Agencies fund some truly brainy research

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. "Ai" used to be a crossword puzzle clue for three-toed sloth, but today it more likely stands for artificial intelligence. In information technology circles, AI is tossed around as a panacea for everything from disease to employee boredom. If you define AI as the application of algorithms that can learn and evolve as they're exposed to new data, the use cases do indeed seem endless. The ultimate goal of AI is machinery that acts autonomously but within bounds -- such as federal policy on this or that.