When Chen Qiufan took a trip to the southwest Chinese province of Yunnan 15 years ago, he noticed that time seemed to slow down as he reached the city of Lijiang. Chen was a recent college graduate with a soul-sucking real estate job in the pressure-cooker metropolis of Shenzhen, and Lijiang was a backpacker's refuge. Wandering through the small city, he was enchanted by the serrated rows of snow-capped mountains on the horizon and the schools of fish swimming through meandering canals. But he was also unnerved by the throngs of city dwellers like himself--burned out, spiritually lost, adrift. He wove his observations together into a short story called " The Fish of Lijiang," about a depressed office worker who travels to a vacation town, only to discover that everything is artificially engineered--from the blue sky to the fish in the streams to the experience of time itself.

Honda launched a self-driving car in Japan on Friday. Japanese automaker Honda has launched a limited roll-out of its new Legend, which it calls the most advanced driverless vehicle licensed for the road, in Japan. The Legend's capabilities include adaptive driving in lanes, passing and switching lanes in certain conditions, and an emergency stop function if a driver is unresponsive to handover warnings. The Legend's autonomy is rated Level 3 on a scale of 0 to 5; analysts said a true Level 4 vehicle, in which a car no longer requires a driver at all, is a long time off.

In recent years, videogame developers and computer scientists have been trying to devise techniques that can make gaming experiences increasingly immersive, engaging and realistic. These include methods to automatically create videogame characters inspired by real people. Most existing methods to create and customize videogame characters require players to adjust the features of their character's face manually, in order to recreate their own face or the faces of other people. More recently, some developers have tried to develop methods that can automatically customize a character's face by analyzing images of real people's faces. However, these methods are not always effective and do not always reproduce the faces they analyze in realistic ways.

Pedestrians should wear radar reflectors to avoid being run over by self-driving cars, says a team of researchers that has created a device to make people more visible to a vehicle's artificial intelligence. Self-driving cars rely on visual sensors, which can be blocked by fog, rain or snow, or radar sensors, which can struggle to pick out objects if they fail to reflect radio waves back to the car. Some cars also use a combination of both sensors.

Jen Copestake looks at some of the best technology news stories of the week.

Is the future of deep-sea exploration soft? Researchers have developed a new type of soft robot designed to cope with the crushing pressures at the bottom the ocean. Inspired by the deepest-living known fish, the Mariana snailfish (Pseudoliparis swirei), researchers used soft materials and distributed electronics to create a machine that can withstand extreme pressure. They say that a soft robot could be more versatile and reliable at depth than other machines which require bulk materials or pressure compensation systems.

Kevin Chen, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions a time when his insect-sized drone could be used as a search and rescue robot -- to find survivors in disaster debris that bigger drones couldn't reach. Kevin Chen, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions a time when his insect-sized drone could be used as a search and rescue robot -- to find survivors in disaster debris that bigger drones couldn't reach. The reason it's so hard to kill a mosquito is that they move really well. Scientists are trying to build a robot with that kind of agility. And these tiny but mighty flying robots could be used in life-and-death situations, such as finding people in a collapsed building.

The rise of AI inevitably raises the question of how much the technologies will impact businesses, labor, and the economy more generally. AI offers substantial benefits and opportunities for businesses, from increasing productivity gains with automation to tailoring products to consumers using algorithms, analyzing data at scale, and more. However, the boost in efficiency and productivity promised by AI also presents great challenges: Companies must scramble to find and retain skilled talent to meet their production needs while being mindful about implementing measures to mitigate the risks of using AI. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused chaos and continued uncertainty for the global economy. This chapter looks at the increasingly intertwined relationship between AI and the global economy from the perspective of jobs, investment, and corporate activity.

Most people in AI don't care too much about the details, says Jeff Hawkins, a neuroscientist and tech entrepreneur. He wants to change that. Hawkins has straddled the two worlds of neuroscience and AI for nearly 40 years. In 1986, after a few years as a software engineer at Intel, he turned up at the University of California, Berkeley, to start a PhD in neuroscience, hoping to figure out how intelligence worked. But his ambition hit a wall when he was told there was nobody there to help him with such a big-picture project. Frustrated, he swapped Berkeley for Silicon Valley and in 1992 founded Palm Computing, which developed the PalmPilot--a precursor to today's smartphones.

"Ordinary people here in China aren't happy about this technology but they have no choice. If the police say there have to be cameras in a community, people will just have to live with it. So says Chen Wei at Taigusys, a company specialising in emotion recognition technology, the latest evolution in the broader world of surveillance systems that play a part in nearly every aspect of Chinese society. Emotion-recognition technologies – in which facial expressions of anger, sadness, happiness and boredom, as well as other biometric data are tracked – are supposedly able to infer a person's feelings based on traits such as facial muscle movements, vocal tone, body movements and other biometric signals. It goes beyond facial-recognition technologies, which simply compare faces to determine a match. But similar to facial recognition, it involves the mass collection of sensitive personal data to track, monitor and profile people and uses machine learning to analyse expressions and other clues. The industry is booming in China, where since at least 2012, figures including President Xi Jinping have emphasised the creation of "positive energy" as part of an ideological campaign to encourage certain kinds of expression and limit others. Critics say the technology is based on a pseudo-science of stereotypes, and an increasing number of researchers, lawyers and rights activists believe it has serious implications for human rights, privacy and freedom of expression. With the global industry forecast to be worth nearly $36bn by 2023, growing at nearly 30% a year, rights groups say action needs to be taken now. The main office of Taigusys is tucked behind a few low-rise office buildings in Shenzhen. Visitors are greeted at the doorway by a series of cameras capturing their images on a big screen that displays body temperature, along with age estimates, and other statistics. Chen, a general manager at the company, says the system in the doorway is the company's bestseller at the moment because of high demand during the coronavirus pandemic. Chen hails emotion recognition as a way to predict dangerous behaviour by prisoners, detect potential criminals at police checkpoints, problem pupils in schools and elderly people experiencing dementia in care homes. Taigusys systems are installed in about 300 prisons, detention centres and remand facilities around China, connecting 60,000 cameras. "Violence and suicide are very common in detention centres," says Chen. "Even if police nowadays don't beat prisoners, they often try to wear them down by not allowing them to fall asleep.