Experts in artificial intelligence, lawyers and activists organized by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots gathered at the United Nations on Tuesday to warn against a growing reliance on cheap drones and "stupid AI" that can be unpredictable in the real world. "Terminator always comes up," Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the sci-fi cyborg on a mission to wipe out mankind. "But it's not really Terminator that we're worried about at the moment. I think that Terminator is perhaps 50 or so years away." But there are concerning technologies "only a few years, at best, away", Walsh said, and with semi-autonomous systems, such as drones, "it would take very little to remove the human from that loop and replace them with a computer".

Companies like Google and Tesla have held up autonomous vehicles as a panacea for road accidents, which claim over 32,000 American lives each year. This month, Obama put stock in that idea, signing a $305bn transportation bill that includes grants for self driving vehicles. That backs up 10 years of US Department of Transportation work on technical studies and policies surrounding autonomous cars. Many researchers say forecasting the impact of self-driving cars on reducing accidents is difficult because there just isn't enough real-life road testing and data to make a reliable forecast. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, however, found that over 90% of car crashes involve human error.

Erica enjoys the theatre and animated films, would like to visit south-east Asia, and believes her ideal partner is a man with whom she can chat easily. She is less forthcoming, however, when asked her age. "That's a slightly rude question … I'd rather not say," comes the answer. As her embarrassed questioner shifts sideways and struggles to put the conversation on a friendlier footing, Erica turns her head, her eyes following his every move. It is all rather disconcerting, but if Japan's new generation of intelligent robots are ever going to rival humans as conversation partners, perhaps that is as it should be.

Robot carers will be the next big thing coming out of Japan, if Toyota, Honda and other firms ploughing money into robo-helpers are to be believed. From robotic toys that simulate pets for companionship, to big mechanical bears that can physically carry you between beds and wheelchairs – all with a friendly smile – the robots aren't only coming to take your jobs, but to take care of older people too. Japan's Honda is arguably one of the world's leaders in at-home robotics, with Asimo its flagship mini-humanoid. But now Japanese automotive firm Toyota is attempting to thrust itself into the growing market of robotic caring with a Silicon Valley partnership. Akifumi Tamaoki, general manager of Toyota's partner robot division said: "We are preparing for a future in which people may not be able to drive cars, or they may need artificial intelligence to support them to drive, and once they get off their cars they may need help from partner robots."

From techno-sheepdogs to android bedfellows, the promise of robotics and the lure of artificial intelligence appears to know no bounds. But will we ever be able to have a proper natter with a robot? And just what will they look like? Now is your chance to find out. Experts will be sharing the latest news in a series of talks and demos under the banner of the New Age of Robotics as part of Sheffield's wide-ranging Festival of the Mind, which starts on 18 September.

It has taken 16 years but James Dyson has achieved one of his dreams: to build a robotic vacuum cleaner. As befits a device of the modern age, it can be controlled remotely via a smartphone app – and reports on where it has been. Announced on Thursday, the Dyson 360 Eye relies on two breakthroughs: a machine vision system that takes in a whole room from a single camera lens and a powerful lightweight digital motor that enhances battery life. Sir James Dyson says that the machine vision system for the device – which was introduced in Japan and is due to go on sale in the UK in summer 2015 – will have applications beyond household appliances. "We think vision is a technology of the future," Dyson told the Guardian.

This summer, Facebook will present a paper at a computer vision conference revealing how it has created a tool almost as accurate as the human brain when it comes to saying whether two photographs show the same person – regardless of changes in lighting and camera angles. A human being will get the answer correct 97.53% of the time; Facebook's new technology scores an impressive 97.25%. "We closely approach human performance," says Yaniv Taigman, a member of its AI team. Since the ability to recognise faces has long been a benchmark for artificial intelligence, developments such as Facebook's "DeepFace" technology (yes, that's what it called it) raise big questions about the power of today's facial recognition tools and what these mean for the future. Facebook is not the only tech company interested in facial recognition.

Though the idea of the "Babelfish" - a thing able to translate between any two languages on the fly - was created by the author Douglas Adams as a handy solution to the question of how intergalactic travellers could understand each other, it could be reality within 25 years. At least, that is, for human language. Prof Nigel Shadbolt, a close associate of the web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says that the idea of automatic machine translation "on the fly" is achievable before the world wide web turns 50. Shadbolt also forecasts that future changes to the web will mean people will be "connected all the time" to medical diagnostic systems – but also that search companies including Google and China's Baidu may face challenges as web use shifts from the desktop to handheld and mobile devices. Having first used the web in 1993, via an early version of the Mosaic browser while on a visit to Canada, Shadbolt now thinks that it opens up huge possibilities for artificial intelligence systems built by connecting computers across the web - so-called cloud computing - that will be able to enhance daily life.

The first London Technology Week drew together a cast of characters and ideas as varied and unpredictable as the sector they represent. From driverless cars to the ironic revelation that the capital's broadband network is sub-par, there was much to glean from five days of visionary thinking. Kit Malthouse, London's deputy mayor for business and enterprise, is no fan of tech giant Oracle. Malthouse told a tech week meeting that his top priority was to "take Oracle down", to much laughter in the room. Boris Johnson's sidekick later revealed that his issue with the company was its unwillingness to give a discount to the Greater London authority during austerity-driven budget cuts in 2010.

On 24 August 1965 Gloria Placente, a 34-year-old resident of Queens, New York, was driving to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Clad in shorts and sunglasses, the housewife was looking forward to quiet time at the beach. But the moment she crossed the Willis Avenue bridge in her Chevrolet Corvair, Placente was surrounded by a dozen patrolmen. There were also 125 reporters, eager to witness the launch of New York police department's Operation Corral – an acronym for Computer Oriented Retrieval of Auto Larcenists. Fifteen months earlier, Placente had driven through a red light and neglected to answer the summons, an offence that Corral was going to punish with a heavy dose of techno-Kafkaesque. It worked as follows: a police car stationed at one end of the bridge radioed the licence plates of oncoming cars to a teletypist miles away, who fed them to a Univac 490 computer, an expensive $500,000 toy ($3.5m in today's dollars) on loan from the Sperry Rand Corporation. The computer checked the numbers against a database of 110,000 cars that were either stolen or belonged to known offenders. In case of a match the teletypist would alert a second patrol car at the bridge's other exit. It took, on average, just seven seconds. Compared with the impressive police gear of today – automatic number plate recognition, CCTV cameras, GPS trackers – Operation Corral looks quaint.