Amid all the buzz about vehicles that drive themselves, there are serious ethical questions facing regulators, manufacturers and the people who will ride in them. If faced with an unavoidable fatal crash, would the car be programmed to save its occupants at all costs or would it sacrifice its passengers for the greater good of saving a group of pedestrians? "There's this trade-off between the interests of the driver, or rather the passenger who buys the car, and the level of public acceptance versus public outrage," says Azim Shariff of the Culture and Morality Lab at the University of Oregon. Along with researchers from France and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shariff set out to test public attitudes on the cold, hard decisions computer programs will have to make when lives are on the line. Azim Shariff, researcher at the Culture and Morality Lab at the University of Oregon, says some ethical questions should be answered before driverless cars fill the streets.

The origins of robotics go back to the automata invented by ancient civilisations. The word robot entered our vocabulary only in 1920 with Czech writer Karel Čapek's play R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots). Over the past 20 years robots have been developed to work in settings that range from manufacturing industry to space. At Cambridge University, robotics is a rapidly developing field within many departments, from theoretical physics and computing to engineering and medical science. Lord Martin Rees is Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal.

The government has released a report highlighting some of the benefits and challenges that are likely to come about as a result of advances in artificial intelligence being made by companies like Google, DeepMind, and Facebook. Written by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Mark Walport and published on Thursday, the report provides an overview of where we're at with AI before going on to highlight how it has the potential to fuel innovation and improve government services. The report -- titled "Artificial intelligence: opportunities and implications for the future of decision making" -- also looks at how government should "manage and mitigate" any negative effects that may be brought about as a result of AI. "It is important to recognise that, alongside the huge benefits that artificial intelligence offers, there are potential ethical issues associated with some uses," Walport writes. "Many experts feel that government has a role to play in managing and mitigating any risks that might arise." Walport also wants to open up the conversation on AI to ensure that scientists in the field gain public trust. "Public trust is a vital condition for artificial intelligence to be used productively," he writes.

ManpowerGroup, one of the world's largest jobs companies, released a report detailing how the technological revolution is going to change the employment market forever. The company released the report, entitled "The Skills Revolution," on conjunction with the World Economic Forum's meeting of the most powerful political and business leaders across the globe in Davos, Switzerland. It surveyed more than 18,000 employers across 43 countries and six industry sectors. While technological developments will cause greater automation, a decrease in headcount or slow growth in hiring in some areas, it will actually create a lot of jobs too, according to Manpower. But the key to this is to make sure the world's workforce "upskills" to be qualified enough to take on new positions.

In one of Böhlen's projects, a robot cohabitated with two chickens, who were unperturbed by its presence. One of them is conceptual artist Marc Böhlen, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study. His medium is not oil or bronze, but robotics and site-specific data, and his practice combines the structured approach of scientific investigation with artistic intuition, spiced with a deliberate and effective dash of good or bad taste. Böhlen considers the media arts in the context of the history of automation technologies. They were invented with the hope of improving everyday life, he notes, and in some ways they have.

Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT professor and a pioneer in artificial intelligence whose famed computer program Eliza seemed to converse with humans in 1964, spent the rest of his life speaking out against substituting machines for human decision-making. "He was a critic of society and science and a true humanist who really touched people," said Peter Haas, a Vienna-based filmmaker who made the 2007 documentary "Weizenbaum. Mr. Weizenbaum, whose parents fled Nazi Germany when he was a boy, died March 5 in Groben, Germany, from cancer. One of his four daughters, Sharon Weizenbaum, recalled playing with the Eliza program in her father's study at her childhood home in Concord. "Eliza was something that was fun to fool around with," she said.

The Search For Artificial Intelligence In the pale light of a laboratory, a white humanoid quietly contemplates a series of objects. A toy car is held up. "Toy car," the robot says, with barely a pause. For decades, the concept of a machine that could not only recognise objects, but could also be taught to learn the shapes and distinctive features of new ones, was the preserve of SF writers like Isaac Asimov. But in 2005, fiction became a reality when Japanese scientists created Asimo (an acronym which stands for Advanced Step in Innovative MObility), a plastic-shelled humanoid standing some four feet tall and capable of recognising objects, faces, hand gestures and speech.

This report summarises views expressed in the second of three BCS Thought Leadership Debates run in association with the UK Office of Science and Technology as part of the Cognitive Systems Programme of the UK Foresight Programme, which explores areas for advanced research. The event was on 25 November 2004 at the Institute of Directors in London. Two expert speakers stimulated debate with short talks and then the 30 participants discussed the topic in small groups over dinner. The participants were mainly senior computer scientists and neuroscientists from UK universities, with others from specialist companies and research organisations. After dinner each table reported back to the entire gathering.

The future of AI is here and it's cognitive. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, professor at the University of California and vice president of the Fair Isaac Corporation, has discovered the universal mechanism of animal cognition and is now developing automated conversational customer service systems with human-level capabilities for use in a variety of industries. He believes his work may revolutionise the study of neuroscience and change the direction of AI research. Justin Richards, BCS, caught up with him to find out more. Please can you provide a brief overview of what you've been doing since your college years to the present day? Well since I'm old that wouldn't be very brief at all, so I'll summarise if possible! The fact is that since 1968 my passion has been understanding how cognition works and this is something I got into as a mathematics student, so I've always been leaning in the direction of trying to understand these things from underlying mathematical principles as implemented by neural tissue. Now as you know neurons are very difficult to study because the brain is a three dimensional structure and you can't even get at a neuron without destroying the tissue between you and it. Another problem is being able to witness the behaviour of neurons during normal behaviour is extraordinarily difficult. Even though centuries of study have gone on there's still very limited capability to do that. And if you can do it you can only do it for brief periods under extraordinarily tense conditions and you're never quite sure what you're seeing. So this is an important place where theory plays an important role because there is no theory that is definitive, so without a theory to tie it all together it's not very easy to make progress. Basically, I've been focused on building a theory, of course informed by the large number of microscopic facts that exist. So we know a great deal about the brain, and being able to appreciate and understand what is known, that's a process that takes decades in itself. And then being able to use that understanding to craft theories is a further difficulty. Anyway, I've been through all of that and have been working on this.

Karen Spärck Jones is winner of the 2007 BCS Lovelace Medal. BCS managing editor Brian Runciman interviewed her. This interview also appears in the ebook Leaders in Computing. By way of introduction, can you tell us something about your work? In some respects I'm not a central computing person, on the other hand the area I've worked in has become more central and important to computing. I've always worked in what I like to call natural language information processing. That is to say dealing with information in natural language and information that is conveyed by natural language, because that's what we use. I think that what has been happening is that those kind of things that were initially thought of as external applications, rather like accounting packages, are becoming more central and not just because more people are using browsers and search engines, but because the information itself they are working with is becoming much more central to what people do.