As a High School student Carlton had been withdrawn and quiet, unsocial and uninvolved. One of his teachers had been convinced that he was using drugs because he was so pale and tired. In reality, he had been up late into the night, designing, building and refining his electrically independent computer. He drew his own blood for it, leading to symptoms of anemia. His prototype was, in retrospect, an archaic fossil as soon as it was operational, but he won a National competition with it.

An MIT-altered robot backed with AI provided scheduling recommendations to labor ward nurses at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. See how it turned out. MIT researchers were recently able to demonstrate that the could train an altered Nao robot to learn the ins and outs of room scheduling in a labor ward at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Nurses accepted the robot's recommendations 90% of the time. Just to make sure the nurses weren't blindly accepting the robot's advice, the team also had the robot provide consciously bad feedback--which was also rejected at a 90% rate.

One of the surprise products of last week's Computex IT show in Taiwan was the Zenbo robot from Asus. The cute, two-wheeled, home-help robot will read stories to kids, summon help for seniors in an emergency and blast out songs while twirling around the floor to the music. But Asus is better known as a manufacturer of smartphones and laptop PCs. Home-help robots have been tried and failed before, so why did the company decide the time is right? IDG News Service spoke with Jonney Shih, chairman of Asus and the power behind much of the company's product planning and design, to find out more about Zenbo. Shih said he saw the robot as an evolution in computing -- something that followed on from the PC era, mobile computing, and the recent so-called Internet of Things.

Google acquired Kifi, an app for collecting links from across the Internet, which teams could then collaborate on. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. The Kifi service and data will not become part of Google. The service will remain fully functional for existing users for a few more weeks, before its shut down. The company is no longer accepting new registrations. The team at Kifi will be joining the Spaces team at Google.

Editor's note: Dallas police actively guided an explosive-laden robot to kill gunman Micah Johnson when negotiations broke down after he opened fire on police and others July 7. This interview on Think -- which was recorded before the ambush took place -- focuses on the questions raised by computers and robots programmed to kill without human supervision. You may have seen it earlier this year when a company called Boston Dynamics posted a video of a humanoid robot that can walk on two legs, even over uneven terrain. Seeing a machine balance on bumpy, snowy ground in a New England forest is mesmerizing. But watching the robot get knocked to the ground by a human tester, then get up all by itself and keep going is somehow profoundly unsettling.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang called on Saturday for greater global cooperation against terrorism, state media said, as the Asian giant seeks greater international support for its anti-terror fight. Speaking at an Asia-Europe summit, Li said various security challenges - conventional and unconventional - remain prominent even though those regions had remained generally stable and peaceful. "Acts of terrorism are common challenges faced by every nation. Countries should work more closely to fight terrorism, and build societies that are truly open and tolerant so to root out the soil where it grows," said Li. China has sought Western support for its own "war on terror" since the attacks in Paris last November.

One of the most remarkable details of a fatal collision earlier this month involving a tractor trailer and a Tesla electric car operating in self-driving mode was the fact that the car apparently mistook the side of the truck for the sky. As Tesla explained in a public statement following the accidental death, the car's autopilot was unable to see "the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky"--which is to say, it was unable to differentiate the two. The truck was not perceived as a discrete object, in other words, but as something indistinguishable from the larger spatial environment. It was more like an elision, a continuation of the sky by deceptive means. Examples like this are tragic, to be sure, but they are also technologically interesting, in that they give momentary glimpses of where robotic perception has failed.

The aim of the hotel, as CEO Hideo Sawada puts it, is a serious one: to be the most efficient hotel in the world. He draws on comparisons with low-cost airlines that "changed how we travel." Two years ago, as hotel prices continued to rise, the CEO (who runs the nearby Huis Ten Bosch theme park) began discussions with robotics and engineering experts with the aim of creating an efficient hotel, one that costs (both fiscally and environmentally) less. If you thought Hen-na Hotel was a kitschy gimmick, well, that's partly true. Still, the bigger picture here is that researchers from Japan's largest, most influential university are involving themselves and testing out cutting-edge green technology, as well as trying to create a space where both robots and humans can move around and do what they want (or need) to do.

New technology could lead humans to relinquish control over decisions to use lethal force. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as "killer robots," are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction toward reality. The unmanned Sea Hunter gets underway. At present it sails without weapons, but it exemplifies the move toward greater autonomy.

Machines could put more than half the world's population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist who said on Saturday that artificial intelligence's threat to the economy should not be understated. Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?" Physicist Stephen Hawking and the tech billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk issued a similar warning last year. Hawking warned that AI "could spell the end of the human race" and Musk said it represents "our biggest existential threat". Related: 'Mini-brains' could revolutionise drug research and reduce animal use The fear of artificial intelligence has even reached the UN, where a group billing itself the Campaign to ...