Tim Peake is set to control a robot rover while orbiting the Earth from space in a pioneering experiment at midday BST (7am ET) today. The British astronaut will remotely navigate the explorer through a simulated Martian landscape from the International Space Station today. The experiment, part of the ExoMars project, will take place in a hangar at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage. The British astronaut (pictured) will remotely navigate the'Bridget' explorer through a simulated Martian landscape from the International Space Station today. Major Peake tweeted yesterday: 'Looking forward to giving rover Bridget in Stevenage, UK, a test-drive from space.' Building on previous test and experiment campaigns, the European Space Agency, UK Space Agency and Airbus Defence and Space UK are working together to investigate distributed control of robots in a simulated planetary environment.

The Dial is being touted as a "voice-first" device with its own virtual assistant, called AneedA. Like Siri, Cortana and Alexa, the idea is that you can ask for information and execute tasks while your hands are full. How AneedA compares to those alternatives is, for now, a mystery. Three says it has the ability "to learn and tailor responses to each consumer" and "make traditional mobile search irrelevant." Big claims, which we're skeptical of given the performance of its previous wearable, the Puls.

BT is about to hike prices for millions of households, and other companies are likely to follow. Prices across its broadband, phone and TV packages will be hiked up from this summer, the company has announced. It has put up costs substantially in recent years, and each hike has usually been followed by a similar move from its rivals. Landline charges will go up by £1, it said, rising 5.5 per cent to almost £19. The most popular call package will also have its price increased by about 7 per cent.

If you're looking to add artificial intelligence to a hardware project for doing things like sensing objects in an enviroment or understand voice commands, Movidius' new Fathom USB stick might be just the thing. The company is known for its Myriad 2 deep learning chip that allows DJI drones to avoid obstacles. The Fathom is essentially a portable version of the chip that can be plugged into the USB 3.0 port of Linux-based devices to run fully-trained neural networks while consuming very little power. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! It's compatible with Caffe and TensorFlow frameworks and is capable of 150 gigaFLOPS (150 billion floating-operations per second). That means developers can use it to do things like enable robots to understand natural human speech and recognize faces, and teach drones to navigate indoors and outdoors by themselves – all without the need to connect to the cloud.

Last December, Tesla CEO Elon Musk teamed up with Y Combinator president Sam Altman and former Google Brain Team scientist Ilya Sutskever to launch OpenAI, a 1 billion non-profit organization dedicated to furthering our understanding of artificial intelligence with a promise to share its research openly with the world. Today, it's taken its first step in that direction by launching a free toolkit for developers to build and train their own AI bots with games and algorithmic challenges. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. The OpenAI Gym, currently in beta, includes environments to simulate situations for your AI to learn from, as well as a site to compare and reproduce results. The tools are designed for use with Reinforcement Learning (RL), one of the technologies used to develop Google's AlphaGo AI that defeated Go world champion Lee Se-Dol recently. RL works on the principle that a bot will receive a reward every time it completes an action successfully – similar to how you might train a dog.

French officials have unveiled a humanoid diving robot that they hope will give a big artificial hand to the practice of underwater archaeology. Ocean One, which looks like something out of a scuba-diving sequel to "Transformers," is the work of a team of roboticists, including Oussama Khatib of Stanford University. It is intended to help researchers explore underwater archaeological sites that are too deep to be explored by human divers. It was unveiled by culture officials Thursday in the French city of Marseille after a trial sifting through the wreckage of "The Moon," a 17th century warship, where it had managed to collect a delicate ceramic pot and bring it back to the surface. According to Stanford, the concept for Ocean One was born from the need to study coral reefs deep in the Red Sea, far below the comfortable range of human divers.

Scientific determinism as first published by Laplace in 1814 is an important and essential principle in the macro-world around us. We know that if we push something, it will move -- unless our impulse was not sufficient to overcome inertia… and so forth. Laplace postulated that if there were an omniscient daemon who knew the precise positions and impulses of each and every particle in a system, this daemon would be able to deterministically calculate each and every future state of this system. Our beloved spreadsheet calculations resemble this daemon (possibly in more than one connotation). Typing in some basic data to start calculations from, the wonderous spreadsheet software will automagically calulate everything depending on them, eventually deriving the results we wanted to obtain.

If you're looking to add artificial intelligence to a hardware project for doing things like sensing objects in an enviroment or understand voice commands, Movidius' new Fathom USB stick might be just the thing. The company is known for its Myriad 2 deep learning chip that allows DJI drones to avoid obstacles. The Fathom is essentially a portable version of the chip that can be plugged into the USB 3.0 port of Linux-based devices to run fully-trained neural networks while consuming very little power. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. It's compatible with Caffe and TensorFlow frameworks and is capable of 150 gigaFLOPS (150 billion floating-operations per second). That means developers can use it to do things like enable robots to understand natural human speech and recognize faces, and teach drones to navigate indoors and outdoors by themselves – all without the need to connect to the cloud.

With A.I. it's sometimes easy to get ahead of ourselves. Yes, it's true, "computers are going to take over from humans, no question" (Steve Wozniak), and while it is also probably true that soon enough we will all be made into paperclips by a super-intelligent machine that lacks human values, we still have some time. Despite his apocalyptic paperclip predictions (slightly taken out of context) Nick Bostrom would still "assign less than a 50% probability to super-intelligence being developed by 2033". It turns out that A.I. is still hard. Take Microsoft's Tay for example, an A.I. chat bot built to speak'like a teen girl' and be a virtual friend on social media.

A couple of months ago I was at a London insurance market meeting. It was mostly attended by brokers and underwriters and the subject was the London TOM. During a roundtable discussion I mentioned an article I'd just written about big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. I said as much as 80% of insurance underwriting will be automated before long. Sitting opposite me was a London market broker. "Nothing writes business faster than a Mont Blanc pen!" Now, I'm not trying to make fun at his expense. How could he know any different, he wasn't a subscriber to The Digital Insurer at the time (although he is now!). In the specialist insurance market of London, this mind set may have held the market in good stead since the days of the quill pen.