There are plenty of bots working today to produce basic, numbers-driven reports on sports and finance results, but the Olympics showed that one robo-reporter can be quite prolific. A single Chinese bot named Xiaomingbot produced 450 stories about results from the games.

Flying machines are hard secrets to keep. By their very nature, they soar into the heavens, above the heads of those below. America's military tends to keep its secret planes secret by only flying them in vast swathes of empty desert, until they're ready for public debut.

Mosul wasn't supposed to fall again. The city in Northern Iraq saw intense fighting between American forces and Saddam Hussein's sons in 2003, and in 2008 saw major campaign by American troops against insurgent forces.

Nikola Tesla, the inventor, electric car company namesake, and beloved darling of the internet, had a great many visions in his mind. Among the more obscure: a patent for killer robots. And not just killer robots, but killer robots he thought were so deadly that the mere risk of their use would bring about peace.

This week, NASA announced the start of the Space Robotics Challenge, a $1 million contest to program a virtual robot.

When the water rises, what can you do? When torrential rains led to massive flooding in Louisiana, the floodwaters displaced thousands of people. Getting to shelter is the most important thing, but for many, the most urgent question on their mind once they found somewhere to wait out the storm was finding out if their home is still underwater. That's a hard thing to do remotely. It's a pretty easy thing to do with remotely piloted vehicles.