Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are going to completely change how we live and work but the UK government is totally unprepared, MPs have warned. The Science and Technology Committee released a report on Wednesday warning that the UK government "does not yet have a strategy" for equipping citizens with the skills they need to flourish in a world where AI is more prevalent. It also has no strategy for dealing with the social and ethical dilemmas that AI advances present, according to the report. Acting chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Dr Tania Mathias MP, said in a statement: "Artificial intelligence has some way to go before we see systems and robots as portrayed in the creative arts such as Star Wars. At present, 'AI machines' have narrow and specific roles, such as in voice-recognition or playing the board game'Go'. "But science fiction is slowly becoming science fact, and robotics and AI look destined to play an increasing role in our lives over the coming decades.

A sensor due for launch early next year allows small drones to sense and avoid obstacles with the aid of quantum film. The drone revolution could see fleets of uncrewed aerial vehicles crisscrossing cities delivering pizza, cleaning windows and inspecting infrastructure. But this will only be possible if they can avoid trees, buildings and other hazards autonomously while flying at speed. InVisage Technologies of Menlo Park, California, has built a low-cost sensor that can rapidly detect obstacles up to 20 metres away, using a technique called structured light. The SML-20 projects laser dots that are distorted by any object they strike, allowing the sensor to infer the location and distance of obstacles ahead.

This system, created by a team at St. Andrews University in Scotland, uses radar technology and Google's Project Soli to identify a wide variety of items. In the future, when you come across a strange thing or material, all you'll need to do is give it a scan before promptly receiving an answer.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode. I've been familiar with Siri longer than most people. Way back in 2009 -- two years before Apple incorporated the intelligent digital assistant into the iPhone -- I stood onstage with the inventors of the service while they debuted it at a tech conference I co-produced. At the time, it was just a third-party app on the iPhone App Store. Not long thereafter, Apple bought the company, and the assistant reemerged in 2011 with a splashy introduction as a core feature of the iPhone 4s.

A new kind of computer, devised by researchers at Google DeepMind in the U.K., could broaden the abilities of today's best AI systems by giving them an important new feature--a kind of working memory. The researchers show that the computer, which consists of a large neural network connected to a unique form of memory, can perform relatively complex tasks by figuring out for itself what information to hold in its memory. The tasks include figuring out the best way to get from one station to another on London's spaghetti-like Underground transit network, after exploring diagrams of other types of networks and learning about the most salient features. The Google DeepMind researchers call their system a differentiable neural computer. It is differentiable in the sense that its behavior--including what to store in memory--can be learned using the mathematical process, called backpropagation, that underlies the working of neural networks.

An artificial intelligence algorithm has been developed by Google's DeepMind that is capable of working out the most efficient way of getting from one point to another on London's Tube network. The system, known as a differentiable neural computer (DNC), is able to combine basic reasoning with memory in a unique way to solve such problems. "Like a conventional computer, it can use its memory to represent and manipulate complex data structures, but, like a neural network, it can learn to do so from the data," states a paper that details the DNC in the journal Nature. "We show that it can learn tasks, such as finding the shortest path between specified points and inferring the missing links in randomly generated graphs, and then generalize these tasks to specific graphs, such as transport networks and family trees." Google's DeepMind gained international media attention earlier this year after it developed the first machine capable of beating a human world champion at the board game Go.

PlayStations are no longer things that sit underneath your TV. Now they get strapped to your face. Sony has released the PlayStation VR, a special headset that represents its first foray into virtual reality gaming. And it might represent many other people's first try with it, too, since it is much cheaper than competing headsets and doesn't require a huge computer system. The PS VR plugs into existing PlayStation 4 consoles with a series of wires.

Alexander the friendly robot visits the Indoor Park to interact with children by telling classic fairy tales, singing and dancing at Westfield London on August 10, 2016 in London, England. For most, Artificial intelligence (AI) – loosely defined as the ability of machines to mimic human intelligence – feels like a known entity borne out of sci-fi and pop culture. However the reality of AI the burgeoning startup sector growing around it is perhaps far more exciting than anything ever dreamed up in Hollywood. AI is a diverse field, mostly dominated by efforts in machine learning that use algorithm frameworks to gather unprecedented amounts of actionable information. Within that field is the subfield of deep learning, which might borrow from fields like computer vision and image recognition to analyze data (text, images, video, speech, music, etc.) in order to properly identify something. Think about a computer seeing millions of pictures of a dog.

There's no question that technology is drastically changing the way we work, but what will the job market look like by 2050? Will 40% of roles have been lost to automation – as predicted by Oxford university economists Dr Carl Frey and Dr Michael Osborne – or will there still be jobs even if the nature of work is exceptionally different from today? To address these issues, the Guardian hosted a roundtable discussion, in association with professional services firm Deloitte, which brought together academics, authors and IT business experts. The future of work will soon become "the survival of the most adaptable", says Paul Mason, emerging technologies director for Innovate UK. As new technologies fundamentally change the way we work, the jobs that remain will be multifaceted and changeable. "Workers of the future will need to be highly adaptable and juggle three or more different roles at a time," says Anand Chopra-McGowan, head of enterprise new markets for General Assembly.

You could call it a demonstration of the proliferation of drone use with frightening possibilities. Last week's attack in northern Iraq in which a small drone exploded killing two Peshmerga fighters and badly wounding two members of the French special forces, marks something of an innovation in modern warfare. The US launched the first armed drone attack back in October 2001. Since then the use of armed drones has been the preserve of the most sophisticated military actors in the world. Israel and the US had the early technological lead with Russia and China rapidly developing their own drone industries.