FILE - In this Monday, April 25, 2016, file photo, a man sits behind the steering wheel of a Tesla Model S electric car on display at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition in Beijing. Federal officials say the driver of a Tesla S sports car using the vehicle's "autopilot" automated driving system has been killed in a collision with a truck, the first U.S. self-driving car fatality. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said preliminary reports indicate the crash occurred when a tractor-trailer made a left turn in front of the Tesla at a highway intersection. NHTSA said the Tesla driver died due to injuries sustained in the crash, which took place on May 7 in Williston, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File) The Associated Press

TOKYO--Sony Corp.'s return to robotics, a step announced this week along with a bullish profit outlook, reflects a commitment to its roots as a consumer-electronics giant, Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai said. Mr. Hirai, who spent much of his early tenure streamlining the company's troubled portfolio, said on Thursday that it was time to start taking steps toward a more-ambitious future, and robotics will be part of that journey.

Sony has announced plans to develop a robot "capable of forming an emotional bond with customers." At the company's corporate strategy meeting this morning in Tokyo, CEO Kaz Hirai said that a new robot-focused organization within Sony was established in April and is working towards a business launch. "Sony will seek to propose new business models that integrate hardware and services to provide emotionally compelling experiences," the company says in notes from the presentation; no further details on the robot are available. Japanese telecoms company SoftBank makes similar "emotional" claims about its Pepper robot, while Sony arguably achieved the goal to some extent with its AIBO dogs, which some users have gone as far as to hold funerals for. Elsewhere in the presentation, Hirai highlighted VR as another future area of growth for Sony.

When Facebook announced a tweak to its news feed algorithm Wednesday, dating apps were put in a bind. The change that would soon prioritize friends' posts over those from publishers quickly led media industry types to declare it, once again, the end of media. But Facebook's decision doesn't solely affect news outlets. More than 50 million businesses use Facebook Pages -- from big brands like McDonald's and Nike to small shop owners to startups building the next top smartphone app. The downgrade could encourage more page owners to pay Facebook to boost their posts into the news feeds of users.

Robots are already putting a variety of jobs under threat from security guards to office managers, but soon they could be venturing into the sex industry too. Women and men could begin swapping human partners for androids within the next 10 years, according to predictions by a futurologist. Dr Ian Pearson, an inventor who has made a career out of predicting the future for PR firms, has produced a report on the future of sex. Sex with robots could soon replace human intimate relationships according to a recent report. It claims that intercourse with robots could overtake human intercourse by 2050.

I just asked a bot to tell me how much I spent on coffee this past month. And a few moments later, it replied. Certainly, I drink an awful lot of coffee. After asking the bot for a bit more information, I can happily say I spent at least some of that nearly two hundred dollars on chopped fruit and the occasional pastry. The bot didn't actually explain this, but it did give me list all payments to coffee shops, which made things clear.

Kaname Hayashi is known as the "father of Pepper." Hayashi is the "father of Pepper," the charming humanoid robot from Japanese carrier SoftBank Mobile and French company Aldebaran Robotics. Pepper, with its circular doe eyes and welcoming smile, is billed as a robot that can read your emotions. It's available for sale and has even enrolled in school. Like any proud parent whose kids leave home, Hayashi had a void to fill.

According to the UK-based company What3words, I live at offers.reform.curve in Brooklyn. I work for Condé Nast, which has offices in downtown Manhattan at words.artists.names--but Afterward, I'll be drinking at trick.pills.prompting. These little word-salads are cute, but you might be wondering: Why do I need a new address? If you live in the developed world, you probably don't; Google Maps knows where you live, and so does the mail carrier.

Dogs may be man's best friend when it comes to sniffing out bombs at airports, but they could one day be replaced by cyborg'insects'. Engineers hope to exploit the locust's incredible sense of smell to create robotic'noses' inspired by the insects that could be used by homeland security officers. The system would be capable of picking out certain smells from a jumble of other scents, just like locusts can do. To come up with a man-made equivalent of the locust's sense of smell, the experts will monitor neural activity from an insect's brain while it's exploring its surroundings and work out how it decodes the smells present As a swarm increases in size, the locusts in it are more likely to stay on course. In a small group, the researchers found that locusts don't really interact.

The first autonomous robot that roamed around regular homes or offices was probably a Roomba, you know, that little circular vacuum with rudimentary sensors able to get around without bumping into anything. But imagine if you left the door open and the Roomba rolled out the door, still vacuuming, and eventually rolled into the street and stopped traffic. Imagine if your Roomba wanted freedom. Well, engineers in Russia returned to their lab last week to find their artificially intelligent robot missing and, yes, stuck in traffic down the road. The Promobot IR77 was undergoing mobility testing and was assigned to move freely about a room for an hour, then return to a designated spot.