To the average person, it may seem that the biggest technology advances of 2015 were the larger smartphone screens and small app updates. But a lot more happened than that. A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from cool science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven't seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. In the developed world, we have become used to having devices that connect and inform us and provide services on demand, and the developing world has largely been in the dark.

Machines may yet take over the world, but first they must learn to recognize your dog. To hear Google executives tell it at their annual developer conference this week, the technology industry is on the cusp of an artificial intelligence, or AI, revolution. Computers, without guidance, will be able to spot disease, engage humans in conversation and creatively outsmart world champions in competition. Such breakthroughs in machine learning have been the stuff of science fiction since Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. "I'm incredibly excited about the progress we're making," CEO Sundar Pichai told a crowd of 7,000 developers at Google I/O from an outdoor concert stage.

The Ministry of Defence is organising its first-ever "Robo-Wars" exercise this autumn, using drones, seacraft and a host of other innovations as part of the growing trend towards reducing the role of humans in combat. The large-scale event off the west coast of Scotland will form part of the regular UK-led Nato Joint Warriors exercise. The navy, on its website, is billing the robotic part as "Unmanned Warrior 2016", and says: "Recognising a commitment to innovation, the Royal Navy will host a large-scale demonstration in a tactically representative environment of maritime autonomous systems in the autumn of 2016." More than 80 countries around the world, including the US and China, have stepped up research and development of "killer robots" and other non-human forms of warfare. Although large-scale civilian casualties from robotic warfare – mainly from drones – are already a reality, military personnel, analysts and academics have predicted that combat would one day be conducted between armies of robots and unmanned vehicles.

When you're zipping through the air at 60 kilometres per hour, it can be hard to work out where you're going. But now drones can create detailed 3D maps as they fly – an advance that could let them navigate the world free from human input. Called Hydra Fusion, the system could one day allow drones to use a form of navigation known as simultaneous localisation and mapping to find their way in unfamiliar spaces – just as some robots do on the ground. It will also make them better at aerial surveillance. Hydra Fusion works by stitching together multiple images – in this case, consecutive frames of footage from a drone's video camera – to form a detailed 3D map while it is in the air.

An octopus likes to be wined and dined during sex. A study looking at the larger Pacific striped octopus shows that, unlike most octopuses, the male and female face each other when mating – a pose that may allow them to feed together at the same time (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134152). Now glasses can hide you from prying eyes. A team at Japan's National Institute of Informatics has developed a pair of glasses whose patterning foils face recognition software. The Privacy Visor is expected to go on sale in June 2016 for about $240.

IN 2015, humanity put 2 or 3 trillion photographs on the internet. Now, researchers are tapping into this vein of information, studying photos in bulk to give us fresh insights into our lives and our cities. In Singapore, a project called AirTick is aiming to use these photos to get a handle on air pollution. This is a serious problem in south and east Asia where schools and factories shut down when pollutants reach dangerous levels. The World Health Organization estimates that one in eight deaths worldwide are caused by air pollution.

International crowdfunding is always risky business. Even if a project makes it to market, overseas backers usually have to pay a shipping premium. Sometimes, it's worse: today backers of Jibo's social'family robot' have been told the product's release has been cancelled in all markets except the US and Canada. The company is now preparing to issue refunds to customers in 45 countries. Jibo apparently has a hard time understanding accented English.

You can spend a long time searching satellite images for interesting locations. Now imagine a tool that can not only show you the location, but scans large geographical areas to find specific features that are similar, and then it presents these results in a pattern-like format. In 2002, Carnegie Mellon's (CMU) School of Computer Science launched what it calls the world's "first PhD program in Machine Learning". It attempted to learn how to program systems to automatically learn and use its experience to improve its results. A group of CMU professors and students have now created a visual search tool for satellite imagery called Terrapattern. In a landmark project, Google Earth has teamed up with locals to provide a fully immersive experience of the Sherpa community and their mountain home in the Sagarmatha region in Nepal, home to the tallest mountain in the world, Everest.

SoftBank Robotics America (SBRA) announced that its friendly humanoid will spend a week at b8ta, a Palo Alto store designed for trying and buying new tech products. From August 11th to 18th, the store's visitors can interact with Pepper, and programmers are invited to a developer's workshop on August 16th to learn how to create apps for the robot. In hospitals around the world, surgeons are getting help from new robotic assistants. We spoke with Steve Carlin, VP Marketing & Business Development at SBRA, to find out more about the company's plans to officially introduce Pepper to North America later this year. He told ZDNet, "Our first initiative is to incentivize the development community to understand what the platform is, and bring their creativity onto the platform."

Neura has announced plans to make its personal artificial intelligence (AI) service and ecosystem commercially available after successfully raising $11 million in a Series A funding round. The funding round was led by AXA Strategic Ventures and existing investor Pitango Venture Capital, and was joined by Liberty Israel Venture Fund and Lenovo Group. Speaking to ZDNet, Neura CEO Gilad Meiri said just shy of launching the company three years ago, the company is now ready to make its AI ecosystem commercially available. "What we're going to do is putting it on the shelf and inviting the world to use it, and that obviously requires a different level of infrastructure, scale, security, and customer support, so the money is mainly geared towards that," he said. Neura has developed technology based on data collected from human behaviours, and plans to make the information accessible to help enhance apps and devices through personalisation.