Using humanoid robots to study human behavior.

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, first codified in his 1942 short story "Runaround" (http://bit.ly/1AAkKhW), Robots were never to harm humans, or by inaction allow them to come to harm. Within months of the elucidation of these laws, however, an extremely primitive robot, the Norden bombsight, was being put to lethal use by the U.S. Army Air Corps. The bombsight combined a computer that calculated various factors affecting an aircraft's arrival over a target with an autopilot. Touted for its accuracy from high altitude, the Norden nevertheless tended to miss the aim point by an average of a quarter-mile.

In an update to the Turing Test, mobile phone game Angry Birds is being used as a test of artificial intelligence. The game by Finnish software house Rovio, where users squash green pigs to save their eggs, has been selected as a test of a computer program's ability to mimic the human mind. Developers have been challenged to create a program that is able to play the game as part of a global competition run by the Australian National University's Artificial Intelligence Group. The Angry Birds AI challenge has been thrown open to developers worldwide in this year's championship. Developers have until August this year to create intelligent agents that can rival a human's ability to play the popular game.

In his new book, Who Owns The Future?, computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, argues that as technology has become more advanced, so too has our dependency on information tools. Lanier believes that if we continue on our present path, where we think of computers as passive tools, instead of machines that real people create, our myopia will result in less understanding of both computers and human beings, which could cause the demise of democracy, mass unemployment, the erosion of the middle class, and social chaos. Lanier encourages human beings to take back control of their own economic destiny by creating a society that values the work of all industries, and not just those with the fastest networks. By monetizing information, he foresees a more egalitarian society, which can still adhere to the principles of free market capitalism. What will the future economy look like if technology keeps advancing the way it does and we do nothing?

Established in January 2009, The Oxford Centre for Neuroethics (hosted by the Uehiro Centre) aims to address concerns about the effects neuroscience and neurotechnologies will have on various aspects of human life. Its research focuses on five key areas: cognitive enhancement; borderline consciousness and severe neurological impairment; free will, responsibility and addiction; the neuroscience of morality and decision making; applied neuroethics. Science and Religious Conflict: The past decade has seen an explosion in empirical work on moral reasoning. We are coming to understand how people's moral judgments are shaped by interactions with others in their society. There are good reasons for thinking that people's moral judgements are mostly intuitive (recent empirical work by Jonathan Haidt and his collaborators supports this view) and that people's intuitions are powerfully shaped by the institutions around them, including religious institutions.

Dawson, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in California, said he happened by chance upon the discovery that voice recognition could be applied to seismic data. A visiting researcher from Spain who specialized in voice recognition needed a desk and the USGS just happened to have a spare that she could use. Dawson and Carmen Benítez got to talking one day and decided to apply her skills to decoding data collected from the Norris Geyser Basin.

Since the dawn of the space age, unmanned spacecraft have flown blind with little or no ability to make autonomous decisions based on the content of the data they collect. The Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE) is operating onboard the Earth Observing-1 mission since 2003. The ASE software uses onboard continuous planning, robust task and goal-based execution, and onboard machine learning and pattern recognition to radically increase science return by enabling intelligent downlink selection and autonomous retargeting. This software demonstrates the potential for space missions to use onboard decision-making to detect, analyze, and respond to science events, and to downlink only the highest value science data. The onboard science algorithms analyzes the images to extract static features and detect changes relative to previous observations.

Hugo Liu and Push Singh.

As Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader pulled out their light sabers for a deadly battle 30 years ago today, "Stars Wars" movie-goers asked themselves one thing: Where can I get one of those? The iconic movie series prompted young children to tote R2D2 lunch boxes and teenage boys to fall in love with side hair buns and gold bikinis. But in 1977, the groundbreaking fan favorite did more than just secure its place in Americana -- it also captured the hearts and minds of scientists of the '70s and a few younger, budding lab rats waiting in the wings. "I think the influence is huge," Michio Kaku, one of the world's most prominent physicists and the co-founder of string field theory, told ABCNEWS.com. "Many people don't realize that science fiction has been an inspiration for the world's leading scientists."

Evolving technologies should develop at a steady enough pace to adequately replace the jobs they eliminate, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC on Tuesday. "Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too. That's what we call productivity," Benioff said on "Squawk Box" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "I think a lot of people don't understand how deep AI already is in so many things," he said, one being Salesforce's newly updated Einstein product, which Benioff said is not yet available to clients but can tell the company whether it will make or miss earnings estimates using artificial intelligence. What business leaders at the WEF have been calling the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" is at the center of a global transformation in the technology space, as artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing gain traction, he said.