We live in a world where robots and robotic technology have become part of our everyday lives. While films such as "Metropolis" and television series like "The Twilight Zone" warned of a world in which our mechanical creations would enslave us, many of us could not envision a day without virtual personal assistants like Siri or the floor-cleaning robotic vacuum Roomba.

Babak Hodjat believes humans are too emotional for the stock market. So he's started one of the first hedge funds run completely by artificial intelligence. "Humans have bias and sensitivities, conscious and unconscious," says Hodjat, a computer scientist who helped lay the groundwork for Apple's Siri. "It's well documented we humans make mistakes. For me, it's scarier to be relying on those human-based intuitions and justifications than relying on purely what the data and statistics are telling you."

After a decline in 2015, U.S. patenting activity rose to a record high in 2016. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 304,126 patents last year, up from 298,407 in 2015. The increase was largely driven by West Coast technology companies, including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Boeing, IBM, Intel, Google, and Microsoft. According to a 24/7 Wall St. analysis of data provided by Information for Industry (IFI) Claims Patent Services, Korean conglomerate Samsung Electronics was granted the most patents in 2016. Including its major subsidiaries, Samsung was awarded more than 8,500 patents, slightly higher than IBM's 8,088 awarded patents.

The new Google logo is displayed at the Google headquarters on September 2, 2015 in Mountain View, California. Technology investors who bought shares of Alphabet last year on optimism that new CFO Ruth Porat would increase fiscal discipline were disappointed Friday. They pushed the Google parent's GOOGL shares down 5% to 737.77 on heavy trading volume, a day after learning that the company's investments in what it calls Other bets remain a drag on short-term profits. The category posted a first-quarter operating loss of 802 million, while generating sales of just 166 million, just a tiny fraction of overall revenue of 20 billion. Alphabet's money-losing moonshots take shine off Google's ad business Other bets include expensive, speculative projects such as building a self-driving car or bringing fiber-optic Internet cables into neighborhoods.