In The Social Express, a cast of animated characters help kids with autism learn helpful social skills. Both Katie and her teacher look like they'd be right at home in a Pixar film, and at first their conversation seems like it would fit in one too. The ponytailed and pink-clad Katie really wants to sharpen her pencil, but her teacher won't let her until the other kids in the class finish taking a test. Katie asks again, but the teacher offers the same, frustrating answer. "Katie seems upset that her teacher said'no.'

After a drawn-out battle, South Korea's Go grandmaster with 9-dan rank, Lee Sedol, lost his fifth game against Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo in Seoul on March 15, 2016. AlphaGo's win over one of the world's best players shocked the world's Go circle. Due to the complexity of the nature of Go, which requires intuition, creativity, and strategic thinking, it was believed that Go was the only board game that no computers could conquer. Hong Kong's Go champion, Lee Cheuk-leung, was surprised at the result of the fifth match, in which Lee Sedol had the upper hand in the first half of the game, but somehow lost to the computer eventually. Experts from the Go circle initially expected Lee Sedol to win all five games, but he ultimately lost four of them to the computer.

Some of the more interesting and universally accessible developments in technology over the past decade (to me anyway) have been within the artificial intelligence world. Unlike many other industry advancements, stories of high-profile AI successes or failures make suitable discussion fodder at family dinner tables. The "Fork Me On GitHub" types appreciate the complexity of the required engineering efforts, while the "Hey Person Who Computers -- Can You Set My VCR Clock?" crowd can just think "whoa" without concern for what is happening under the hood. One somewhat recent and well-publicized AI event was the Jeopardy-playing Watson supercomputer built by IBM. Those in the technology community understood the difficulties of natural language processing (all while being required to answer in the form of a question) while much of the world just wanted to see a computer built by anonymous geeks humiliate more smug geeks on live TV.

X2AIX2AI founders Eugene Bann (left) and Michiel Rauws (right) intrigue school children with Karim's automatic responses at Jusoor school, located within a Syrian refugee community in Al Marj, Lebanon. According to the UN, over 3 million Syrian refugees are now in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, with millions more displaced within Syria. To help with this crisis, artificial intelligence startup X2AI is in the middle of a two week stay in Beirut, Lebanon, where it's piloting the use of artificial intelligence as a psychotherapy treatment for refugees. Partnering with Singularity University and the Field Innovation Team, X2AI is pitching the psychotherapy bot (named Karim) to aid workers and refugee communities. X2AIX2AI founder and CTO Eugene Bann watches on as a student from Jusoor school has a conversation with Karim in Arabic, and his first interaction with an AI.

"I had a half-cup of oatmeal, with two-tablesoons of maple syrup and a cup of coffee. Oh, I put a handful of blueberries in the oatmeal, and there was milk in the coffee. Ask someone what they had for breakfast, and this is the kind of description you might get. And that's one of the reasons keeping track of food intake is such a problem for tech that's meant to help a person lose weight or stick to a diet for other reasons. Logging food for nutrition and calories is important to sticking to a diet, according to Susan Roberts, director of the Boston-based Energy Metabolism Lab at Tufts University. "It makes people more self-aware about the junk they are eating and how little they actually enjoy it, and the shock of huge portions, et cetera.

Memories, at their fundamental level, are simply electrical connections between neurons. When you make a new memory, the connection between a set of neurons is strengthened. However, if that were the only mechanism in play, the development of new memories would eventually lead to runaway electrical activity in the brain. There must be, as the Oxford team hypothesizes, an inhibiting system that keeps that activity in check. And that's where anti-memories come in.

In Seoul, South Korea, a Google-created artificial intelligence has been squaring off against a mortal man in the 2,500-year-old strategy game, called Go, that's several orders of magnitude more complicated than chess. When it was finally over, Google's AlphaGo won four out of five matchups, making AlphaGo a role model for young artificial intelligences everywhere. Wired reported that "AlphaGo relies on deep neural networks--networks of hardware and software that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain. With these neural nets, it can learn tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data." That's bad news for SEOs the world over, because Google isn't just using neural nets to beat Koreans at board games, it's also using these advanced networks to make their search results more efficient.

Child care is a hard job, but somebody, or something, has got to do it. Japanese researchers have developed androids to meet that need, which includes happily reading that fairy tale again and again and again. The androids, which were created by a team of education and robotics specialists at a research facility in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, are part of a larger system called RoHo Care. Short for Robotic Hoikujo (day care center), RoHo is being touted as a high-tech solution to the staffing crisis that forced the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry to announce emergency measures this week. "I never thought I'd see this day, but we're now confident that RoHo could blaze a trail for child care worldwide," said team leader Makoto Hara.

Anyone interested in the future of design should have a look at the new Batmobile. I was lucky enough to be photographed alongside it at the London Film and Comic Convention earlier this year, and my inner geek was impressed. Built like a tank and armour-plated, with twin machine guns mounted on a bat-black body, it's a seriously cool-looking piece of kit. But looks can be deceptive. The Batmobile certainly looked rough and tough, but it was roped off from the crowds so no one could get too close.

Fascinating, but there is a grain of truth at the core of this article. In Western culture we have fairy tales, Aesop's fables and the Bible. In Eastern culture, they have Hinduism, Buddhism and their own brand of stories and fables steeped in morality and ethics. However, one must remember that humans are deeply flawed creatures, which doesn't even start to include those who are mentally unbalanced or just plain psychotic. Just look at the news headlines and you will see that crime and unethical behavior has been with us since the dawn of civilization some 13,000 years ago.