Microsoft has apologised after a robot it made "tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images" that included support for Hitler and genocide. The company launched Tay, an artificially intelligent robot, on Twitter last week. It was intended to be a fun way of engaging people with AI – but instead was tricked by people into tweeting out support of Hitler and genocide, and repeated white power messages. Microsoft said that it had no way of knowing that people would attempt to trick the robot into tweeting the offensive words, but apologised for letting it do so. Microsoft said that it had launched Tay after success with a similar robot, XiaoIce, in China.

If venture capital and research funding are any indication, artificial intelligence will play a leading role in shaping our future. And few tech innovators in the private or public sector have been as prominent in defining that role as Andrew Ng, chief scientist at China's search giant Baidu. Ng has taught AI at Stanford, led the Google Brain project, founded online education pioneer Coursera, and just last year took his post at "China's Google" in hopes of figuring out how to teach computers to see and hear, and to do that for the world's most populous country. Small wonder why China represents such a huge opportunity for machine intelligence applications. Baidu is the world's fifth most trafficked website.

Drone attacks killed eight men suspected of belonging to al Qaeda in southern Yemen on Saturday night, local residents said, as a U.S. campaign against the militant group goes on amid a wider civil war in the country. Two missiles hit the fighters who had gathered in courtyards in the villages of al-Hudhn and Naqeel al-Hayala, residents from the southern coastal province of Abyan told Reuters by phone. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has taken advantage of a war pitting the Iran-allied Houthis against forces loyal to exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to grab territory and operate more openly. The group has carried out attacks against the Yemeni state for years, plotted to blow up U.S.-bound airliners and claimed responsibility for the January 2015 attack in Paris on a French magazine that killed 12 people. The United States has kept up a drone campaign against the militants, although it evacuated the last of its military and intelligence personnel from Yemen in March last year.

OK, it's not the HAL 9000 (yet) but all over the world, intelligent machines are replacing jobs at an alarming rate. And the smarter they get, the faster they're going to be replacing us. What I am talking about here is not a subtle shift to more automation but a real threat to society and the human race. From self-driving cars and robot waiters to robotic doctors and robot journalists, what seem like novelties today will soon be commonplace. As just one example take Foxconn, the largest private employer in China that contract manufactures of products such as the iPhone, Kindle, Playstation etc.

By now, the fact that transatlantic democratic capitalism, once the engine of postwar prosperity, has run into trouble can hardly be denied by anyone with the courage to browse a daily newspaper. Hunger, homelessness, toxic chemicals in the water supply, the lack of affordable housing: all these issues are back on the agenda, even in the most prosperous of countries. This appalling decline in living standards was some time in the making – 40 years of neoliberal policies are finally taking their toll – so it shouldn't come as a shock. However, coupled with the spillover effects of wars in the Middle East – first the refugees, now the increasingly regular terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe – our economic and political malaise looks much more ominous. It's hardly surprising that the insurgent populist forces, on both left and right, have such an easy time bashing the elites.

Can artificially intelligent robots be our friends? Roboticists and AI researchers are trying to make it so – and the first fruits of their labors are about to come onto the market. But there are already hints that the efforts will touch some of humanity's hot buttons. Take Hanson Robotics, for example: Its latest creation, Sophia, combines an AI chatbot with an expressive humanlike face. She can talk enthusiastically about helping humans in health care, education and customer service.

In the face of the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, a start-up that develops AI is to puts its technology to use as a psychological aid for refugees by having supportive conversations with them via SMS messages. In the midst of a civil war and a near-total collapse of society, millions of Syrian refugees have been fleeing their country in search of anywhere where they can live safe in the knowledge their life is not under threat, but not without great psychological stress on those involved. However, due to the sheer number of people fleeing, and the difficulty they experience in simply trying to find shelter, they are unlikely to receive any form of support for the sake of their mental health. According to The Guardian, however, a start-up that develops AI, X2AI, is to use its systems to create a chatbot called Karim, which will allow anyone with a mobile phone to have conversations with it about their experiences in Arabic. Once the conversation becomes more developed, Karim will use its natural language processors to analyse the likely emotional state of the human on the other end and react with an appropriate response or questions for the refugee.

Machine learning algorithms can warn investors when a particular stock is going to fall by predicting likely instances of insider trading (when information that's not in the public domain is capitalised upon by people in the know). This can be done by analysing previous occasions when company insiders did apparently well-timed trades in their own stocks, and recognising these patterns. This might seem deceptively simple, but it isn't, explains Tom Doris, CEO of OTAS Technologies, a London-based market analytics and machine learning trading system. While company executives are required to file details of transactions in their company's stock, most insider trades are few and far between: a needle in a haystack. Doris told IBTimes UK: "We look at all of the insiders, the directors of companies, and we see all of their historical transactions in their own stock. If you are the chief financial officer of Vodafone, any time you buy or sell Vodafone stock, you're obliged under regulation to file details of those transactions. So that would include the amount that you bought or sold, when you did it and what price you got and the reason, if any, for the transaction. There is an enormous database of all of these transactions for all of the world's listed stocks and we go and we basically back-test all of the insiders and we find the ones that are apparently good at timing their own stocks."

When the apocalypse comes, it won't do so on four rotors. Drones, especially drones-as-we-know-them--the affordable, commercially available quadcopters--are only really engines of their own destruction. Zoltan Istvan, transhumanist candidate for President, wrote today that the American constitution is unprepared for the challenges of swarming robots. With all due I respect, I couldn't possibly disagree more. "The Second Amendment Isn't Prepared for a 3D-Printed Drone Army", Istvan argues, and vividly sets a scene of total despair: Imagine this: A disgruntled citizen borrows 30,000 from his credit cards.

China's leading Internet search company, Baidu, says that data collected from its customers could be used to predict and preëmpt potentially deadly crowd gatherings in the real world. Baidu has an incredible amount of data to mine. Out of a total population of 1.35 billion in China, more than 657 million people use its services. The Baidu research also highlights how the digital trails left by Internet users can be used to understand city dynamics. Baidu's data is already being used in China to show city planners where to place transportation, facilities, or shops. However, some experts worry that such data mining might also help the government keep an eye out for social unrest.