Hisashi Taniguchi took a sabbatical from developing software for driverless taxis and drones to pilgrimage to a Buddhist temple in western Japan. He shaved his head, donned black robes and studied to become the shrine's leader. He passed the test, yet within a week was back at the Tokyo offices of ZMP Inc., overseeing his robotics company in a more-typical wardrobe of jeans and red Converse sneakers. As ZMP's founder and chief executive officer, he tries to sync millennia-old teachings with efforts to make artificial intelligence part of everyday life. "The temple teaches you that if you shine, you'll shed light on those around you," Taniguchi, 52, said.

MUNICH – Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as "electronic persons" and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution. Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation. Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests. Some robots are even taking on a human form. Visitors to the world's biggest travel show in March were greeted by a lifelike robot developed by Japan's Toshiba and were helped by another made by France's Aldebaran Robotics.

As someone so flummoxed by traffic I wrote a book about it, I have a near-clinical aversion to vehicular congestion. My global default strategy is to simply drive as little as possible, but there are times when I simply must put foot to gas pedal. Like many, I have become increasingly dependent on the Waze app, which, via each drivers' smartphone, turns an inchoate, undifferentiated mass of drivers into something resembling a collective form of networked intelligence. Waze, it occurred to me the other day while stuck in a bit of unexpected congestion (which had been duly flagged by at least 13 "Wazers"), is helping us turn into ants. Every time drivers travel down a path, Waze tracks their speed--information that can then be broadcast to every following driver.

We are all familiar with the doomsday scenario depicted by many modern films, when artificial intelligence goes bad and takes over the world. But this is not going to happen, according to Google chairman, Eric Schmidt, who claims that super-intelligent robots will someday help use solve problems such as population growth and climate change. During a talk in Cannes, he said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry. Artificial intelligence will let scientists solve some of the world's'hard problems.' During a talk in Cannes, Eric Schmidt said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry. 'We've all seen those movies,' he said.

The number of sophisticated cognitive technologies that might be capable of cutting into the need for human labor is expanding rapidly. But linking these offerings to an organization's business needs requires a deep understanding of their capabilities. If popular culture is an accurate gauge of what's on the public's mind, it seems everyone has suddenly awakened to the threat of smart machines. Several recent films have featured robots with scary abilities to outthink and manipulate humans. In the economics literature, too, there has been a surge of concern about the potential for soaring unemployment as software becomes increasingly capable of decision making. Yet managers we talk to don't expect to see machines displacing knowledge workers anytime soon -- they expect computing technology to augment rather than replace the work of humans.

A university professor is heading the Japanese version of a U.S.-led movement to exonerate people who have been wrongfully charged and imprisoned using DNA testing. Mitsuyuki Inaba, 51, who is neither a lawyer nor an expert in criminal law, is a professor at Ritsumeikan University's College of Policy Science. He believes Japan's criminal justice system is rife with fundamental failures that lead to wrongful imprisonment due to the "unscientific" way in which investigations are carried out. Inaba, who specializes in cognitive science, took up the post of director at the Innocence Project Japan, which was launched in April in cooperation with lawyers and other legal experts. Similar movements have sprouted in Britain, South Africa and Taiwan.

Baidu Inc. is using its own trove of data to measure China's economy, devising new gauges that may paint a better picture than the government's. The country's leading search engine has begun using location and search information collected from its more than 600 million users to create indicators and indexes it says could shed light on what's happening with the world's second largest economy. Investors and analysts have long questioned the veracity and methodology of China's government-issued statistics. An example is jobless data, with an unemployment rate staying between 4 percent and 4.3 percent in every quarter since the end of 2002, through a domestic boom, the global financial crisis and now an economy growing at its slowest pace in 25 years. "The economy is slowing down but the unemployment rate published by the government remains steady about 4 percent," senior data scientist Wu Haishan said.

A robot capable of thinking for itself is set to be scrapped after it escaped from a high-tech lab for a second time. The Promobot IR77 has been fitted with artificial intelligence meaning that it learns from its experiences and its surroundings, although the programmers had not expected it to yearn for freedom. They say that despite reprogramming it twice, the robot continues to attempt to escape and they are now considering scrapping it. The other robots which have been created from the same series are well-behaved, and have not been escaping, say the team. Promobot IR77 made headlines last week when he escaped but ran out of battery in the middle of the street after 45 minutes in the city of Perm in central Russia's Perm Krai region.

As a High School student Carlton had been withdrawn and quiet, unsocial and uninvolved. One of his teachers was 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. He won because his design exemplified the philosophical goals of the contest: energy efficiency.

An industrial robotic arm pours a glass of beer at the Automatica trade fair in Munich on Tuesday. Munich: Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as "electronic persons" and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution.Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation. Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests. Some robots are even taking on a human form. Visitors to the world's biggest travel show in March were greeted by a lifelike robot developed by Japan's Toshiba and were helped by another made by France's Aldebaran Robotics.