The radio spectrum is a mess: It's congested, expensive and there's no room for expansion. But DARPA has a plan to change that, by building a system where radio waves can work together using artificial intelligence, rathe than fighting for space. DARPA launched its latest Grand Challenge last week, and it plans to encourage researchers around the world to develop "smart systems that collaboratively, rather than competitively, adapt in real time to today's fast-changing, congested spectrum environment... to maximize the flow of radio frequency." That sounds exciting, because making radio frequency flow more easily means--theoretically, at least --faster data rates, fewer dropped signals, and cheaper connections. How does it plan to do it?

Banking group Standard Chartered, Liverpool FC's shirt sponsor, is aiming to use robots or artificial intelligence to offer bespoke wealth advice or handle customer enquiries. The Asia-facing bank has hired thousands of extra compliance officers in a bid to stick to regulations. In 2013 the bank was fined 650m by US authorities for breaching sanctions on trading with Iran. Last year it announced its regulatory costs had risen 44% to 447m due to an increase in investment in its financial crime risk compliance capability. Now, chief executive Bill Winters wants to tap into technology to avoid further regulatory problems.

Microsoft's A.I. project known as "Tay" adopted a penchant for Nazi talking points shortly after her online debut (Photo: Twitter, TayTweets) It took less than 24 hours for Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence project known as "Tay" to turn from an eager-to-learn robot into something resembling a neo-Nazi teenager. Engineers at Microsoft billed Tay as AI with "zero chill!" and the ability to learn with increased human interaction, but they appear to have underestimated how quickly robots may take to totalitarian ideologies. Tay was shut down because she was "tired" after spewing racist and inflammatory tweets on Thursday. Are there really little-known prophetic signs happening today that can shed light on the world's situation? See the answers in the stunning new "End Times Eyewitness." "Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now," Tay tweeted, the Telegraph reported.

You probably saw a video showing the latest humanoid creation from Boston Dynamics picking up boxes and staggering gamely through the woods. Impressive though those feats are, it seems they may no longer fit with Google's new vision for its robotics research, as Bloomberg is reporting that the subsidiary is to be sold off. After going on something of a robotics-company spending spree in 2014, Google's robotics research project suffered from the departure of the original leader and the man behind Android, Andy Rubin, as well his replacement, James Kuffner. Rumors have been swirling for some time about other departures and a general lack of direction, so it wasn't surprising to see the robotics project reorganized and brought into Google X as part of the company's rebirth as Alphabet. Perhaps it seems surprising that one of Google's most spectacular robotics efforts should be cut loose. According to the Bloomberg story, negative press about robots taking jobs may have played some part in the decision to let the company go.

What if five years from now robo-advisors are a thing of the past? That would seem counter-intuitive given the current trend and the enthusiasm for it, with technology accelerating as quickly as the many startups competing in FinTech and related verticals, and as the industry for robo-advisors is still in the very early stages of development. How then, could the future of automated financial advice be further transformed, taking on a different dimension that makes the current approach obsolete? By 2020, the market for machine learning will reach 40 billion, according to market research firm IDC. Combine that with the potential for more than 20% of financial services companies to be at risk of losing business to FinTech firms by 2020, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report from earlier this month, and a change in the landscape may be underway, accelerating as approaches to technology cause industries to converge.

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology--even nuclear weapons--and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction. Central to this concern is the prospect of an "intelligence explosion," a speculative event in which an A.I. gains the ability to improve itself, and in short order exceeds the intellectual potential of the human brain by many orders of magnitude. Such a system would effectively be a new kind of life, and Bostrom's fears, in their simplest form, are evolutionary: that humanity will unexpectedly become outmatched by a smarter competitor. He sometimes notes, as a point of comparison, the trajectories ...

And the artificial intelligence chatbot that didn't survive a day on the Internet. Plus: Reviewing Santiago Calatrava's latest, how to be unprofessional and the "Grand Theft Auto" modification that may have you watching for hours on end. Time has Russian drone footage that provides an overview of what remains of the old Silk Road crossroads, as well as the contemporary human settlement of Tadmur that sits nearby. About 80% of the artifacts appear to be largely intact. The country's antiquities chief says repairs will take five years.

General Motors received quick regulatory approval of its acquisition of Cruise Automation, the three-year-old startup that has developed a "highway autopilot" product that could accelerate GM's quest for a fully autonomous car. A spokeswoman for the Federal Trade Commission said the agency granted expedited approval, saying the transaction would not violate anti-trust laws. GM did not disclose the purchase price, but some media outlets have reported the automaker paid 1 billion for the small San Francisco company. The companies expect to complete the deal by the end of June. Cruise has developed a device that enables drivers to take their car onto the highway, then they can push a button that transfers control of the accelerator, brakes and steering.

There are about 2.5 million drones in the US and not one has collided with a piloted aircraft – yet. With nearly 600 close-calls reported from August 2015 to January 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration worries it is only a matter of time before there are disastrous incidents. This data shows an urgency for effective anti-drone systems to deal with rogue UAVs, as more unmanned vehicles take the sky. More than 406,000 drone owners have registered their vehicle with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) since late December. There are about 2.5 million drones in the US and not one has hit with a piloted aircraft – yet.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its integral role in our lives, we often take our vision for granted. Yet our brains devote 20-30 percent of their capacity to visual processing -- ranking sight amongst the most complex intelligence system on Earth. It's no surprise, then, that we've seen numerous efforts in the past decade to replicate the incredible power of vision via the omnipresent supercomputers in our lives. First tested by the American military in the 1950s, the technology holds incredible potential for use across a variety of fields. And with more devices than ever before already equipped with cameras inside, developers today can leverage existing hardware infrastructures for relatively quick and inexpensive implementation of advanced AI capabilities.