Everyone on the internet had a great time with Tay, Microsoft's Twitter robot that became a racist Holocaust denier in a matter of a few hours (then came back and did it again). The company had created a public relations flap -- more incident than a disaster -- while giving the public an object lesson on the pros and cons of machine learning: Automation can harness patterns to fascinating effect at speed, but the results will be predictably hard to predict. As is often the case, the military is an early adopter of automation technology. It is -- at one time -- leading the charge toward machine learning and also trying desperately to keep up. One of the main areas of focus for the Pentagon is autonomous robots and how they will team with humans – a R2D2-style robot wingman, for instance. But this week, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work outlined another task for A.I.: open-source data crunching.

Britain Prime Minister David Cameron warned Western leaders Friday the Islamic State plans to use drones to spray nuclear material over Western cities. The UK Daily Telegraph reported that there is growing concerns among world leaders that extremists are looking to buy commercial drones to launch a dirty bomb attack over major metropolitan cities, which could kill thousands. Cameron warned the dangers of ISIS getting hold of nuclear material were "only too real." He met with leaders from the U.S., France and China to plan out a reaction response to such an attack, the newspaper reported. US officials reportedly fear that extremists could steal radioactive material from a medical facility and sold through the "dark web." Cameron said he would deploy counterterrorism police and the UK Border Force while British leaders hold a Cobra meeting.

Smart robots seem to be everywhere. Whether they're performing surgery, trouncing Go champions or generating dreamy artwork, computers programmed to learn on their own are growing more intelligent by the day. Southwestern Law School professor Ryan Abbott believes that computers are even generating patentable subject matter. We just don't know about it, he says, because disclosing it on an application might render the invention unpatentable. "Now that very large companies like IBM, Pfizer and Google are investing heavily in creative computing, it's going to play a much greater role in innovation in the future," he says.

NEW YORK – Terrorists flying drones to spread highly radioactive material over a civilian area: That's part of the nightmare scenario President Barack Obama urged world leaders to consider as they debated better ways of controlling nuclear material. With the aid of apocalyptic fake newscasts, Obama told the group of 50 heads of state and foreign ministers in Washington Friday to imagine that a terrorist group had bought isotopes through brokers on the so-called dark Web. One shipment was picked up in transit by radiation monitors, but others were thought to be still on the move. The terrorists were believed to be planning to use a drone to distribute the material. Would authorities react in time?

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that "civilians were killed that shouldn't have been" in past U.S. drone strikes, but said the administration is now "very cautious" about striking where women or children are present. Obama was asked at a news conference about an increase in the number of people targeted in drone strikes against extremists in Libya, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere. "In the past, there was legitimate criticism that the legal architecture around the use of drone strikes wasn't as precise as it should have been," Obama said. "There's no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn't have been." He added that over the last several years, the administration has worked to prevent civilian deaths.

WASHINGTON – The United States has conducted another drone strike in Somalia, targeting a senior al-Shabab leader thought to have been plotting attacks against Americans in Mogadishu, the Pentagon said Friday. The announcement came shortly before President Barack Obama offered detailed remarks about America's controversial drone program, saying some criticism of it had been "legitimate," and acknowledging there was "no doubt" the unmanned aircraft have killed innocent people in the past. Thursday's strike was conducted in cooperation with Somali officials and targeted Hassan Ali Dhoore, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said. The Pentagon said it was still assessing whether Dhoore had been killed. A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the strike targeted a vehicle Dhoore was riding in with two other al-Qaida-aligned al-Shabab members.

X2AIX2AI founders Eugene Bann (left) and Michiel Rauws (right) intrigue school children with Karim's automatic responses at Jusoor school, located within a Syrian refugee community in Al Marj, Lebanon. According to the UN, over 3 million Syrian refugees are now in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, with millions more displaced within Syria. To help with this crisis, artificial intelligence startup X2AI is in the middle of a two week stay in Beirut, Lebanon, where it's piloting the use of artificial intelligence as a psychotherapy treatment for refugees. Partnering with Singularity University and the Field Innovation Team, X2AI is pitching the psychotherapy bot (named Karim) to aid workers and refugee communities. X2AIX2AI founder and CTO Eugene Bann watches on as a student from Jusoor school has a conversation with Karim in Arabic, and his first interaction with an AI.

Computers that draw and analyze data from the Internet are ubiquitous in many industries. But the new wave of deep-learning machines makes this technology far more compelling for military use. This is attributed to the proliferation of data collectors like drones and smart devices -- known as the "Internet of things" -- combined with advances in software algorithms and the vast computing power available in the cloud. How the Pentagon could use smart machines to gain an edge on the battlefield is now the subject of many closed-door conversations and exchanges with the intelligence community and Silicon Valley firms.

SAN FRANCISCO – The next step in regulating, and potentially expanding, drone use in the U.S. hit a deadline Friday, when the Federal Aviation Administration was slated to receive recommendations on very small drones. As consumers and the industry surge forward with ideas for what they want to do with drones, the FAA is still working on the details on how these new devices, dubbed UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) or UAS (unmanned aerial systems), will be treated. The report due to the FAA comes from the Micro UAS Aviation Rulemaking Committee, or the ARC. Its charter was to come up with recommendations for the FAA covering "micro UAS," or drones weighing less than 4.4 pounds. That size of drone includes everything from small, inexpensive toy drones to 3,000, film set quality flying cameras.

After World War II, Britain was a hotbed of pioneering computer research. Work done on automatic ways to crack codes and spot enemy aircraft meant it had a skilled cadre of engineers and scientists equipped with the knowledge to create powerful and practical computers. The machines that resulted, the Manchester Mark I, Edsac and the Ace, are now well known. Even Colossus, a secret during wartime and for decades after, is now widely recognised as the world's first programmable, electronic digital computer. But not all the UK's pioneers and pioneering computers are as well-known.