In an unjustly dark and dusty corner of YouTube is a badly compiled video slideshow of Alan Rickman in various stages of monochrome moodiness. It has the look of something slapped together late one night by a distracted student who should have been revising and YouTube is hardly the most salubrious home for Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. But Rickman's reading is heavenly – he oozes through it: I found it by following some piece of internet flotsam or other – one of those things you end up doing online when you're almost certainly on deadline. But it came to mind again when the female voice of Siri – the voice control feature on Apple's more recent iPhones – was tracked down recently in the US. It's a woman called Susan Bennett, who has variously voiced a cash machine, phone systems and help messages for Delta Airlines.

The scientist behind Google Glass wearable technology has criticised the use of restrictive and "fear-based" testing regimes in education, describing a lack of innovation in the system as a crisis. Sebastian Thrun, who led the Google research lab responsible for self-driving cars and Google Glass, made the comments ahead of a meeting with education minister Michael Gove. Thrun, who is one of the world's most influential computer scientists, is exploring online collaborative education – known as Moocs, which stands for "massively open online courses". He has developed a project called Udacity, which is working with two colleges and workplace learning schemes. "The education system is based on a framework from the 17th and 18th century that says we should play for the first five years of life, then learn, then work, then rest and then die. I believe we should be able to do all those things all the time," said Thrun.

The United Nations has been warned that its protracted negotiations over the future of lethal autonomous weapons – or "killer robots" – are moving too slowly to stop robot wars becoming a reality. Lobbying for a pre-emptive ban on the weapons is intensifying at the UN general assembly in New York, but a deal may not emerge quickly enough to prevent devices from being deployed, experts say. "There is indeed a danger now that [the process] may get stuck," said Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. "A lot of money is going into development and people will want a return on their investment," he said. "If there is not a pre-emptive ban on the high-level autonomous weapons then once the genie is out of the bottle it will be extremely difficult to get it back in."

Movement towards road vehicle automation has been potentially the most revolutionary development in transportation during 2012. Transport research institutes in many countries and several car manufacturers have reported progress. The pacesetter in driverless technology is Google Inc., working through Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Google has a fleet of more than a dozen what it calls "self-driving cars" that by August, 2012, had completed some 500,000 kilometres of testing. "They've covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn't been a single accident under computer control," explained Google's official blog.

The billionaire entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley have not all been recycling their earnings into Napa Valley vineyards. With publicity commensurate with their wealth and ambitions, such notable visionaries as Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal, the online payments giant owned by eBay) have staked out claims at and beyond the frontier of available technology, from Tesla's all-electric cars to the proto spaceships of SpaceX. This is a moment when the Silicon Valley style and brand – Go Big or Go Home -- has appeal. The recovery from the Great Recession remains frustratingly slow. In response, governments across the developed world have perversely embraced austerity.

It is predicted that driverless cars will prevent the vast majority of crashes and dramatically reduce the cost of insuring a car, according to industry experts. Volvo's chief executive will tell a seminar on driverless cars on Tuesday that autonomous vehicles are the "single most important advance in automotive safety" in years. The Swedish carmaker's boss, Håkan Samuelsson, will cite US government research predicting that driverless cars will lead to an 80% fall in the number of car crashes by 2035. Even when an accident cannot be avoided, the impact speed will also drop due to automatic crash avoidance systems, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The result will be a huge decrease in the cost of car insurance premiums, according to separate research by insurer Swiss Re and the technology group Here. Premiums in the 14 largest car markets in the world are set to drop by $20bn (£13.5bn) by 2020 alone, according to their projections.

In his report, Von Neumann outlined the architecture of a stored-program digital computer, an ancestor of most computers in use today. But the existence of both the computer and Google can be traced to a much earlier date. It was 150 years ago that George Boole published his literary classic The Laws of Thought, wherein he devised a mathematical language for dealing with mental machinations of logic. It was a symbolic language of thought -- an algebra of logic (algebra is the branch of mathematics that uses letters and other general symbols to represent numbers and quantities in formulas and equations). In doing so, he provided the raw material needed for the design of the modern high-speed computer.

Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son's school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple Inc iPhone. "I couldn't believe how accurate it was," said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand. The new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews after its first day of availability and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people. Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom.

As museums worldwide strive to draw in young people, Tate Britain could place itself at the cutting edge with a project for Internet viewers to drive robots around its galleries at weekends, shining lights and cameras on artworks that loom out of the dark. The robot idea is one of four finalists for the new Tate IK Prize. The winning project will become a reality by the summer. "We wanted ways to use technology to increase our audience reach and new ways to connect people with art," said Jane Burton, the Tate's head of creative content. Another finalist proposes reproducing the gallery as a version of the popular Minecraft videogame.

On Saturday at a NASCAR track in Florida, a humanoid robot named SCHAFT, created by a team of engineers from the University of Tokyo, performed a series of emergency tasks including using a hose, drilling a hole into a wall, walking through doors and driving a golf cart. SCHAFT ran away from the competition, with only a robot from DOD-funded Boston Dynamics staying close. These two robots, along with six others from private companies and university labs around the world, performed these tasks under the watchful eye of DARPA, the secretive defense research branch of the U.S. military. DARPA said the purpose of the competition was to begin modeling a robot that could be used on the surface of Mars. But many suspected that DARPA sponsors the competition to advance the use of robots like those on the battlefield.