The past couple of decades have seen technology forge ahead relentlessly, enabling us to communicate in unprecedented ways, work more smartly and from any location, carry our phones in our pocket and much more. And artificial intelligence has evolved somewhat too, alongside all of the'usual' tech that we use daily, bringing with it a more urgent perceived need to consider the threat that it might pose. Bill Gates has come out to state that he's firmly in the'AI is a threat camp', so too has Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest thinkers of our time. But not everyone is in agreement with them. At the Dublin Web Summit, I attended a talk – the name now escapes me unfortunately when it comes to who it was by – and when the speaker, a high profile tech name (that much I do know) was asked about the threat posed by AI, he said something that I found interesting.

Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once. This post (sixth in a series of seven) is a look at robotics. Be sure to read the first five posts if you haven't already: When the World Is Wired: The Magic of the Internet of Everything Where Artificial Intelligence Is Now and What's Just Around the Corner The Near Future of VR and AR: What You Need to Know Drones Have Reached at Tipping Point--Here's What Happens Next How 3D Printing Is Transforming the Way We Make Things An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., 3D Printing), but try to predict the future when AI, robotics, VR, drones, and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining…You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. This post is the result of an interview with Rodney Brooks on the top five recent robotics breakthroughs (2012-2015) and the top five anticipated robotics breakthroughs (2016-2018). Rodney is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT.

Look at it just sitting there on a wall. South Korea's robots are future-proof. A rescue drone by the Korean Advanced Institute Of Science and Technology is a flying wall-climbing fireproof building inspection machine. Named CAROS, for Climbing Aerial RObot System, looks like a normal quadcopter. It flies to and fro like a quadcopter, then turns perpendicular to the ground and attaches itself to surfaces it needs to inspect.

An anti-tank missile fires by an Iraqi CH-4 drone destroys an ISIS artillery piece, seen in footage captured by the drone's onboard, retractable sensor turret. China's armed CH-3 and CH-4 drones have recently made international news, being used by nations that range from Iraq to Nigeria. And now NORINCO, one of China's leading defense contractors, is getting in on the international drone export game, showing off a new armed drone helicopter. The Sky Saker H300, seen here in Dubai, is China's first helicopter UCAV. Being cheaper and easier to use then larger UCAVs like the Reaper and CH-4, it could become a battalion and company level UCAV for on demand air strikes.

In the winter of 2012, I travelled from New Delhi, where I grew up, to Calcutta to visit my cousin Moni. My father accompanied me as a guide and companion, but he was a sullen and brooding presence, lost in a private anguish. He is the youngest of five brothers, and Moni is his firstborn nephew--the eldest brother's son. Since 2004, Moni, now fifty-two, has been confined to an institution for the mentally ill (a "lunatic home," as my father calls it), with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He is kept awash in antipsychotics and sedatives, and an attendant watches, bathes, and feeds him through the day. My father has never accepted Moni's diagnosis. Over the years, he has waged a lonely campaign against the psychiatrists charged with his nephew's care, hoping to convince them that their diagnosis was a colossal error, or that Moni's broken psyche would somehow mend itself. He has visited the institution in Calcutta twice--once without warning, hoping to see a transformed Moni, living a secretly normal life behind the barred gates. But there was more than just avuncular love at stake for him in these visits. Moni is not the only member of the family with mental illness. Two of my father's four brothers suffered from various unravellings of the mind. Madness has been among the Mukherjees for generations, and at least part of my father's reluctance to accept Moni's diagnosis lies in a grim suspicion that something of the illness may be buried, like toxic waste, in himself. Rajesh, my father's third-born brother, had once been the most promising of the Mukherjee boys--the nimblest, the most charismatic, the most admired. But in the summer of 1946, at the age of twenty-two, he began to behave oddly, as if a wire had been tripped in his brain. The most obvious change in his personality was a volatility: good news triggered uncontained outbursts of joy; bad news plunged him into inconsolable desolation. By that winter, the sine curve of Rajesh's psyche had tightened in its frequency and gained in its amplitude.

"Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business" (Random House) is Charles Duhigg's follow-up to his best-selling "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," which was published in 2012. The new book, like its predecessor, has a format that's familiar in contemporary nonfiction: exemplary tales interpolated with a little social and cognitive science. The purpose of the tales is to create entertaining human-interest narratives; the purpose of the science is to help the author pick out a replicable feature of those narratives for readers to emulate. What enabled the pilot to land the badly damaged plane? How did the academic dropout with anxiety disorder become a champion poker player? What made "West Side Story" and Disney's "Frozen" into mega-hits?

But it could be a real threat, warn researchers at the recent World Economic Forum. Unlike today's drones, which are still controlled by human operators, autonomous weapons could potentially be programmed to select and engage targets on their own. "It was one of the concerns that we itemized last year," Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence (AI) at the school of computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales, told FoxNews.com. "Most of us believe that we don't have the ability to build ethical robots," he added. "What is especially worrying is that the various militaries around the world will be fielding robots in just a few years, and we don't think anyone will be building ethical robots."

A bronze bell has been recovered from a Japanese submarine that was sunk intentionally off the Hawaiian Islands by U.S. forces 70 years ago. Researchers from the Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) in two submersibles, Pisces IV and Pisces V, used a robotic arm to retrieve the bell that was resting on the seafloor. The bell was from the I-400 - a World War II-era Imperial Japanese Navy mega-submarine, lost since 1946. Longer than a football field at 400 feet, the I-400 was known as a "Sen-Toku" class submarine - the largest submarine ever built until the introduction of nuclear-powered subs in the 1960s. "It was an exciting day for the submersible operations crews of Pisces IV and Pisces V," Terry Kerby, HURL operations director and chief submarine pilot, said in a statement.

AlphaGo has won the fifth of five games of Go against South Korean grandmaster Lee Se-dol. The final game was a close-run thing, spilling into overtime with the AI just half-a-point ahead at one stage. The best-of-five tournament, which saw the software win 4-1, is considered to be a significant moment in the development of artificial intelligence. Go is a sophisticated game with more potential moves than there are atoms in the observable universe, requiring a greater capacity for on-the-fly "thinking". In a post on Google's Asia-Pacific blog, top American go player Michael Redmond said: "It was difficult to say at what point AlphaGo was ahead or behind, a close game throughout. "AlphaGo made what looked like a mistake with move 48, similar to the mistake in Game Four in the middle of the board.

When Google's algorithm AlphaGo beat South Korean Go Grandmaster Lee Se-dol by 4-1 last week, it was a significant event in the world of algorithms and artificial intelligence. This is because it represented a new form of artificial intelligence: intuitive artificial intelligence, something which is remarkably more challenging than standard artificial intelligence. The disruption happening thanks to algorithms is happening all around us. The largest taxi company in the world, Uber, owns no taxis, but uses smart algorithms to connect drivers and passengers. The largest telephone company in the world, WhatsApp, has no telecom infrastructure, but sends over 35 billion message per day.