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.

If there's any comfort offered during the current debate around robots, automation and the future of work, it's that robots can't do creativity. Machines are great for automated, precise, repetitive work; not so great for creative, expressive work. Beating beneath the discussion is a steady pulse of fear that once the technology leaps from apprentice to creative independent agent, robots could cause mass unemployment, bring about a dystopian society and steal our very reason for being. Yet there are some who argue that robots getting creative could actually make the world a better place. Machines will analyse and come up with solutions for environmental problems, such as infrastructure and design, that humans couldn't possibly conceive, for example.

There has been a sense that as the capabilities of artificial intelligence has expanded at a rapid pace in the past few years that we need to step back and think of the philosophical and ethical side of AI. This is especially so when we have such a patchy understanding of how seemingly straightforward goals might be carried out by an AI. For instance, requesting that an AI eradicate cancer could prompt it to kill all humans, thus achieving its ultimate goal but probably not in the way we'd desire. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology believe that robots can learn sufficient ethics, even if it's not hardwired into them by using an approach they're calling Quixote. The approach, which was documented in a recent paper, uses value alignment, with the robots trained using stories to understand right from wrong.

Samsung Electronics Co. is "actively looking" to acquire developers of artificial intelligence and other software as the world's biggest smartphone maker tries to overcome flat-lining sales for its devices. Samsung, which has 61 billion in cash and equivalents, wants to morph into more of a software-driven company, Executive Vice President Rhee In Jong said in an interview. The South Korean consumer-electronics giant also is spending more to develop its own services because the global market for gadgets is saturated and can't be counted on for significant revenue growth, he said. "We are actively looking for M&A targets of all sorts in the software area," said Rhee, who runs the mobile division's software research-and-development business. "We are open to all possibilities, including artificial intelligence. Intelligence is no longer an option -- it is a must."

The idea behind the show is that surely a technology company that has pushed boundaries in tech can offer fine artists an app or two? The show, held in a refurbished cinema in the city's Mission district, displayed a series of manipulated, photographic works created using one of the tech firm's artificial intelligence programs. In an opening address and an accompanying online essay, Blaise Ag?era y Arcas, a Google machine-intelligence developer, likened the artistic use of such programs to photography, or the employment of optical instruments by Renaissance artists – tools which may have had their detractors, yet are now an accepted part of art history. "Faced with a new technical development in art, it's easier for us to quietly move the goalposts after a suitable period of outrage," Arcas argued, "re-inscribing what it means for something to be called fine art, what counts as skill or creativity, what is natural and what is artifice, and what it means for us to be privileged as uniquely human." To reposition those posts would be mistake, in Arcas' view: "We believe machine intelligence is an innovation that will profoundly affect art."

Read more ... », alerted everyone to the combinational possibilities of networksGoogle Advances Artificial Intelligence with Open-sourced TensorFlow. Read more ... » of small satellites, machineA startup that helps police track criminals using bitcoin just raised 5 million.

NEWS ANALYSIS: The sadly embarrassing end to Microsoft's public experiment with a chatbot that would mirror millennial attitudes provides some critical lessons about designing machine learning systems. Imagine if you will that Edgar Rice Burroughs had taught his famous character Tarzan how to type and then dropped him into a room with nothing but a computer attached to Twitter. That computer would be the young Tarzan's only window to the outside world. You'll remember that Burroughs' fictional Tarzan (the character in the book, not the movie Tarzan who yodeled among jungle greenery) was a very fast learner who had limited context with which to judge humanity. If you think of Microsoft's Tay machine learning project as being roughly equivalent to Tarzan, it makes it easier to understand what happened when Microsoft had to take its teenaged chatbot off the Internet after the Web's creepier denizen's taught it to spew anti-Semitic rants.

Business leaders are fast recognizing the potential of advanced robotic process automation (RPA) systems to boost the performance of their managers. These "intelligent machines" are able to perform a variety of complex tasks and free managers to concentrate on more strategic endeavours. Furthermore, their ability to understand and learn from the activities they perform enables them to provide managers with quick, well researched and carefully analyzed advice. These intelligent RPA systems, which use the latest cognitive computing technology, have huge potential to step up management effectiveness. To be successful, however, they must have the support of the managers they're intended to help.

Building technology companies worth tens of billions of pounds often requires one or two exceptionally talented individuals with strong computer science backgrounds and entrepreneurial spirits. Finding these people can be time consuming and difficult, which is why a couple of UK organisations have turned to artificial intelligence and software. In the last month, Founders Forum, a network of successful startup founders and business leaders, and company builder Entrepreneur First, have both revealed they are using artificial intelligence (AI) and custom-built software to identify the UK's most promising founders. Founders Forum, set up by serial entrepreneur and lastminute.com "An AI simulates what a human might do but at scale; with more data and no bias," said Dr Tom Bowles, data scientist and founder in residence at Founders Factory, a startup accelerator launched by Brent Hoberman.