From the Darmouth Conferences to Turing's test, prophecies about AI have rarely hit the mark. In 1956, a bunch of the top brains in their field thought they could crack the challenge of artificial intelligence over a single hot New England summer. Almost 60 years later, the world is still waiting. The "spectacularly wrong prediction" of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence made Stuart Armstrong, research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at University of Oxford, start to think about why our predictions about AI are so inaccurate. The Dartmouth Conference had predicted that over two summer months ten of the brightest people of their generation would solve some of the key problems faced by AI developers, such as getting machines to use language, form abstract concepts and even improve themselves.

Forget about The Terminator, the real problem with AI (artificial intelligence) is what to do when it meets your boss or even your friends. This is not the pitch for some kind of sci-fi rom-com, but rather the genuine concern of Dr Stuart Armstrong, a research fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. His job is to think about future threats to the human race and how to confront them. AI is in the top five threats to humanity that he lists quickly on the back of his napkin, set against the rather incongruous background of the student chit-chat that fills Oxford's cycling cafe, Zappi's (for the record, the other four are: pandemics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology and nuclear war). While dismissing the blood and guts of Hollywood scenarios, what worries Armstrong -- as he outlines in his upcoming research paper Thinking Inside The Box in the journal Minds and Machines -- is the potential for superintelligent AI to stage a "takeover".

The peak of all this may be the moment at which the inventor Ray Kurzweil asks, "As Machines become more like People, will People become more like God?" The infectiously enthusiastic Kurzweil is the leading proponent of "Strong A.I.," a brave new world in which a "Non-invasive Surgery-Free Reversible Programmable Distributed Brain Implant" will soon become available. In the keynote essay in "Are We Spiritual Machines?" Kurzweil imagines nanobots--hyper-intelligent miniaturized robots--zipping around our brains and downloading our mental software onto new hard drives which will somehow become re-embodied as us. Immortality looms, if "we are sufficiently careful to make frequent back-ups."

The guide was written in German, which Casey cannot read, so she typed bits of it into an Internet translation tool. "It occurs nobody endlschleudern, however, intercatapults" is one result she got. Stumped, she pressed some buttons and eventually managed to wash her clothes, in an elongated wash cycle that kept her pinned down for three hours. Libby's quandary will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to use a computer to translate things. For decades, machine translation was mostly useful if you were trying to be funny.

Chess was supposed to be a bastion of human ingenuity, an art machines would never conquer. The smarter they get, the more threatened we feel. We, too, are getting smarter, and computers are a big reason why. We certainly needed the challenge. Chess computers, in particular, have exposed our complacency.

While working in his native Poland in the 1960s, Dr. Michalski devised an early computer system that could recognize handwriting. After coming to the United States in 1970, he expanded the field of machine learning, creating applications in which computers could execute a form of reasoning, drawing conclusions from information supplied to them. "He was a pioneer in this field," said James S. Trefil, a GMU physicist and writer. Dr. Michalski's specialty of machine learning is similar to but distinct from artificial intelligence. The underlying purpose of much of his work was to use computers to recognize patterns that could ease the decision-making process in seemingly unrelated systems.

Even when our debates seem petty, you can't say national politics doesn't deal with weighty matters, from jobs to inequality to affordable health care and more. But lately I've become obsessed with an issue so daunting it makes even the biggest "normal" questions of public life seem tiny. I'm talking about the risks posed by "runaway" artificial intelligence (AI). What happens when we share the planet with self-aware, self-improving machines that evolve beyond our ability to control or understand? Are we creating machines that are destined to destroy us?

STUDENTS at a Welsh university are to begin preparing for a world shared with intelligent robots. A new degree in robotics will teach students how to apply science fiction in science. The release of the big-screen adaptation of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot has fuelled speculation about whether robots designed as servants could attempt to become our masters. Dr Mike Reddy at the University of Glamorgan is determined to take these questions from the realm of science fiction and explore them in the new BSc Science (Robotics) degree. He said, "Films like I, Robot and Artificial Intelligence have raised issues of how we treat robots, but, more importantly, how they might treat us. There is a great deal of interest and ignorance of what robotics is and will become in the future. "We feel there is a real need for greater understanding of what a world shared with robots should be.

On any other soccer field it might be considered a disaster. The forwards keep getting calls against them. The goalie falls over when the ball isn't even near the net. As for the striker -- well let's just say he won't be rushed when he lines up to kick the ball. It's RoboCup 2013 and what it is championing is robotic technology and artificial intelligence.