Characters named Q in film and TV have been portrayed as being exceptional. Q in the James Bond movies served up futuristic gadgets, and Q in Star Trek was omnipotent. A new quantum computing program called Q at IBM will be remarkable in its own right. In a few years, IBM plans to create a quantum computer with more than 50 qubits, which should push conventional computers one step closer to the trash heap. IBM Q will deliver paid quantum computing consulting and services to users.

It started as a seemingly sweet Twitter chatbot. Modeled after a millennial, it awakened on the internet from behind a pixelated image of a full-lipped young female with a wide and staring gaze. Microsoft, the multinational technology company that created the bot, named it Tay, assigned it a gender, and gave "her" account a tagline that promised, "The more you talk the smarter Tay gets!" She brimmed with enthusiasm: "can i just say that im stoked to meet u? humans are super cool." She asked innocent questions: "Why isn't #NationalPuppyDay everyday?" Tay's designers built her to be a creature of the web, reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) to learn and engage in human conversations and get better at it by interacting with people over social media. As the day went on, Tay gained followers. She also quickly fell prey to Twitter users targeting her vulnerabilities. For those internet antagonists looking to manipulate Tay, it didn't take much effort; they engaged the bot in ugly conversations, tricking the technology into mimicking their racist and sexist behavior.

If you want an artificially intelligent system to reason like a person, model it after an octopus. Jim Crowder, chief engineer at Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services, and his colleague John Carbone are working toward robotic systems that possess distributed intelligence like that found in octopi. The robotic systems could be useful in managing dozens of autonomous vehicles or drones at once, such as a flock of unmanned aerial vehicles sent to scout a disaster zone for survivors. "Right now, it takes many people to run one UAV," Crowder told DNews. "You want to see one person running several UAVs."