When industries replace workers with robots, wages rise for all on average due to productivity gains, but the difference in pay for men and women widens. They found that the number of robots per 10,000 workers increased, on average, by 47 per cent between 2006 and 2014.

In a perfect world, what you see is what you get. If this were the case, the job of artificial intelligence systems would be refreshingly straightforward. Take collision avoidance systems in self-driving cars. If visual input to on-board cameras could be trusted entirely, an AI system could directly map that input to an appropriate action -- steer right, steer left, or continue straight -- to avoid hitting a pedestrian that its cameras see in the road. But what if there's a glitch in the cameras that slightly shifts an image by a few pixels?

MIT researchers have developed a way to produce holograms almost instantly. They say the deep learning-based method is so efficient that it could run on a smartphone. A new method called tensor holography could enable the creation of holograms for virtual reality, 3D printing, medical imaging, and more -- and it can run on a smartphone. Despite years of hype, virtual reality headsets have yet to topple TV or computer screens as the go-to devices for video viewing. One reason: VR can make users feel sick.

Umpires will have a little help behind home plate in some minor league games this season – from a "robot ump." Major League Baseball announced Thursday that select games in the Low-A Southeast will use a robot to help call balls and strikes. The use of the technology, called the Automatic Ball-Strike System, will also "ensure a consistent strike zone is called, and determine the optimal strike zone for the system," according to MLB. The robot's use is one of a number of experimental rules announced Thursday, which the league said are "designed to increase action on the basepaths, create more balls in play, improve the pace and length of games, and reduce player injuries." MLB has often tried out rules in the minor leagues it is considering for the majors.

LJ Rich looks at some of the best technology news stories of the week.

My friend Mike Carey, who has died aged 71, was a pioneer in the development of speech recognition and digital audio, including digital audio broadcasting (DAB). After a formative period at the Post Office research labs, Keele University and Mitel Telecom, he left in 1985 with Adrian Anderson and me to establish Ensigma, a company that quickly established itself as a leader in the research and development of digital speech and audio applications, with uses in mobile telephony, broadcasting and automated speech recognition systems. Mike was born in Preston, to Ethel (nee Glover), a weaver and housewife, and Stephen, a miner-cum-decorator. At Preston Catholic college, a local grammar, he met Elizabeth Mercer at a school dance, for once beating the cross-country champion across the floor. They married in 1969, by which time Mike was on a Post Office scholarship to study electrical engineering at Imperial College, London, supported throughout by extra work taken on by his parents.

Machine learning, a process used to train artificial intelligences, can take an extremely long time – but a quantum trick could massively speed things up for tasks involving particles of light called photons. In reinforcement learning, an algorithm runs through the same problem over and over again and is given a numerical reward only when it reaches the correct answer. That process teaches it to find the correct answer more quickly when pitted against similar problems later on. Now Valeria Saggio at the University of Vienna in Austria and her colleagues have added a quantum twist to accelerate this process. They set up an experiment involving a photon moving through a wave guide and ending up in one of four possible states.

Imagine, if you will, the home robot of the future. It picks clutter off the floor, sweeps, and does the dishes. And it has to do so perfectly: If the robot has an error rate of just 1 percent, it will drop one dish out of a hundred. In no time, your floor would be covered in shards and the robot would get stuck in a sad, vicious feedback loop, dropping dishes and sweeping them up and dropping more dishes, ad infinitum. To avoid this domestic nightmare, engineers will have to give robots a keen sense of touch.