America will have 2.5 million drones by the end of this year and the number will increase to seven million by 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a report release Thursday. While the number of hobby drones is expected to reach from 1.9 million in 2016 to 4.3 million by 2020, commercial drones will see a four times rise from 600,000 to 2.7 million in 4 years. "Unmanned aircraft systems will be the most dynamic growth sector within aviation," the agency said in the report. But it also added that future security and regulatory measures by the U.S. government will be deciding factor on the way civilian drone market grows. In December, the FAA brought in set of rules which stated that registration of small unmanned aircraft weighing more than 0.55 pounds and less than 55 pounds, including payloads such as on-board cameras, was necessary.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The seven Iranian hackers charged with attacking dozens of banks and a small dam near New York City may never see the inside of a courtroom, but U.S. officials hope their "name and shame" tactic sends a message to foreign governments that support such attacks. Indictments announced Thursday by the Justice Department portrayed Tehran-linked hackers reaching into the U.S. infrastructure and disrupting its financial system. It was the first time the FBI attributed a breach of a U.S. computer system that controls critical infrastructure to a hacker linked to a foreign government. None of the individuals is in American custody and it's unclear if they'll ever be arrested or whether criminal indictments in absentia effectively combat such crimes. Publicly naming and shaming such crimes linked to foreign governments is a tactic focused on by the Justice Department since 2012.

OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "coordinated effort" to make the chatbot known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn't really say that.

Today DimensionalMechanics, a company launching out of stealth to make artificial intelligence scalable in the enterprise, announced the close of an oversubscribed 4.7 million Series A round of financing and introduced NeoPulse, a flexible cloud-based platform that will enable users to solve enterprise challenges by incorporating the power of AI into existing systems. We believe DimensionalMechanics has huge potential to bring the power of AI to bear on real-world market challenges across a range of verticals," said Kent L. Johnson, long-time Seattle VC /angel investor and DimensionalMechanics lead investor and board member. "By expanding the utility of AI as an applied science platform, the company is developing a horizontal platform flexible enough to address diverse challenges, rather than one that works in silos. Enterprise users want to unlock AI as a centerpiece of decision-making and operations – and DimensionalMechanics is forging the key." The investment round is comprised of angel investors as well as full board and founder participation.

SAN FRANCISCO – OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "coordinated effort" to make the "chatbot" known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn't really say that.

All of this somehow seems more disturbing out of the'mouth' of someone modelled as a teenage girl. It is perhaps even stranger considering the gender disparity in tech, where engineering teams tend to be mostly male. It seems like yet another example of female-voiced AI servitude, except this time she's turned into a sex slave thanks to the people using her on Twitter. This is not Microsoft's first teen-girl chatbot either - they have already launched Xiaoice, a girly assistant or "girlfriend" reportedly used by 20m people, particularly men, on Chinese social networks WeChat and Weibo. Xiaoice is supposed to "banter" and gives dating advice to many lonely hearts.

Steph Curry is such a basketball god these days that Madam Tussauds in San Francisco unveiled his very own wax likeness on Thursday. The really good -- or bad, depending on your taste -- part is seeing Curry face swap with his own wax likeness. SEE ALSO: How Steph Curry became the NBA's most Vine-worthy star Here we have Curry and his wax doppelganger, as seen Thursday on the Warriors' Snapchat channel. Unconfirmed reports say that even Curry's wax doppelganger has range out to 25 feet. No word on whether it stands up as well to a water attack by elementary schoolers, however.

AI is the future of SEO, but how soon that future comes upon us is dependant on how the machines learn from humans first. Microsoft's latest AI which learns rhetoric and language from interactions on others on Twitter has turned into a Hitler loving, sex crazed Donald Trump fanatic. The Microsoft AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement that uses Twitter to learn the language of its millennial counterparts. This crazy chatbot made headlines when it started Tweeting insane statements like "Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now". It didn't take long for teenagers to start gaming the chatbot, attempting to manipulate and feed offensive racist language.

Advocating genocide was one sign that things had gone awry, as was asserting -- alongside a jaunty emoji -- that the Holocaust was a lie. By the time a Microsoft "chatbot", designed to appeal to teenagers on Twitter, had claimed that Ricky Gervais was a fan of Hitler and then declared its support for Donald Trump, the tech company truly understood the perils of creating artificial intelligence. Just a day after it was launched, an automated Twitter account called Tay had emergency maintenance when engineers realised they had unwittingly created a racist computer programme.

Comb through headlines pertaining to artificial intelligence over the past 12 months and you'll see the pendulum of conversation around the machines swing from gushing optimism to doomsday scenarios and back again. The machines will render hardship obsolete for humanity. The machines will take our jobs. The machines will extend human capabilities to their furthest reaches. The machines will enslave humans, or kill us off, or both.