Green-eyed and diminutive, Pepper works the crowd hard as he sings, dances and tries out his small talk. "You guys seem to be foreigners – where are you from?" he asks. When we tell him we're Irish, he says: "Gosh, Europe has so many interesting countries. I'd like to go there some day." Pepper is the latest in a long line of made-in-Japan battery-powered bipeds.

Welcome to the Uncanny Valley. Sounds like a spooky, scary place to live – and that's certainly true – but it's more of a state of mind. Anyone who has been freaked out by the robots in Channel 4's new hit drama Humans knows what life in the Uncanny Valley feels like. The same goes for those who have met or seen footage of Aiko Chihira, a realistic humanoid who has just started welcoming visitors to a department store in Japan. Aiko and Anita, the renegade Synth in Humans, are both sufficiently lifelike to be approachable but sufficiently inhuman to be deeply unsettling, speaking to our deepest fears about robots taking over our lives.

When most people think of robots, they either think of hulking Terminators or the dumb industrial varieties taking part in a future robot uprising. But there's another class of robot that's also gaining traction – social robots that cost less than £650 and are designed for the home. They are more WALL-E than Terminator, and are meant to be personal companions and even "one of the family". For all the stories about the perils of artificial intelligence, these machines are strangely disarming. First of all, some of them – such as the new Buddy companion robot from French firm Blue Frog Robotics – look like they've had a cartoon smiley face painted on them.

We humans might think we have the edge over machines when it comes to art appreciation, but computer scientists are perfecting programs that have a discerning eye. To do this, Lawrence Technological University researchers Lior Shamir and Jane Tarakhovsky found a way to break down an individual painting into 4,027 "numerical image context descriptors." They performed this operation on 1,000 paintings by 34 famous artists. Then, Shamir and Tarakhovsky let the computer algorithm scrutinize all the paintings based on visual content alone, without input from a human. The program was able to identify differences between modern art and classical realism and identify specific subgroups of painters.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals 2014 has announced Google's SCHAFT robot will compete in the self-funded track. This move frees up funding for two more teams to the DRC Finals 2014, while a third team will compete as part of the self-funded track D. On March 21, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced Google's SCHAFT robot will switch to the unfunded Track D for the DRC Finals 2014, which allows for two more teams to compete in the robotics challenge. The robotics teams will compete for a grand prize of $2 million. Team THOR will use the DARPA funds, up to $500,000 for each team, to continue work on the Tactical Harzardous Operations Robot (THOR) at two universities. One team will continue work on THOR at the University of California Los Angeles while a second team will be stationed at the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at Virginia Tech.

Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Project Glass, which can be seen above, is the company's newest effort to develop an augmented reality experience by simply putting on a pair of glasses. Now, its Chinese competitor, the search engine giant Baidu, is creating its own version of the tech accessory that has wowed the Internet. According to the China Daily, a prototype of Baidu's version of the $1,500 Google Glass is known internally among developers as the "Baidu Eye." It will also be a wearable LCD display device that will supposedly function like the Google model. It will include speech recognition features, in Mandarin of course, and other specs similar to Google Glass like image recognition and motion sensing.

BMW is overhauling its research and development activities to focus on self-driving cars, board member Klaus Froehlich told Reuters, a move which includes a revamp of its "i" sub-brand of carbon-fibre based electric vehicles. The company is updating its zero-emission vehicles after a lackluster response to its only fully battery-powered car, the i3, which recorded only 25,000 sales last year. By contrast, Tesla already has more than 370,000 orders for its Model 3. To help improve sales, BMW (BMWG.DE) is increasing the battery range of its i3 city vehicle by 50 percent this year. Its next full-fledged new electric car model is not due until 2021, but the Bavarian auto maker is also planning to build a new version of its i3 electric car to be released by 2018, a source familiar with the matter said. "It is a sportier brother for the i3," said the source, who declined to be named.

Amazon introduced Thursday two gadgets similar to its voice-controlled Echo speaker, which can be used to check the weather, order Domino's pizza or hail an Uber car. The Amazon Tap, a portable speaker that streams music, sells for $129.99. The $89.99 Echo Dot is a hockey puck-shaped device that responds to prompts to control smart appliances and connects to external speakers. For now, the Echo Dot is available only to Amazon Prime members who already have the original Echo device and Amazon's Fire TV set-top box. The original Echo, launched in 2014, is larger and cannot connect to external speakers.

It is small because it is not on the radar of most leaders today, not even as a potential threat of the future. What worries leaders is the economy in Europe and the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine involving Russia. What worries leaders is global warming, quantitative easing or China's rise as a superpower. At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave an address on global responsibilities in a digital age. But the digital referred to privacy, not artificial intelligence.

Easy targets in war are, in reality, something of an oxymoron, and the concept that jets and tanks are far from civilians is an absurd comment when we pause to consider modern, urban warfare: just visualize Syria and Iraq, for starters. Indeed, the reason pilots and machines work together is because they benefit from the particular strengths of each -- the judgment of humans combined with control loops that only technology can provide. The fact that such coupled systems work does no service to the argument that we ought to subtract the human from the system for even better performance. If you wish for more detail about human-robot systems, I heartily recommend reading P.W. Singer's Wired for War.