Households have spent £180m over the past three years on spare power capacity that was never used, according to a report that comes as MPs prepare to debate what can be done about rising energy bills. Power stations have been put on standby over the winter since 2014 as part of the National Grid's supplemental balancing reserve but the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has found that the scheme, which closed in February, was never used. The thinktank said a new scheme to be introduced this winter would see the annual cost jump to £387m. Jonathan Marshall, energy analyst at the ECIU, said: "The clear message from this report is that paying to boost spare capacity in Britain's electricity system can be very expensive and potentially unnecessary." He calculated that increasing the capacity margin, the percentage difference between electricity supply and demand, would be extremely costly. The margin was 6.6% last winter, prompting a Lords committee last month to call for it to be boosted to 10%.

Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, Harald Krueger, CEO of German car maker BMW and Amnon Shashua, co-founder, chairman and CTO Mobileye NV, pose after a press conference in Munich on July 1, 2016. As the automotive industry races to commercialize automated driving by the turn of the decade, the number of real power players in the space is rapidly consolidating. The latest move is Intel's acquisition of Israeli machine vision leader Mobileye for $15.3 billion. If completed, the deal may finally put Intel in a strong position in a new market after it has struggled in recent years to break into new new territory beyond its deteriorating stronghold in PC chips. Founded 1999, Mobileye is the undisputed global market leader for the image processing systems that are increasingly becoming standard equipment on new vehicles and will be essential to making self-driving vehicles work.

Over the last few months it has become trendy to jump on the neo-Luddite bandwagon and bemoan how machines are taking our jobs, and as automation gathers pace, they will take our jobs in never before seen numbers. It's led to a renewed emphasis on policies such as the Universal Basic Income. I'm inclined to think that much of this is simply bandwagon jumping, and have argued in the past that the notion that the current revolution is somehow different to all of those in the past is not born out by the evidence, whilst at the same time admitting that governments are largely failing to do the kind of things required to support citizens in their attempts to adapt. A recent paper provides a further element of evidence to add to the discussion. It looks at the role technology plays in economic recoveries, both in terms of economic growth and the number of jobs. The paper reveals that whilst economic recoveries in previous decades would usually involve average increases in employment of around 5% per year, this has slowed significantly since the 90s.

Android users have long been able to personalise their phone's home screen by creating widgets and downloading launchers and icon packs. However, many users are unaware of this, and instead rely on their own pictures and their phone's pre-loaded wallpapers to keep their handset's look fresh. That's why Google has created the'myAndroid Taste Test', a short quiz designed to help users discover the perfect home screen design and layout for them. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Google just killed the Captcha, perhaps the most obstructive thing on the entire internet. For years, Captcha served as the primary way of telling humans and robots apart on the internet. It made sure that the person looking to access a website was actually a human being – ensuring that robots couldn't be used to send spam or flood a website with requests, for instance. But over time, robots have gradually become too clever for the often simple tests – which early on required people to transcribe hard-to-read text. With that, the technologies have become more complex, too.

Technology is most successful when it impacts society in a positive way, and whilst Artificial Intelligence is still a sensitive subject for some, another benevolent application for AI has been found in fighting crime. AI powered platforms are brilliant at recognising patterns, which also means that they can pick out anomalies. That's why AI is such a valuable tool for detecting fraud, for instance. It can flag up suspicious behaviours amongst datasets that are so huge, human administrators wouldn't know where to start. The latest use of the technology to combat crime isn't on the streets, or even in the courts – it's a prison that is pioneering this new high-tech approach to security.

Today's self-driving car isn't exactly autonomous – the driver has to be able to take over in a pinch, and therein lies the roadblock researchers are trying to overcome. Automated cars are hurtling towards us at breakneck speed, with all-electric Teslas already running limited autopilot systems on roads worldwide and Google trialling its own autonomous pod cars. However, before we can reply to emails while being driven to work, we have to have a foolproof way to determine when drivers can safely take control and when it should be left to the car. 'Even in a limited number of tests, we have found that humans are not always performing as required,' explained Dr Riender Happee, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who is coordinating the EU-funded HFAuto project to examine the problem and potential solutions. 'We are close to concluding that the technology always has to be ready to resolve the situation if the driver doesn't take back control.'

Apple is going to release an "iPhone Edition" as well as its normal 7s and 7s Plus this year, according to a report, potentially making this year's iPhone release the most complicated ever. The company is expected to reveal its 7s and 7s Plus later this year, in keeping with tradition. But much less is known about a special model that might accompany it – the so-called iPhone 8, which will mark the phone's tenth anniversary. Now a new report claims that phone will have a 5-inch screen, be made out of strange new materials and launch later than the two updated models. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Intel is acquiring Mobileye, a company that specializes in chips for vision-based autonomous vehicles. The Marker and Axios first reported the deal, valued at $15.3 billion, and it will see Intel take over some key technology for its ambitions to lead autonomous cars. BMW, Intel, and Mobileye have all partnered to deploy 40 autonomous vehicles for testing on public roads later this year. Intel and Mobileye's technology is to be tested on roads in the US and Europe. Intel's acquisition of Mobileye was officially confirmed this morning, and it will mark a huge investment in self-driving cars for the chip company.

As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, people need to make sure it's not used by authoritarian regimes to centralize power and target certain populations, Microsoft Research's Kate Crawford warned on Sunday. In her SXSW session, titled Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism, Crawford, who studies the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems, explained ways that automated systems and their encoded biases can be misused, particularly when they fall into the wrong hands. "Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism," she said. All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.