With everyone from Google to Elon Musk warning about artificial intelligence or AI, this story is especially timely. A Russian robot learning to promote a company's products and'automatic movement profiles' escaped from its testing grounds in Perm, Russia, near the Ural mountains. The machine made it to a busy intersection, snarled traffic, and the police were called. "The robot was learning automatic movement algorithms on the testing ground, these functions will feature in the latest version of the Promobot." The co-founder of the robot's maker, Oleg Kivokurtsev, told ura.ru news agency.

"Political elections – for better or worse – have become a gameshow. The more social media, the more clickbait headlines … whatever generates a lot of buzz is one way to make our mark in an election," he says. Istvan has attracted countless profiles in the international press, been followed around by two film documentary crews and has secured a TV show once the election is over. It certainly seems to be benefiting Brand Zoltan. Could it all be an elaborate strategy to boost his profile and become a media personality?

One of five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing in mysterious circumstances last year has said he had been detained for more than eight months by Chinese authorities. Lam Wing-kee announced on Thursday that he was arrested in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and that his colleague, Lee Bo, who went missing from Hong Kong in December, had also been abducted. Following months of speculation about the circumstances surrounding the disappearances, Lam called a surprise press conference just two days after being released. Lam said he was taken on a 14-hour train journey to the eastern city of Ningbo following his arrest. There, he was kept in a small room by himself, and repeatedly interrogated about the selling of banned books on the mainland.

DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence (AI) division, certainly thinks there's a risk. They've teamed up with Oxford University to develop a "red button" that would interrupt an AI machine's actions. Their paper "explores a way to make sure a learning agent will not learn to prevent (or seek!) being interrupted by the environment or a human operator."

While we are many years away from an autonomous utopia, where cars pick us up and drive us where we need to go without a human at the wheel, we are seeing the first steps toward self-driving cars. Volvo, Honda, Audi, Tesla--pretty much every auto manufacturer, plus Google and probably Apple--is incorporating advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) into cars we can buy right now. As humans transfer driving tasks to computers, it raises questions for the insurance industry. There will still be crashes on the way to that autonomous utopia, and insurance companies want to know who's going to pay. Volvo, for one, has stepped up to say that when one of its vehicles is in autonomous mode, Volvo is responsible for what happens.

NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND – A new maker of self-driving vehicles burst onto the scene Thursday in partnership with IBM's supercomputer platform Watson, and it is ready to roll right now. Arizona-based startup Local Motors is offering Olli, an electric minibus capable of carrying 12 people. It says the vehicle can be produced to order by 3-D printing. Olli was designed as an on-demand transportation solution that passengers can summon with a mobile app, like Uber rides. And it can be "printed" to specification in "micro factories" in a matter of hours. Olli will be demonstrated in National Harbor, Maryland, over the next few months with additional trials expected in Las Vegas and Miami.

A robot escaped from a science lab and caused a traffic jam in one Russian city, it's reported. Scientists at the Promobot laboratories in Perm had been teaching the machine how to move around independently, but it broke free after an engineer forgot to shut a gate, says the local edition of the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper. The robot found its way to a nearby street, covering a distance of about 50m (164ft), before its battery ran out, the daily says. An eyewitness video posted online shows a vaguely humanoid machine standing in the middle of a busy road, guarded by a traffic policeman. It is then wheeled off by a human, presumably an engineer from the company that developed the robot.

Olli will be exclusive to DC these next few months, but Miami and Las Vegas will get their own in late 2016. Local Motors is also in talks to test the bus in cities outside the US, including Berlin, Copenhagen and Canberra. It's unclear if anyone can get the chance to ride one, since these are merely trial runs, but you can ask local authorities if the EV makes its way to your city. If and when the time comes that driverless public vehicles can legally shuttle passengers, you'll be able to summon an Olli through an app, just like Uber. And if Local Motors' plans pan out, a lot of people around the globe will be using that app: Company co-founder John Rogers envisions building hundreds of micro-factories all over the world that can 3D print an Olli within 10 hours and assemble it one.

A robotic employee will be deployed instead of human council workers to answer customer queries. IPsoft said Amelia, its technology platform, will be deployed to work for Enfield Council in North London. Capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context, applies logic, learns, resolves problems and even senses emotions. IPsoft said Amelia will be deployed to work for Enfield Council in North London. Capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context and even senses emotions.

This is a real laser gun that's marketed to real militaries in our real reality. Drones are smaller, slower, cheaper, and lower-flying targets than most airplanes, which makes them a weird threat to modern militaries. Even when just scouting, and especially if outfitted with explosives, the unmanned aerial vehicles are dangerous enough to warrant their destruction, but cheap enough that it doesn't make sense to use a missile. Enter the laser cannons, like this one on display at the Eurosatory 2016 Land and Airland Defence and Security tradeshow. Made by Germany's Rheinmetall, the Oerlikon Skyshield High Energy Laser is part of a larger system of sensors and weapons.