The odds that artificial intelligence will enslave or eliminate humankind within the next decade or so are thankfully slim. So concludes a major report from Stanford University on the social and economic implications of artificial intelligence. At the same time, however, the report concludes that AI looks certain to upend huge aspects of everyday life, from employment and education to transportation and entertainment. The analysis is significant because the public alarm over the impact of AI threatens to shape public policy and corporate decisions. It predicts that automated trucks, flying vehicles, and personal robots will be commonplace by 2030, but cautions that remaining technical obstacles will limit such technologies to certain niches.

Apple's Siri upgrades will let you dictate LinkedIn messages, verbally search for shoe photos on Pinterest, and hail an Uber, hands-free. When Apple unveils its new iPhone Wednesday, it's expected to push hard on software improvements available for its next mobile operating system, iOS 10, available for current iPhones and a predicted new iPhone model. The iPhone's voice-activated digital assistant Siri will be a key part of this upgrade, say tech analysts and developers. Siri, primarily used for voice commands to dial phone numbers, set reminders and get traffic information, has been opened to third-party developers after five years of existence. "This is such a huge leap," says Sagi Dudai, vice-president of mobile development for voice over internet protocol company Vonage.

Isaac Asimov publishes Pebble in the Sky, his first science-fiction novel. And Earth enters a brand new epoch – according to some geologists. Now the idea of the Anthropocene – the period in which human activity profoundly shapes the environment – has taken an important step closer to general acceptance. A working group of scientists has been mulling over the subject for seven years. This week 30 of its 35 members recommended adding the Anthropocene to our standard geological timescale. The ultimate decision rests with the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

SOMEWHERE in California, Google is building a device that will usher in a new era for computing. It's a quantum computer, the largest ever made, designed to prove once and for all that machines exploiting exotic physics can outperform the world's top supercomputers. And New Scientist has learned it could be ready sooner than anyone expected – perhaps even by the end of next year. The quantum computing revolution has been a long time coming. In the 1980s, theorists realised that a computer based on quantum mechanics had the potential to vastly outperform ordinary, or classical, computers at certain tasks.

Investigating the deepest regions of a person's brain is no easy task. Tiny robots crawling through it could help. It's a tantalising idea, but one problem is how to direct such nanobots on their travels. One way to do this would be to program them to search like bats hunting for prey, says a team who have created a computer simulation of this, and hope to trial their method in people in a couple of years. Engineers around the world are working on various designs of nanobot, particularly ones that could release medicines inside the body.

Amazon lures away eBay's artificial intelligence chief Amazon poaches eBay A.I. chief, continues ramping up machine learning operations See The Eerie Sci-Fi Movie Trailer Made By IBM's Artificial Intelligence Now's the time to submit your talks for the AI Summit at GDC 2017

The Seattle tech titan hired eBay's head of artificial intelligence, Hassan Sawaf, to lead its own A.I. operation in Palo Alto, Calif. Sawaf is now Director of Artificial Intelligence at Amazon-owned A9 Labs, the Wall Street Journal reports. Poaching Sawaf from rival eBay is the latest in a series of moves this week that indicate Amazon is doubling down on A.I. The company just acquired a machine learning team in Cambridge, UK and used some of the 100 million Amazon Alexa fund to invest in natural language processing startup DefinedCrowd. In 2012, Jeff Bezos provided 2 million to fund machine learning professorships for Turi CEO Carlos Guestrin and his wife, Emily Fox at the University of Washington.

A typical nightmare scenario goes something like this: Robots first replace autoworkers on the assembly line. Then they move into white-collar jobs, writing articles, drafting legal documents and reading X-rays. Finally, the robots, growing ever smarter through machine learning and Big Data, displace even the most highly trained workers. Another scenario: Robots become so intelligent that they not only can beat people in chess and on Jeopardy!, but they also think faster, better and more analytically than any of us. Milind Tambe thinks these dystopian visions, so popular these days, miss the mark.

Google's DeepMind is aiming to help cut the time spent identifying key areas to treat, and avoid, in radiotherapy. Google's DeepMind is partnering with the UK's NHS to explore how machine learning could help doctors treat head and neck cancers. DeepMind, the Google subsidiary that beat a human contestant in the notoriously complex game of Go and is helping cut Google's datacenter costs, will be conducting cancer treatment research at the Radiotherapy Department at University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust. While privacy and regulation will slow the pace of adoption, AI will bring some profound changes to healthcare. As the AI-research unit notes in a blog post, radiotherapy involving sensitive parts of the body, such as the mouth and sinuses, requires careful planning prior to treatment to avoid damaging key nerves and organs.

Amazon lures away eBay's artificial intelligence chief Amazon poaches eBay A.I. chief, continues ramping up machine learning operations See The Eerie Sci-Fi Movie Trailer Made By IBM's Artificial Intelligence Now's the time to submit your talks for the AI Summit at GDC 2017