This summer, Facebook will present a paper at a computer vision conference revealing how it has created a tool almost as accurate as the human brain when it comes to saying whether two photographs show the same person – regardless of changes in lighting and camera angles. A human being will get the answer correct 97.53% of the time; Facebook's new technology scores an impressive 97.25%. "We closely approach human performance," says Yaniv Taigman, a member of its AI team. Since the ability to recognise faces has long been a benchmark for artificial intelligence, developments such as Facebook's "DeepFace" technology (yes, that's what it called it) raise big questions about the power of today's facial recognition tools and what these mean for the future. Facebook is not the only tech company interested in facial recognition.

The first London Technology Week drew together a cast of characters and ideas as varied and unpredictable as the sector they represent. From driverless cars to the ironic revelation that the capital's broadband network is sub-par, there was much to glean from five days of visionary thinking. Kit Malthouse, London's deputy mayor for business and enterprise, is no fan of tech giant Oracle. Malthouse told a tech week meeting that his top priority was to "take Oracle down", to much laughter in the room. Boris Johnson's sidekick later revealed that his issue with the company was its unwillingness to give a discount to the Greater London authority during austerity-driven budget cuts in 2010.

On 24 August 1965 Gloria Placente, a 34-year-old resident of Queens, New York, was driving to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Clad in shorts and sunglasses, the housewife was looking forward to quiet time at the beach. But the moment she crossed the Willis Avenue bridge in her Chevrolet Corvair, Placente was surrounded by a dozen patrolmen. There were also 125 reporters, eager to witness the launch of New York police department's Operation Corral – an acronym for Computer Oriented Retrieval of Auto Larcenists. Fifteen months earlier, Placente had driven through a red light and neglected to answer the summons, an offence that Corral was going to punish with a heavy dose of techno-Kafkaesque. It worked as follows: a police car stationed at one end of the bridge radioed the licence plates of oncoming cars to a teletypist miles away, who fed them to a Univac 490 computer, an expensive $500,000 toy ($3.5m in today's dollars) on loan from the Sperry Rand Corporation. The computer checked the numbers against a database of 110,000 cars that were either stolen or belonged to known offenders. In case of a match the teletypist would alert a second patrol car at the bridge's other exit. It took, on average, just seven seconds. Compared with the impressive police gear of today – automatic number plate recognition, CCTV cameras, GPS trackers – Operation Corral looks quaint.

Loredana Paglialonga leans across her father's prone body and whispers in his ear: "Spinta, Papi, spinta" ("Push Daddy, push"). It is impossible to tell whether Anselmo Paglialonga, a former major in the Italian carabinieri, has heard. Paralysed from head to toe with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Anselmo is completely "locked in". Unable to speak or open his eyes, his only hope of communicating is via a state-of-the-art neuroheadset attached to his scalp. Designed by Emotiv Systems, a Californian neuroengineering company, the Epoc headset purports to give users the power to control objects with their thoughts and was a succès fou on Kickstarter, where users stumped up $1.6m to fund its development – 16 times Emotiv's original target. Indeed right now, I am told, the 14 marble-sized electrodes in the Epoc's plastic clip-on frame are monitoring the EEG signals from Anselmo's brain and sending them wirelessly to a control unit. By analysing those signals using a machine-learning algorithm, BrainControl, a Sienna-based developer, claims to be able to distinguish Anselmo's thoughts and intentions from other brain noise and use those signals to operate a cursor on a tablet computer.

The Moto X was Google's vision for the future of mobile technology. Billed as the world's first artificially intelligent phone, its permanent listening mode enabled it to serve up directions or give weather forecasts in response to spoken commands. That was until the search giant called an end to the adventure with the $2.9bn (£1.8bn) sale of Motorola to rising Chinese star Lenovo on Wednesday, a move that will free its engineers to focus on other revolutionary technologies. Google's recent acquisitions – from robot maker Boston Dynamics to a London company that aims to make computers think like humans – show how its ambitions stretch far beyond the smartphone. After all, mobile phones are now a low-margin, high-volume manufacturing business, which makes them a better fit for Lenovo than Google.

It's hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione? With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive "long enough" to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he's 66 and he believes that "some of the baby-boomers will make it through"). Or with the fact that he's predicted that in 15 years' time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do.

Sir James Dyson is taking on the might of Google by investing £5m in a British university to develop a new generation of "intelligent domestic robots". His company, best known for its vacuum cleaners, is putting the money into a laboratory at Imperial College London, which has begun hiring up to 15 scientists who will work on developing robot vision systems that could be used in devices such as robot-controlled vacuums – a longstanding ambition of Dyson himself. The inventor said the plan was to create "practical everyday technologies that will make our lives easier". The move could put Dyson into a position where it is directly challenging Google, which has recently acquired eight robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics, which has made self-controlling robots for the US military. In January it spent £400m acquiring DeepMind Technologies, a London-based startup focusing on artificial intelligence.

Players of the video game Halo will be familiar with Cortana, an artificial intelligence character. Now it's arriving on Microsoft's Windows Phone smartphone as a virtual assistant to take on Apple's Siri and Google Now. The move is one of a number unveiled by Microsoft at its annual Build conference in San Francisco on Wednesday as it seeks to gain traction in a highly competitive and lucrative market for smartphones. The most dramatic for handset makers - though not initially users - is that Microsoft will make both Windows Phone and Windows licences free for use on devices with screens smaller than 9in diagonally. That has been seen as an acknowledgement that the huge success of Google's free Android mobile OS, which dominates worldwide smartphone sales, has made it impossible for Microsoft to charge for software on those devices.

Marking Google's 15th birthday, Hummingbird is the biggest change to the inner workings of the world's most popular search engine since Google's "Caffeine" update in 2010, which sped up Google's indexing of sites and delivery of search results. The Hummingbird update focuses more on Google's Knowledge Graph – an encyclopaedia of about 570m concepts and relationships that allows Google to anticipate facts and figures you might want to know about your search term. Hummingbird isn't an overhaul that Google search users will instantly notice, however. "In general, Hummingbird – Google says – is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organised in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of 10 years ago, with the technologies back then," said Danny Sullivan of the search blog Search Engine Land. It will benefit those using more modern forms of search, such as conversational or voice search, where you ask Google a question rather than typing keywords into the search box.

One of the UK's most congested highways, connecting the busy container port at Felixstowe to Birmingham, is to become Britain's first internet-connected road in a pilot project that could pave the way for everything from tolls to self-driving cars. A network of sensors will be placed along a 50-mile stretch of the A14 in a collaboration between BT, the Department for Transport and the Cambridge start-up Neul, creating a smart road which can monitor traffic by sending signals to and from mobile phones in moving vehicles. The technology, which sends signals over the white spaces between television channels instead of mobile phone networks, could even pave the way for government systems to automatically control car speeds. The telecoms watchdog Ofcom, which on Wednesday approved the project as part of its new blueprint for how Britain will use spectrum, is already forecasting what high technology traffic systems will look like. "Sensors in cars and on the roads monitor the build-up of congestions and wirelessly send this information to a central traffic control system, which automatically imposes variable speed limits that smooth the flow of traffic," Ofcom said.