Fox Business Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on FoxBusiness.com. "May you live in interesting times," goes the old Chinese curse. When it comes to economics, "interesting" usually means the sky is falling. Inflation reached seven percent at the end of 2021, a rate not seen in forty years.

Uncle Sam is padding the Treasury with millions of dollars to assess bots at the same time that corporations invest more in advanced technology and labor-saving machinery, according to experts. New "robot" taxes are expected to multiply in the coming decades as millions of Americans see their jobs automated away. "Yes, governments already tax robots because they tax virtually everything that goes into developing and making robots," economist and author Mark Thornton told The Post. "In a few cases, there are subsidies such as government grants for robot development. But that still means they are taxing you and me to provide the subsidies." Taxing robots -- a proposal first suggested by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 2017 as a way for government to tame the inexorable ascent of machines, and to finance new programs like elder care and education -- is back on the front burner.

Like most people in high tech these days, Uncle Sam is upping his investment in AI. The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) announced a new program on Friday that will add an estimated $100 million a year to its current sending on machine learning. The AI Exploration program will initially spend about $10 to 20 million to fund a set of feasibility studies to generate ideas worth pursuing. They are expected to spawn larger projects that will eventually bump DARPA's total estimated spending on AI in its various forms to as much as $400 million annually. "We hope we will have a conference next summer focusing on what we will do in AI," said Steven Walker, DARPA's director, speaking at an event here on the agency's Electronics Resurgence Initiative.

These are for brands going beyond customer service, which was predominantly the reason for the businesses having a presence on Twitter. These case studies show that Twitter can be used for different key performance indicators such as branding, product discovery, transaction or ecommerce and post sales customer service. One of the reasons Twitter surprisingly works is because the platform's open content accessibility and shareability makes brand messages easily discoverable. Plus, Twitter's advertising products, such as DM video and image cards, make it easy to find bots. Now let's have a look at the live case studies and their main features, to see how brands are aligning them to their key performance indicators. If you're desperately googling for, or frantically picking up the phone to ask Mama about her ultimate secret recipe against red wine stains, you can now get help from "SAM", Samsung's digital stain advisor on Twitter.

The nation's top-level intelligence office, the Director of National Intelligence, wants to find "the most accurate unconstrained face recognition algorithm." A branch of the office, which oversees the nation's spy agencies, is holding a contest toward that end, with submissions due no later than 2pm ET June 15. "Have you developed software to identity faces in general web photographs? Can your software verify that a face in one photograph is the same as in another?" asks a posting on challenge.gov The goal of the Face Recognition Prize Challenge is to improve core face recognition accuracy and expand the breadth of capture conditions and environments suitable for successful face recognition.

Uncle Sam, Carnegie Mellon's latest robotic snake, has been taught to climb trees. The snake is the newest version of "modsnake" created by the Biorobotics Laboratory at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The snake's movements are biomimetic, mimicking movements of real snakes including side-winding, wiggling and rolling. Now the snake robot can also wrap itself around a tree trunk and climb vertically up the outside of the tree. An earlier version has previously been demonstrated climbing vertically inside pipes.