When robots inevitably take over our planet, as the dystopian vision of science fiction writers foretells, we'll lose our jobs, our freedom, our humanity. But take comfort in one thing the robots will provide for us lowly carbon-based life-forms: artisanal pizza. They're already making it in a commercial kitchen in the heart of Silicon Valley: Two robots named Pepe and Giorgio squirt sauce on dough, and another robot, Marta, spreads it. A robotic arm named Bruno puts the pizza in the oven. They don't operate independently from humans yet -- two or three people still load the dough onto the conveyor and sprinkle cheese and toppings -- but Zume Pizza in Mountain View expects to be fully automated by spring, delivering made-to-order, customizable pizzas in as little as seven minutes.

Sitting in a studio in Kensington, London, the designer Sebastian Conran walks me through a worst-case scenario. "Basically, what it's looking for is a break in routine," he explains, pointing to a drawing of an elderly woman, collapsed on the floor of her home. The e-sensor in the room notices that you've fallen over. MiRo is a robotic dog. There is an early model close to where we are sitting.

With GPS technology at our fingertips and Siri available to navigate our every turn, paper maps have been rendered obsolete. But that is exactly what Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino has created with his series of collaged "Diorama Maps," which went on view Friday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After initial research of a city, Nishino spends up to three months walking it while snapping photos in black and white. "He climbs up to rooftops and high floors of buildings to get a multifaceted bird's-eye view," curator Corey Keller said. "These vantage points give him an alternative perspective of the city."

Disclosure: Organizers of the "France is AI" conference paid travel expenses for the reporter to attend and moderate several sessions at the event. Tucked into a courtyard in central Paris, the 35 employees of Snips are hunched over their computers trying to put the finishing touches on a new version of the company's artificial intelligence app for smartphones. The company is packed full of big brains, many of them products of France's leading universities and a culture that is historically strong in mathematics. And they're not afraid to let you know it. Etched into winding wooden staircases that lead to Snips offices are a series of math puzzles that job recruits are asked to solve as they work their way upstairs. Snips' app wants to scan all the data across the apps on your smartphones to deliver insight about you and eventually become a hyper-smart personal assistant.

When the engineers had at last finished their work, Eugenia Kuyda opened a console on her laptop and began to type. "This is your digital monument." It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda's closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way.

AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program powered by Google's DeepMind, defeated South Korean world Go champion Lee Sedol convincingly with a 4-1 score earlier in the year. It seems that DeepMind is now moving on to a bigger challenge, going from an ancient board game into a modern strategy video game. At the ongoing BlizzCon 2016, Blizzard and Google announced a collaboration to open up StarCraft II as an AI and machine learning environment for researchers around the world. StarCraft II is one of the most fiercely competitive video games that is played professionally, and according to the DeepMind team, it will provide an interesting testing environment for research in AI as it "provides a useful bridge to the messiness of the real-world." "The skills required for an agent to progress through the environment and play StarCraft well could ultimately transfer to real-world tasks," said Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist for DeepMind who was once the top-ranked player of the game in Spain.

The Drum's latest documentary, produced in association with Teads, 'The Automation of Creativity' explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising. Automation will claim 50% of all jobs in the next 30 years, according to Rice University professor Moshe Vardi, but creativity is impossible to automate, right? Adland will surely escape this robot advance? Such a binary argument fails to take into account the huge leaps artificial intelligence (AI) and other such technologies are making. Why, when it is being used in film-making, music and even journalism, should advertising avoid the onslaught?

Sherry Coutu spends much of her time above the Atlantic, shuttling between Cambridge and Silicon Valley in search of the brightest talent in the technology sector. When it comes to artificial intelligence -- one of the fields expected to make the biggest difference to the way we live our lives over the coming decades -- she believes that Britain has an edge. "There is a huge amount of evidence to show that we are No 1," said the Canadian-born tech guru, who has lived in Britain since 1993. But, she added, "we are still growing fewer companies than we should". Artificial intelligence (AI) is an overused term. Some big companies attempt to pass off basic systems that simply provide automated responses to consumers as an "AI solution".

The White House released its much anticipated document last May, entitled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." Sent from the Office of the President and the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology (or NSTC), the report is 58 pages of research, documentation, and recommendations on how the United States government plans to respond to artificial intelligence (AI) moving forward. The report was developed by the NSTC's Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence "which was chartered in May 2016 to foster interagency coordination, to provide technical and policy advice on topics related to AI, and to monitor the development of AI technologies across industry, the research community, and the Federal Government," according to the report. The NSTC hosted five public workshops, as well as putting out a public Request for Information. The information drawn from those six sources informed the eventual recommendations of the committee.

FILE - In this Oct. 21, 2016 file photo, a Samsung Electronics' Galaxy S7 is displayed as customers wait in line to buy Apple's iPhone 7 at a mobile phone shop in Seoul, South Korea. Apple Inc. began selling the iPhone 7 in South Korea on Friday. The South Korean company said Sunday, Nov. 6, 2016, that the Galaxy S8 smartphone will let users order food or perform other tasks without going through a third-party application but by simply asking the phone's virtual assistant.