The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Thursday April 22 2004 The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett's students was Dennett's seminar at Tufts, not Gould's at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a "Darwinian fundamentalist". Dan Dennett is a sailor, with a billowing white beard and moustaches that he twiddles when thinking. He uses "salty" as a term of praise and has just bought a 42ft boat that sleeps five and could, if he wished, cross the Atlantic. His passion for sailing may be the best way to approach his philosophy. In both, un-charted and dangerous areas are to be navigated by explorers ingeniously equipped. Like all sailors, he has stories. One concerns a French couple he met when sailing off Greenland. They were on their honeymoon, sailing from France to Iceland, then Greenland, and finally, in one long reach, from Greenland to the Falklands.

Hilton Nunez felt more like an air traffic controller than the commander of six Hunter unmanned aerial vehicles. A division commander wanted a UAV to check for surface-to-air threats. A corps commander sought one to fly far ahead of advancing troops to gather intelligence for the next day's war planning. There were never enough UAVs to go around. "There was a constant battle over who would control the UAVs," Nunez says.

A new android infant has been born thanks to the University of California San Diego's Machine Perception Lab. The lab received funding from the National Science Foundation to contract Kokoro Co. Ltd. and Hanson Robotics, two companies that specialize in building lifelike animatronics and androids, to build a replicant based on a one year old baby. The resulting robot, which has been a couple of years in development, has finally been completed – and you can watch it smile and make cute faces after the break. Diego-san, as it's called, is actually much larger than a standard one year old – mainly because miniaturizing the parts would have been too costly. It stands about 4 feet 3 inches (130 cm) tall and weighs 66 pounds (30 kg), and its body has a total of 44 pneumatic joints.

Could we fall in love with robots? Movies have been suggesting the possibility for some time, from a man falling in love with his computer operating system in the 2013 film Her, to robot lover Gigolo Joe offering his services to women in 2001's A.I. We are on the cusp of creating loveable robots. Leaps in artificial intelligence are making conversations with automatons less stilted, for example. One Silicon Valley company, Eternime, plans to let people create avatars of themselves that learn their speech patterns and life stories, then converse with loved ones after death. And robots themselves are becoming increasingly lifelike.

When robots were called into service at the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant after the 2011 tsunami, they were not ones made in Japan. Instead, machines built by US company iRobot to operate in minefields in Afghanistan and Iraq had to be used. It was a clear illustration of how, despite the country's longstanding prowess in robotics, Japanese leadership in the field is no longer a given. More adaptable machines developed for difficult environments are coming to the fore. Even more significantly, machine learning and other techniques of artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming paramount as robots learn to respond to and interact with humans.

In warehouses, hospitals and retail stores, and on city streets, industrial parks and the footpaths of college campuses, the first representatives of this new invading force are starting to become apparent. "The robots are among us," says Steve Jurvetson, a Silicon Valley investor and a director at Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX companies, which have relied heavily on robotics. A multitude of machines will follow, he says: "A lot of people are going to come in contact with robots in the next two to five years." The arrival of the robots -- and their potentially devastating effect on human employment -- has been widely predicted. Now, the machines are starting to roll or walk out of the labs.

If economists are to be believed, vast numbers of jobs will have evaporated by the time today's pupils reach the labour market. Oxford university's Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne say almost half of the jobs in the US are at high risk from computerisation in the next two decades, together with two-thirds of those in India and three-quarters in China. While workers worry about whether robots will take their jobs, teachers are wondering how to use education to insulate the next generation from such a fate. When the last wave of automation swept the developed world at the start of the 20th century, policymakers decided education was the answer. If machines were going to substitute for brawn, they reasoned, more people would need to use their brains.

Who will build the self-driving car of the future? Fired-up by Google's driverless prototype, carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz and Volvo are already testing autonomous vehicles on public roads. But the advanced sensors and electronics that form the building blocks of self-driving cars are often made by suppliers, not the car manufacturer. "It's all the suppliers into the industry who, in the fullness of time, will gain the power," says a senior industry analyst, who works closely with the leading carmakers. Carmakers have been gradually adding autonomous elements to their vehicles since Jaguar introduced adaptive cruise control in its XK sports car in 1996.

Siri may be able to tell you the capital of Kazakhstan and show you the city's weather forecast -- but her descendents will be able to book the flight that gets you there. Technology under development for "bots" focuses on back-and-forth conversation, a new phenomenon that essentially gives the sensation of a computer standing in a room, aware of its surroundings and offering feedback. "Typically, what happens with Siri is you ask a question and you get an answer," said Next IT chief technology officer Chuck Wooters. "You are having a conversation, but a limited one." That will change as bots, connected nearly every hour of everyday through mobile devices, learn from their users by retaining search history and processing trends.

Fintech labs, accelerators and hackathons are spreading around the world, from New York to London to Asia to Latin America. In New York, where it all started in 2010 with the FinTech Innovation Lab launched by and the Partnership Fund for New York City, the latest startup graduates have been announced from the 12-week mentoring program. Participants were: Digital Asset Holdings, secure distributed settlement and ledger services; EverSafe, protection for older adults from financial abuse and identity theft; MaxMyInterest, cash sweep to a client's highest yielding account; PierceMatrix, cyber-security third party risk management; Pay Your Tuition, helps high performing students obtain funding; Social Alpha, trading information from social media and news using natural language processing; Ufora, provides answers from large data sets in seconds. The FinTech Innovation Labs' 24 alumni companies have raised a total of $176 million in financing after participating in the program, and one alumni company was acquired last year for $175 million. Accenture's 2015 FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific in Hong Kong announced seven startups for this year's program.