Brian Forde, director of digital currency at the MIT Media Lab, recently observed other ideas flowing at a PeaceTech Exchange workshop in Basra. According to a blog post published on the World Economic Forum website Tuesday, Forde watched two women building a wireless robotic arm and spoke with an aspiring entrepreneur's business plan to create an artificial-intelligence editor to help journalists verify information with greater accuracy.

The Google driverless car is an extraordinary technical achievement. To grasp the its scope, watch this video featuring a near-blind man sitting behind the wheel of an autonomous Prius as the car does the driving. Or, to get an idea of the complexity of the system, see this presentation by Sebastian Thrun (one of the main architects of Google's self-driving car project) going through the multiple systems running inside the car. Spectacular as it is, this public demonstration is merely the tip of the iceberg. For Google, the economics of self-driving cars lie in a vast web of data that will become a must to operate partially or fully self-driving vehicles on a massive scale.

The Atlas robot looks something out of the post-apocalyptic future, or maybe a Will Smith blockbuster. It's a 330lb cyborg with eerily human-like hands and a head equipped with a laser. This bot will be a first responder in times of crisis, says the Pentagon – it's designed to use tools and trudge through difficult terrain, heading into smoky, dangerous areas that humans can't. With its human capabilities it could also, not coincidentally, be a good soldier. This robot – named Atlas after the Greek mythological hero who supported the world on his back – is part of the Pentagon's quest to create a humanoid robot that can do everything from turning knobs in nuclear plants to driving a car.

'The best is the enemy of the good," said Voltaire. It's a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never made it beyond the prototype stage because their designers felt they fell too far short of the ideals they had set for themselves. One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so remarkable as a company boss is that he was the exception that proved Voltaire's rule. He was a perfectionist for whom the good was the enemy of the best.

Faced with an enemy fighter jet, there's one sensible thing a military drone should do: split. But in December 2002, caught in the crosshairs of an Iraqi MiG, an unmanned US Predator was instructed to stay put. The MiG fired, the Predator fired back and the result, unhappily for the US, was a heap of drone parts on the southern Iraqi desert. This incident is often regarded as the first dogfight between a drone, properly known as an unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV, and a conventional, manned fighter. Yet in a way, the Predator hardly stood a chance.

He made contributions of crucial international significance in three distinct fields of endeavour. During the second world war, he developed code-breaking techniques which led to effective automatic deciphering of German high-level ciphers. In the 1950s, he worked with Anne on pioneering techniques which were fundamental in the development of in vitro fertilisation. Donald subsequently became one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, an area to which he devoted the remainder of his academic career. It was within this field that I came to know Donald as an inspirational supervisor of my PhD at Edinburgh - not only insightful, forceful and even heroic, but possessing a wicked sense of humour.

Lying on a patch of rocky earth, in Chiba, just north of Tokyo, is a large machine about the size of a dinner table; it could be a small tank if it wasn't for the six legs aligned, insect-like along two sides of its rectangular body. Slowly, the machine rises up onto its feet and walks forward like a giant, silver beetle. This is not a creature from the latest Godzilla movie but a robot being developed by a group at Chiba University. If all goes according to plan, their test ground could soon be exchanged for the deserts of Afghanistan and Comet III could be working to help solve one of the country's biggest problems. Afghanistan is plagued by land mines.

Fulfilling the dreams of bosses everywhere, Wakamaru San is never late, doesn't gossip or throw sickies, and somewhat unnervingly never stops smirking. That's because one-metre tall Wakamaru is an android, whose idea of a tea break is to find the nearest power socket and recharge itself when its battery runs low. This Mitsubishi-made winsome bot is part of the vanguard of so-called "second generation" robots, autonomous machines designed to help around the home and workplace - permanently. In the first serious attempt to commercialise a robot that can work in the office, 10 little Wakamarus touting "strong receptionist skills" were recently taken on by an employment agency in Japan, where they are now for hire for £12,000 a year. Other bots are muscling in on Japan's increasingly mechanised construction industry, though those look far from the "humanoid" type robot, such as Wakamaru, that we have been led to expect by science fiction. In fact, really clever, human-like robots may still be decades away (see below) but gradually robot manufacturers are moving from creating machines that work mostly in the automotive sector to other industries, such as the food business, while many robots are becoming consumer products.

It should be settling into senior citizenship, but the 65-year-old festival is reinventing itself this year. The programme has been mixed up by a host of guest curators – ranging from Gus Van Sant to Jim Jarmusch, and Mike Skinner to Apichatpong Weerasethakul. And as well as the usual core of new international features and documentaries, there are envelope-pushing new strands and events. Of the conventional features, highlights include Romain Gavras's awaited feature debut Our Day Will Come, a French skinhead tale that looks as confrontational as his music video work (which plays beforehand). David Hare presents his new MI5 thriller Page Eight, led by Bill Nighy (who'll also be giving an onstage interview); Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle buddy up in Irish cop comedy The Guard; and festival regular David McKenzie returns with apocalyptic art sci-fi Perfect Sense, starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green.

When Haldeman returned from Vietnam, with a Purple Heart for the wounds he had suffered, he wrote a story about a pointless conflict that seems as if it will never end. It was set in space, and the enemies were aliens, but 18 publishers decided it was too close to home before St Martin's Press took a gamble. The book that "nobody wants to read" went on to win many prizes. It's not perfect - it's hard to take seriously a future in which hetereosexuality is a perversion - but the anti-war message is as powerful as ever. Known for his intricate short stories and critically acclaimed mountaineering novel Climbers, Harrison cut his teeth on SF. In typical fashion, he writes space opera better than many who write only in the genre. For all its star travel and alien artefacts, scuzzy 25th-century spaceports and drop-out space pilots, Light is actually about twisting three plotlines as near as possible to snapping point. This is as close as SF gets to literary fiction, and literary fiction gets to SF. Jon Courtenay Grimwood Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop Amateur stonemason, waterbed designer, reformed socialist, nudist, militarist and McCarthyite, Heinlein is one of the most interesting and irritating figures in American science fiction.