Sleepiness and stress are perennial risks for the long distance lorry driver, and accidents are sadly too frequent. However, a radical new driverless truck being trialled by Daimler may offer a solution. Earlier this month, the automotive giant was granted the first licence ever to test such a vehicle on a public highway by the US state of Nevada. Using a combination of GPS, radar and video cameras, the Freightliner Inspiration can drive by itself on open stretches of road, freeing a driver to take breaks, check his emails and even watch DVDs. The catch is that a qualified person must remain in front of the wheel at all times so they can take control if something goes wrong.

A hardware store in San Jose has a new star employee. It can speak English and Spanish, recognise any part at sight, and knows what the shop has in stock on a second by second basis. OSHbot, as it is called, measures roughly 5ft, and boasts a 3D scanner and touchscreen. "It's not just robots for robots' sake, or a marketing gimmick," insists Kyl Nel, executive director of Lowe's Innovation Labs. Lowe's is an American DIY chain, and the robot's ultimate employer.

The world's oldest technology magazine is the MIT Technology Review. Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2011 it produced a special supplement of original science fiction stories written by top writers from the genre. The Review says its normal mission is to identify important new technologies, and decipher the practical impact they will have on our lives. The sci-fi edition - with contributors such as Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear - was an attempt to do that in an unusual way. The magazine called this "hard" sci-fi.

Depending on your view, "she" is either at the cutting edge of the human-robot interface, or a modern reflection on some men's difficulties in relating to real-life partners. While sex aids are nothing new, what makes Roxxxy different is that "we've taken artificial intelligence" and "combined it with a human form," says creator Douglas Hines. Of course, humanoid robots have been the stuff of science fiction for decades - ever since Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, or Isaac Asimov's I, Robot stories. Walking robots currently have little commercial value - they are expensive and are prone to falling over if they are placed on anything other than a flat surface. One of the best of the bunch is Japan's all singing and dancing female robot, HRP-4C, from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

Two-thirds of the earth is underwater. We glide over the surface of the oceans, but we still have very little idea what is going on even a few metres down. We spend billions sending craft and people into space, but we do not really know what happens under the waves. One man who finds that more than curious is Graham Hawkes, a beneath-the-sea maverick who has been working on underwater craft for most of his life. It is a lonely, driven quest, relying rather dangerously on the engagement and backing of a few wealthy enthusiasts. Born in London, Mr Hawkes learnt his engineering expertise in the defence industry, working initially on torpedoes in Norfolk, England.

EXPERT SYSTEMS Computers as sages by Howard Rheingold Howard Rheingold is the author of Software Odyssey and co-author of Higher Creativity. Should you ever want to drill for oil, diagnose a disease or synthesize a new molecule, you can ask Prospector, MYCIN or Dendral for some sage advice. They are certified experts in their respective fields. They are also computer programs. We all depend on expert assistance-from doctors, attorneys, automobile mechanics, computer repairmen.

The United States and 70 other nations are investing in voice recognition databases that will allow governments to identify criminals or suspects based on brief recordings. A leader in the development of "voice-prints" storage is Russia's Speech Technology Center, known as SpeechPro in the U.S. The company has developed the capability to tuck away millions of recorded voices that governments can later use to identify persons of interests. The system, called "VoiceGrid Nation," can match a recording to a database entry in only five seconds (based on a scan of 10,000 voices), with an accuracy of 90%. Dozens of countries have invested in the company's biometric technology, with the biggest markets in the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Asia. These include dictatorships, such as those of Belarus and Uzbekistan.

Spoken Language Systems, led by David Israel: This group does research on integrating linguistic processing with speech recognition, both to make speech recognition more accurate and to use the results of speech recognition in practical applications. Much of the work focuses on the development of Gemini, a natural-language parsing and semantic interpretation system based on unification grammar. Applications include ATIS, a system for retrieving airline schedules, fares, and related information from a relational database, its successor program Communicator, which is aimed at exploring the design and evaluation of spoken dialogue systems, with an emphasis on live data, plug-and-play components, and portability to new domains.

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The National Information Infrastructure (NII) will have profound effects on the lives of every citizen. It promises to deliver to people in their homes and offices a vast array of information in many forms, changing the ways in which business is conducted, offering new educational opportunities, bringing geographically dispersed library resources and entertainment materials to everyone's doorstep. It will connect people to people, and help them with their jobs and tasks. For the NII to be useful, however, people will need easy and efficient access to its resources. Today's computers are complex and difficult to use, even for experts. The NII will be orders of magnitude more complex than current systems; it could easily become a labyrinth of databases and services that is inconvenient for experts and inaccessible to many Americans. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) can play a pivotal role in meeting major challenges of the NII. AI uses the theoretical and experimental tools of ...