Smart people are starting to worry about the brainpower of machines. A recent report from Harvard said the emergence of artificial intelligence as a weapon poses as much game-changing potential as the airplane and the nuclear bomb. They worry it could give small countries and terrorists the long-range strike capability of a superpower, the ability to crash our cyber systems and create a channel for fake news that would overwhelm our understanding of what's real and what's not. Elon Musk, the Tesla/Hyperloop/SpaceX dude prone to the grandiose, thinks unchecked artificial intelligence could become an existential threat to mankind. If we're not careful, he warns, we'll end up in a world where humans answer to machines and not the other way around.

Google once had a reputation for bankrolling moonshots. It spent billions creating a self-driving car, started Google Fiber to bring ultra-high-speed internet to the masses, and acquired the Darpa-backed robotics company Boston Dynamics. But since restructuring itself as a holding company called Alphabet in 2015 and moving many of its bigger ideas outside the core Google business structure, Mountain View's ambitions have become a little more sober and its investment strategy more restrained. As Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat put it during an earnings call last year: "We continue to rationalize our portfolio of products to ensure we efficiently and effectively focus our resources behind our biggest bets across Alphabet." In practical terms, that's meant scaling back Google Fiber and selling off some of its wilder projects, and it's also opened the door for another company–the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank–to take the lead on some of today's most audacious bets in global tech.

It might be time to stop thinking about Kansas City, Mo. as "flyover country." After a series of projects and millions of dollars spent, ""We will be the smartest city on Earth within five years," Bob Bennett, Kansas City's Chief Innovation Officer, said in an interview with The Kansas City Star . The mission began four years ago when Kansas City officials added free Wi-Fi on 50 city blocks and 125 smart LED street lights all over downtown. In July 2015, Kansas City announced a partnership with Cisco, an artificial intelligence company. Both parties invested a total of $15 million in hopes of simplifying travel in their city.

Google just posted some tremendous financial results, causing shares of its parent company Alphabet to surge more than 5 percent and surpass Apple in market cap to become the world's most valuable company. But one big question on everyone's mind is this: How well are the firm's moonshot projects -- such as the self-driving car and hovering Internet balloons -- doing? For the first time, Alphabet has released some information about its so-called "Other Bets," which include its X laboratory, Google Fiber, and a number of additional ventures. Here's the one chart you need to see to grasp where they stand. What this shows is that Alphabet is losing a ton of money on these initiatives.

Artificial intelligence is nothing new at Google, but today we learned just how big a role top boss Sundar Pichai sees AI playing in our future. Answering an analyst query on Google-parent company Alphabet's Q1 2016 earnings call about how the company is leading innovation, rather than simply adapting to changes in technology, Pichai talked about his role in projecting where Alphabet is going in the next 10 years. He gave a shout out to VR as the hot new platform, and then wrapped up his comments by saying: "In the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world." Earlier in the call he cited Google's DeepMind AlphaGo super computer defeating a human champion as an extraordinary achievement. He also said the company is investing in AI and machine learning, areas that are taking off and beginning to bear real-world benefits.

It's a good time to be Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), the parent company of Google. The holding company that owns Google, YouTube and Android -- as well as so-called moonshots like self-driving cars, the home-networking division Nest and Google Fiber -- is expected to turn in healthy first-quarter results on Thursday, driven by its dominant position in online search and display advertising. On Wednesday, the European Commission is expected to formally charge Google for favoring its own apps and services on its Android mobile operating system, which powers more than 80 percent of the world's smartphones. That will be the latest in a decade of entanglements with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic; Google also got some bad press in Britain earlier this year for having paid just 185 million in taxes over the past decade. Also confronting Google -- and the rest of the tech industry -- is how to manage government and law enforcement requests for information.