroying humanity, deeming themselves better, more rational caretakers of the Earth in light of our irrational behaviors. Pilot or garbage man, soldier or slave, hero or villain--robots have played every role imaginable in popular science fiction for nearly a century. In the 21st century, real-life robots inspired by their fictional counterparts are beginning to take starring roles in everyday life. Several companies, Google among them, are testing autonomous cars (unfortunately, there is no indication that they will be able to travel into the past or future anytime soon).

Brace yourselves: Artificial intelligence, virtual reality and a host of new emerging technologies are becoming mainstream. Fortunately, for the federal government, two new digital communities will coalesce around these burgeoning technologies in an effort to promote interagency collaboration, partnerships with industry and to exchange ideas about what works. Launched last month, the Artificial Intelligence for Citizens Services and Virtual/Augmented Reality communities add two new focus areas to General Services Administration's Digital Communities effort, which already boasts some 10,000 members and 16 active mission areas. Justin Herman, digital communities and open government lead at GSA, said the communities arose from direct conversations, feedback and analysis from federal agencies themselves. "Agencies had the need for more information and clarification for how to approach these technologies of tomorrow," Herman told Nextgov.

Amazon Alexa, the voice assistant that lives in various Echo hardware is, apparently, now a bit of a political junkie, obsessively tracking the presidential election returns just like you. Election results are, in truth, just another in a long line of Alexa skills Amazon adds to its artificial intelligence platform almost every day. According to Amazon, which announced the update on, naturally, Election Day, Alexa is watching who won which states, which candidate is in the lead and, most importantly, current electoral vote counts. With the first polls set to close hours from now, it is a little early for Alexa to be offering much -- if any -- valuable election information. Amazon Alexa can now give real-time election results.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), home of the Titan supercomputer and a research team dedicated to Vice President Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot program, is experimenting with how deep learning can be used to improve cancer research. Specifically, ORNL researchers applied new deep learning techniques to automate how information is extracted from cancer pathology reports documented across a nationwide network of cancer registry programs. These registry programs collect demographic and clinical information related to diagnosis, treatment, and history of cancer incidences in the US, and are used by physicians as a consultation tool for broad cancer surveillance. Using a dataset composed of 1,976 pathology reports, ORNL researchers trained a deep-learning algorithm to multitask, which in this context means it was made to simultaneously carry out two different but closely related information-extraction tasks. In the first task the algorithm aimed to identify the primary location of the cancer, and in the second it identified which side of the body the cancer was located.

Google cut power usage in its data centers by several percentage points earlier this year by trusting artificially intelligent software derived from 1980s-era Atari video games. And in the years to come, the Internet giant not only could save much more electricity, but also solve far larger problems by taking on a much more complex video game. Research scientists at Google's DeepMind unit announced Friday they are developing a computer program that reads data about Blizzard Entertainment's "StarCraft II" games and learns how to play on its own. The software would have to figure out how to split its attention between micromanagement and long-term strategic decisions. It's that maneuvering that could deliver big breakthroughs.

Elon Musk's "Alien Dreadnought" is bringing a German crew on board. Tesla, the electric car company based in Palo Alto, announced Tuesday that it will buy Grohmann Engineering, based in Prum, Germany, to be renamed Tesla Grohmann Automation. Grohmann, founded by Chief Executive Klaus Grohman, is a highly regarded supplier of factory automation systems in industries ranging from automobiles to microelectronics. It has outposts around the world, including offices in Charlotte, N.C. and Chandler, Ariz. The German company employs about 700 people.

Ecommerce company Etsy today disclosed in a filing that it spent $32.5 million to acquire Blackbird Technologies, a startup that had developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that could be used for various search applications in the context of shopping. "The Company completed this acquisition to improve the quality and relevance of search on Etsy.com," says the SEC filing. Total consideration for the acquisition was approximately $15.0 million, consisting of $8.1 million in cash and 513,304 shares of the Company's common stock with a fair value of $6.9 million on the acquisition date. Additionally, the Company issued 184,230 shares of common stock or restricted stock units ("RSUs") on the acquisition date with a fair value of $2.5 million which are tied to continuous service with the Company as an employee and are being accounted for as post-acquisition stock-based compensation expense over a three-year vesting period. The Company will pay up to an additional $8.8 million in cash and issue up to an additional 460,575 shares of RSUs post-close with a fair value of $6.2 million, both of which are also tied to continuous service with the Company as an employee and are being accounted for as post-acquisition stock-based and other compensation expense over a three-year vesting period.

Crunching vast tracts of data is a growing task for defense, intelligence and security agencies. They need analysis, fast, of what's going on in the air and on the ground to assess battlefields, secure environments, and decide when and how to deploy people or humanitarian aid. Artificial intelligence may be the key to digesting the barrage of data from multiple sources. To unlock insights from this data, agencies are increasingly turning to GPU-powered deep learning, with algorithms that can identify relevant content and patterns in raw data at machine speed. The GPU is the engine of modern AI, NVIDIA solution architect Jon Barker Barker told a broad audience from the defense, intelligence and homeland security communities at the recent annual GEOINT Symposium.

London-based BenevolentAI believes it has built the kind of artificial intelligence tech that will allow it to identify and develop drugs faster and better than any group of mere scientific mortals can hope for. And now J&J is handing over some experimental molecules it needs to prove it's right. The upstart joins a long line scrambling to apply vast amounts of computational power towards drug development. Their goal is to usher in the long-awaited "pharma 2.0" and finally bend the expensive curve of late-stage trial failure. It's unclear how BenevolentAI's algorithms are any better at evaluating the potential of any small-molecule than other computationally-taxing approaches developed by other groups -- and it's all driven by the data.

It's now a hired gun for thousands of companies in at least 20 industries. David Kenny took the helm of IBM's Watson Group ibm in February, after Big Blue acquired The Weather Company, where Kenny had served as CEO. In the months since then, the Watson business has grown dramatically, with well over 100,000 developers worldwide now working with more than three dozen Watson application program interfaces (APIs). Fortune Deputy Editor Clifton Leaf caught up with Kenny in mid-October, when IBM Watson's General Manager was in San Francisco, getting ready to open Watson West--the AI system's newest business outpost--and to launch the company's second World of Watson conference, a gathering of its burgeoning ecosystem of partners and users, in Las Vegas on Oct. 24. KENNY: Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, which essentially is a set of algorithms. Deep-learning uses more advanced things like convolutional neural networks, which basically means you can look at things more deeply into more layers. Machine learning could work, for example, when it came to reading text.