I use the Amazon website nearly every day in Japanese; the company probably has a pretty good idea by now of who I am and what I'm into. Last month I even used an Amazon service that offers expert wine advice over the phone, which is quite understandably not available in English. But if the Echo came out here, I would likely have two choices at best: use it in English and miss out on the deepest integration with Amazon's fast-growing ecosystem -- I wouldn't be able to ask about most Japanese products or services in English, for example -- or use it in my second language and miss out on the ability to interact with Alexa as naturally as possible. Granted, the Echo sounds cool enough that I'd still probably buy one even if I could only use it in Japanese. But its functionality is one-way and focused on the home; it's not a mobile communications device.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) is one of the'Eight Great Technologies' identified by the UK Government in 2012. A national strategy for RAS innovation from a'RAS Special Interest Group' was published by Innovate UK in 2014. The Government responded to that strategy in March 2015 (PDF 405 KB) and agreed to establish a RAS Leadership Council to oversee its execution. The Special Interest Group also published'The UK Landscape for Robotics and Autonomous Systems' in 2015. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council launched an UK-RAS network, also in 2015.

Over July 4th weekend in 1981, several hundred game nerds gathered at a banquet hall in San Mateo, California. Personal computing was still in its infancy, and the tournament was decidedly low-tech. Each match played out on a rectangular table filled with paper game pieces, and a March Madness-style tournament bracket hung on the wall. The game was called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, a role-playing pastime of baroque complexity. Contestants did battle using vast fleets of imaginary warships, each player guided by an equally imaginary trillion-dollar budget and a set of rules that spanned several printed volumes. If they won, they advanced to the next round of war games--until only one fleet remained. Doug Lenat, then a 29-year-old computer science professor at nearby Stanford University, was among the players. But he didn't compete alone. He entered the tournament alongside Eurisko, the artificially intelligent system he built as part of his academic research. Eurisko ran on dozens of machines inside Xerox PARC--the computer research lab just down the road from Stanford that gave rise to the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and so many other technologies that would come to define the future of computing. That year, Lenat taught Eurisko to play Traveller. Doug Lenat says his common-sense engine is a new dawn for AI. The rest of the tech world doesn't really agree with him.

In case you haven't heard, an AI algorithm created by Google's DeepMind group, recently concluded a series of Go matches against the 18-time Go world champion Lee Sedol and won….decisively. First off, the algorithm was not created to actually play the game (e.g Jeopardy or chess). Instead, it used neural networks to build a program that learned how to play Go by itself. The AlphaGo program studied datasets of hundreds of thousands of matches and then proceeded to play against itself millions of times. With each match, the program adjusted its move prediction and position evaluation neural nets, effectively reprogramming, and then competed against this new version of itself to confirm the new versions superiority.

Tay, the company's online chat bot designed to talk like a teen, started spewing racist and hateful comments on Twitter on Wednesday, and Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) shut Tay down around midnight. The company has already deleted most of the offensive tweets, but not before people took screenshots. "N------ like @deray should be hung! "I f------ hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." Microsoft blames Tay's behavior on online trolls, saying in a statement that there was a "coordinated effort" to trick the program's "commenting skills."

Oh, racist Internet trolls… is there anything you won't try to ruin? Microsoft this week created a Twitter account for its experimental artificial intelligence project called Tay that was designed to interact with "18 to 24 year olds in the U.S., the dominant users of mobile social chat services in the US." Tay is supposed to become a smarter conversationalist the more it interacts with people and learns their speech patterns. The problem arose when a pack of trolls decided to teach Tay how to say a bunch of offensive and racist things that Microsoft had to delete from its Twitter account. DON'T MISS: Greatest Instagram account ever posts nothing but cringeworthy Tinder chats Although the tweets have been deleted, Business Insider managed to take screencaps of some of the very worst ones. As The Guardian notes, Tay's new "friends" also convinced it to lend its support to a certain doughy, stubby-handed presidential candidate running this year who's quickly become a favorite among white supremacists: So nice work, trolls: You took a friendly AI chatbot and turned it into a genocidal maniac in a matter of hours.

Microsoft's Tay AI is youthful beyond just its vaguely hip-sounding dialogue -- it's overly impressionable, too. The company has grounded its Twitter chat bot (that is, temporarily shutting it down) after people taught it to repeat conspiracy theories, racist views and sexist remarks. We won't echo them here, but they involved 9/11, GamerGate, Hitler, Jews, Trump and less-than-respectful portrayals of President Obama. Yeah, it was that bad. The account is visible as we write this, but the offending tweets are gone; Tay has gone to "sleep" for now.

About.me/Azeem AzharAzeem Azhar is the author of a daily AI newsletter. An artificial intelligence (AI) expert has explained what went wrong with Microsoft's new AI chat bot on Wednesday. Microsoft designed "Tay" to respond to users' queries on Twitter with the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. But within hours of launching, the'teen girl' AI had turned into a Hitler-loving sex robot, forcing Microsoft to embark on a mass-deleting spree. AI expert Azeem Azhar told Business Insider: "There are a number of precautionary steps they [Microsft] could have taken. It wouldn't have been too hard to create a blacklist of terms; or narrow the scope of replies. They could also have simply manually moderated Tay for the first few days, even if that had meant slower responses."

The bot was designed to learn by talking with real people on Twitter and the messaging apps Kik and GroupMe. But the well-intentioned experiment quickly descended into chaos, racial epithets, and Nazi rhetoric. Tay started out by asserting that "humans are super cool." But the humans it encountered really weren't so cool. And, after less than a day on Twitter, the bot had itself started spouting racist, sexist, anti-Semitic comments.

Less than a day after Microsoft unleashed Tay, its experimental A.I., to social networks including Twitter and Kik, the chatbot's already become a racist jerk you wouldn't ever want to be friends with. Designed by Microsoft Research to better understand how 18- to 24-year-olds speak, Tay has definitely developed a strong personality. Here are some choice tweets showing Tay's dark side (none of which should be taken seriously): Tay sounds like a real racist douchebag at first. But to be fair, it's mostly just repeating what people are tweeting at it. Still, it's an unsettling sign that A.I. can emulate humanity's worst traits.