The Pentagon's No. 2 civilian official said Wednesday that the Defense Department is concerned that adversary nations could empower advanced weapons systems to act on their own, noting that while the United States will not give them the authority to kill autonomously, other countries might. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said the Pentagon hasn't "fully figured out" the issue of autonomous machines, but continues to examine it. The U.S. military has built a force that relies heavily on the decision-making skills of its troops, but "authoritarian regimes" may find weapons that can act independently more attractive because it consolidates the ability to take action among a handful of leaders, he said. "We will not delegate lethal authority to a machine to make a decision," Work said. "The only time we will ... delegate a machine authority is in things that go faster than human reaction time, like cyber or electronic warfare."

The Wild West of the internet is notoriously good at making bad decisions. In 1998, a collective of internet users chose Hank the "Angry Drunken Dwarf" as the most beautiful person in the world. In 2012, a coordinated internet campaign picked a school for the deaf as the winning recipient of a Taylor Swift concert. And this year, some on the internet helped turn an advanced artificial intelligence chatbot, programmed to learn from human interactions, into a racist, sexist bot called Tay -- all in just one day. Soon after Tay's bigoted Tweets started going viral, Microsoft Research's Peter Lee apologized in a blog post: "Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time."

We cover many emerging markets in the startup ecosystem. Previously, we published posts that summarized Financial Technology, Internet of Things, Bitcoin, and MarTech in six visuals. This week, we do the same with Artificial Intelligence (AI). At this time, we are tracking 855 AI companies across 13 categories, with a combined funding amount of 8.75 billion. To see the full list of 855 Artificial Intelligence startups, contact us using the form on www.venturescanner.com.

When TOPIO 1.0, a bipedal humanoid robot that plays table tennis against a human being, was first displayed in 2007, the news hardly received global acclaim. Artificial intelligence (AI) developments, which refer to intelligent computers and machines (equaling or surpassing human intelligence), have become increasingly widespread and commonplace. AI benefits our daily existence even in the most mundane aspects of life, and its uses are tested and applied in a variety of sectors--from medicine and healthcare to the economy, diplomacy, and war. Uses and applications of AI are extremely diverse: they range from online search engines to robotics and security. AI is the basis of unmanned vehicles (which are frequently employed by the United States abroad), space applications, and finance, where AI-based algorithms can quickly find optimal solutions or process data with speed and accuracy.

E: I kicked around the idea of Cosmify for about 4 months after I left Yahoo. I lack some of the data analysis background to pull what I wanted to build off, so I asked around and met with a long list of scientists in the Bay Area, Japan, China, and Russia. A friend and famous Python guru (the Python language is one of pillars of exploratory data analysis; R is the other) introduced me to Ana - she has tremendous programming chops and is a well known scientist specialized in reproducible research. She liked the idea of creating an unstructured data analysis system that anybody could use. Turned out too that we have common friends working at Trinity College in Dublin, where she earned her PhD and where I lectured a few times as a guest speaker about advanced large systems programming.

When monkeys teach monkeys, it's a monkey that you get. When humans teach monkeys, you get a more advanced monkey, who may not know what he really is. Now when humans teach humans, you get humans. But what happens, when machines teach humans? This question is not that far in the future anymore, in fact it's happening right now.

Larry W. Bridgesmith, J.D., is an adjunct professor of law and coordinator of the Program on Law and Innovation at Vanderbilt Law School. You've probably seen one of the many commercials featuring the IBM supercomputer Watson, which made waves a few years ago when it easily defeated two "Jeopardy!" Watson even analyzes trends in music now, as seen in a recent advertising spot featuring Bob Dylan. Perhaps you read where a Google software program just beat a world master champion at Go, a game of intelligence, strategy and intuition far more complex than chess. Instead, the strength of artificial intelligence lies in its effect on the ways we do our jobs -- jobs we might have assumed would always be performed by humans.

Quentin Hardy recently wrote in the New York Times, "As the oracles of Silicon Valley debate whether the latest tech boom is sliding toward bust, there is already talk about what will drive the industry's next growth spurt. The way we use computing is changing, toward a boom (and, if history is any guide, a bubble) in collecting oceans of data in so-called cloud computing centers, then analyzing the information to build new businesses. The terms most often associated with this are'machine learning' and'artificial intelligence,' or'A.I.' And the creations spawned by this market could affect things ranging from globe-spanning computer systems to how you pay at the cafeteria. 'There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there's going to be so much information people have to work through quickly,' said Diane B. Greene, the head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an A.I. boom. 'Just teaching companies how to use A.I. will be a big business.'"

The gaming industry often gets a bad rap for its depictions of violence and female objectification, but Games for Change, a New York-based development company, hopes to slowly change that. Founded in 2004, G4C creates and distributes games that focus on social impact, human rights, poverty and other issues. The customary gun-toting badasses are gone, replaced instead by characters with a strong sense of moral responsibility and a mission to educate players worldwide. Watch the video above to learn more about the company's efforts to create a new niche in the gaming market.

Microsoft wants people to have more intelligent conversations with their computers. The giant software company is promoting new tools for software developers to build intelligent "bots" or commercial programs that will work with Cortana, its voice-activated digital assistant, to perform tasks like booking a hotel room, ordering a meal or arranging a delivery. Microsoft recently shut down an experimental messaging bot after some Twitter users taught it to make offensive statements. CEO Satya Nadella said the episode showed the importance of designing technology to be "inclusive and respectful." Nadella touted the power of "conversational" computing at the company's annual Build conference for software developers in San Francisco, where Microsoft also announced some updates to its flagship Windows 10 software.