AI as management assistant: The artificial intelligence program AlphaGo got a lot of attention for beating 18-time Go world champion Lee Sedol four out of five games last week. The significance of this achievement is rooted in the extraordinary number of possible moves in Go: 2.08168199382 … 10170, reportedly more than the number of atoms in the universe. That's too many possibilities for brute computing force to handle (which is how IBM's Deep Blue beat chess master Garry Kasparov 20 years ago). Yet AlphaGo, created by Google DeepMind, formerly British AI company DeepMind Technologies, mastered the 2,500-year-old board game on its own in a matter of months. "It started by studying a database of about 100,000 human matches, and then continued by playing against itself millions of times," reported science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel at NPR. Go bragging rights are nice for Google, but what does AlphaGo's victory mean for management?

On March 23, Microsoft launched an artificial intelligent (AI) chat bot on twitter called TayTweets, and within hours, anonymous individuals had hijacked the experiment. Because the program was not built with contingencies meant to handle inappropriate questions or information gathering, like a human brain for instance, by asking the AI bot something in a specific manner people were able to get responses regarding Holocaust denial, 9/11 conspiracies and incest. On their project website, the Microsoft development team stated the bot was designed to conduct research on "conversational understanding" through engaging and entertaining people with playful conversation. "Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments."

Every week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, General interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications. AI may undermine big-company advantages. Machine learning – software that can improve itself without human intervention – may mean trouble for big companies that depend on their heft to outmaneuver smaller upstarts, writes Howard Yu for the Harvard Business Review. And for a sneak preview of where the world is headed, one need not look further than the success story of AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence that beat a champion of the ancient game of Go, something that was previously thought to be impossible. "It is easy to imagine a world where self-taught algorithms will play a much bigger role in coordinating economic transactions; AlphaGo simply shows us what is possible in the near future. With instantaneous adjustment, automatic optimization, and continuous improvement all quietly managed by unsupervised algorithms, the redundancy of production facilities and wastage in the supply chain should become headaches of the past."

The Terminator series has long warned us of the perils of artificial intelligence. Fortunately, before the machines decimate humanity, they'll at least provide some levity. Just see the catastrophic failure of Microsoft's recent "Tay" experiment, which was spectacularly summarized with this headline from The Telegraph: "Microsoft deletes'teen girl' AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours." Our civilization had a pretty good run. Here's what else happened this week: Hit the links to get the full story.

Mike Sagar built detailed simulations of body parts for movies like "Avatar" and "King Kong." Now he's trying to build a simulated brain. His program combines his hyper-realistic biological models with artificial intelligence programs, in an attempt to simulate human consciousness. This footage comes from Bloomberg's new show "Hello World."

Reports in the press today that just 24 hours after release, Microsoft closed down Tay, it's new artificially intelligent software chatbot. In its first day, Tay was seen tweeting anti-Semitic rants. See Microsoft Muzzles Artificially Intelligent Chatbot. I guess the real question here is this: Is the design of Tay at fault, or is this more a criticism of the design of us and our current society? I think that might be outside the scope of this blog.

Microsoft's artificially intelligent "chat bot" Tay went rogue earlier this week, harassing some users with tweets full of racist and misogynistic language. The AI was programmed to sound like a millennial and learn natural speech by interacting with people online, but Tay picked up some pretty vile ideas from trolls and wound up saying things like "feminists ... should all die and burn in hell" and "Hitler was right." Microsoft took the bot offline Thursday to make adjustments. Viewed through a certain lens, there's actually a bit to celebrate about this spectacular failure. The bot did exactly what it was designed to do: acquire knowledge from the people it talked with.

Google is reportedly working on a competitor to the Amazon Echo, Amazon's voice-controlled personal assistant. According to The Information, Google is working on a'secret project' which would create a rival to the Echo, currently the leading device of its kind on the market. The Amazon Echo is the home of the digital assistant Alexa, who responds to a'wake word' and can help out around the house by creating to-do lists, playing music, setting alarms, providing weather information and doing internet searches. The Echo hasn't been released in the UK yet, but it's generated a lot of buzz in the US, and has proved successful enough that Amazon is releasing a new version, the Echo Dot, which connects to users' existing speakers. Google-owned company Nest, the creators of smart home devices like the Nest Thermostat, reportedly wanted to be part of the project, but were apparently pushed away by Google itself.

Computers may have become smart enough to beat humans in the world's most complicated board game, but occasionally, they get confused by something as simple as a name. Due to the nature of certain computer systems, some names will bring up error messages or even crash websites, potentially blocking users from entering important information. Names may just be too long for particular online forms to bear, or for people with the last name'Null,' the problem lies in the language of programming. Computers may have become smart enough to beat humans in the world's most complicated game, but sometimes, they get confused by something as simple as a name. People with the last name'Null,' have grown accustomed to the difficulties presented by the word.

U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step toward ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, of its decision in a previously unreported Feb. 4 letter to the company posted on the agency's website this week. Google's self-driving car unit on Nov. 12 submitted a proposed design for a self-driving car that has'no need for a human driver,' the letter to Google from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Chief Counsel Paul Hemmersbaugh said. At a Senate hearing, representatives of General Motors and Delphi touted numerous safety and environmental benefits of autonomous vehicles. In January, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it may waive some vehicle safety rules to allow more driverless cars to operate on US roads.