Google has begun simply asking users whether they are human or not, instead of making them spell out tricky words as a security measure. The new "No Captcha reCaptchas" are the latest in user analysis that allows Google and other websites to monitor user behaviour to figure out whether they are human and prevent robots from abusing the site. "For years, we've prompted users to confirm they aren't robots by asking them to read distorted text and type it into a box," said Vinay Shet, Google's product manager for reCaptcha. "But, we figured it would be easier to just directly ask our users whether or not they are robots – so, we did!" Robots access sites to scrape information and compete with users for purchases, events and sessions. Many services, including comparison sites, use robots to run the searches for users on multiple websites at once.

Players of the video game Halo will be familiar with Cortana, an artificial intelligence character. Now it's arriving on Microsoft's Windows Phone smartphone as a virtual assistant to take on Apple's Siri and Google Now. The move is one of a number unveiled by Microsoft at its annual Build conference in San Francisco on Wednesday as it seeks to gain traction in a highly competitive and lucrative market for smartphones. The most dramatic for handset makers - though not initially users - is that Microsoft will make both Windows Phone and Windows licences free for use on devices with screens smaller than 9in diagonally. That has been seen as an acknowledgement that the huge success of Google's free Android mobile OS, which dominates worldwide smartphone sales, has made it impossible for Microsoft to charge for software on those devices.

The United Nations has been warned that its protracted negotiations over the future of lethal autonomous weapons – or "killer robots" – are moving too slowly to stop robot wars becoming a reality. Lobbying for a pre-emptive ban on the weapons is intensifying at the UN general assembly in New York, but a deal may not emerge quickly enough to prevent devices from being deployed, experts say. "There is indeed a danger now that [the process] may get stuck," said Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. "A lot of money is going into development and people will want a return on their investment," he said. "If there is not a pre-emptive ban on the high-level autonomous weapons then once the genie is out of the bottle it will be extremely difficult to get it back in."

Movement towards road vehicle automation has been potentially the most revolutionary development in transportation during 2012. Transport research institutes in many countries and several car manufacturers have reported progress. The pacesetter in driverless technology is Google Inc., working through Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Google has a fleet of more than a dozen what it calls "self-driving cars" that by August, 2012, had completed some 500,000 kilometres of testing. "They've covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn't been a single accident under computer control," explained Google's official blog.

On Saturday at a NASCAR track in Florida, a humanoid robot named SCHAFT, created by a team of engineers from the University of Tokyo, performed a series of emergency tasks including using a hose, drilling a hole into a wall, walking through doors and driving a golf cart. SCHAFT ran away from the competition, with only a robot from DOD-funded Boston Dynamics staying close. These two robots, along with six others from private companies and university labs around the world, performed these tasks under the watchful eye of DARPA, the secretive defense research branch of the U.S. military. DARPA said the purpose of the competition was to begin modeling a robot that could be used on the surface of Mars. But many suspected that DARPA sponsors the competition to advance the use of robots like those on the battlefield.

The ongoing battle for Mosul, one of the largest cities in Iraq, has involved thousands of government-backed troops and allied fighters steadily advancing on the last urban stronghold of the terror group ISIS. In addition to elite Iraqi counter-terrorism troops, battle-hardened Kurdish peshmerga fighters and U.S. air support, ISIS fighters are facing a unique foe in the form of a remotely controlled combat vehicle developed by two brothers in Baghdad. Dubbed "al-robot," the device is a four-wheeled armored vehicle, considerably smaller than a Humvee or tank, with a 12.7mm cannon and side-mounted 70mm rockets. The main gun is equipped with a thermal-imaging camera that allows the device to be used at night. It is being used in the field during the battle for Mosul by the Iraqi Army's Popular Mobilization Unit, which reported its first use on Tuesday. In a statement to Vice News affiliate Motherboard, the PMU said the robot would be used for three primary missions: "Nighttime hunter missions, daytime combat missions and all-day support role for any troops requiring it."

Earlier this week security reporter Brian Krebs pointed out an odd glitch in Google Translate. It had to do with the service's treatment of "Lorem Ipsum" placeholder text--the string of Latin words that people use to block out space for text on websites and in other designs before meaningful verbiage is added. For some reason, strings of "Lorem Ipsum" were coming back as "NATO." In his post, Krebs works through a few examples and posits a few explanations. Perhaps someone is gaming the translate system for fun, or to get around Chinese censorship laws.

In about A.D. 1300 the Anasazi people abandoned Long House Valley. To this day the valley, though beautiful in its way, seems touched by desolation. It runs eight miles more or less north to south, on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, just west of the broad Black Mesa and half an hour's drive south of Monument Valley. To the west Long House Valley is bounded by gently sloping domes of pink sandstone; to the east are low cliffs of yellow-white sedimentary rock crowned with a mist of windblown juniper. The valley floor is riverless and almost perfectly flat, a sea of blue-gray sagebrush and greasewood in sandy reddish soil carried in by wind and water. Today the valley is home to a modest Navajo farm, a few head of cattle, several electrical transmission towers, and not much else. Yet it is not hard to imagine the vibrant farming district that this once was. The Anasazi used to cultivate the valley floor and build their settlements on low hills around the valley's perimeter. Remains of their settlements are easy to see, even today. Because the soil is sandy and the wind blows hard, not much stays buried, so if you leave the highway and walk along the edge of the valley (which, by the way, you can't do without a Navajo permit), you frequently happen upon shards of Anasazi pottery, which was eggshell-perfect and luminously painted. On the site of the valley's eponymous Long House--the largest of the ancient settlements--several ancient stone walls remain standing. Last year I visited the valley with two University of Arizona archaeologists, George Gumerman and Jeffrey Dean, who between them have studied the area for fifty or more years. Every time I picked up a pottery shard, they dated it at a glance. By now they and other archaeologists know a great deal about the Anasazi of Long House Valley: approximately how many lived here, where their dwellings were, how much water was available to them for farming, and even (though here more guesswork is involved) approximately how much corn each acre of farmland produced. They have built up a whole prehistoric account of the people and their land. But they still do not know what everyone would most like to know, which is what happened to the Anasazi around A.D. 1300. "Really, we've been sort of spinning our wheels in the last eight to ten years," Gumerman told me during the drive up to the valley. "Even though we were getting more data, we haven't been able to answer that question."

Helen Greiner, of US company iRobot Corp, is here promoting a carpet cleaning robot. They're small, unobstrusive, and seem happy to do a job few if any of us enjoy. Such is the appeal of iRobot Corporation's vacuum cleaner known as Roomba that the Massachusetts-based company has already sold more than a million of them in the US. Some, says iRobot chairwoman Helen Greiner, have been named. "Rosie is a highly popular (name) and so is Abby or Agnes," Ms Greiner says.

Winners of an AI-judged beauty contest, which displayed bias against non-white faces. AI has seen a renaissance over the last year, with developments in driverless vehicle technology, voice recognition, and the mastery of the game "Go," revealing how much machines are capable of. But with all of the successes of AI, it's also important to pay attention to when, and how, it can go wrong, in order to prevent future errors. A recent paper by Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville, outlines a history of AI failures which are "directly related to the mistakes produced by the intelligence such systems are designed to exhibit." According to Yampolskiy, these types of failures can be attributed to mistakes during the learning phase or mistakes in the performance phase of the AI system.