Robots are coming for our jobs. These doom-laden predictions probably sound familiar to anyone who's read or seen any movies lately involving artificial intelligence. Sometimes they're invoked with genuine alarm, as in the case of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warning against the danger of killer automatons. Other times, the anxiety comes across as a kind of detached, ironic humor masking the true depths of our dread, as if tweeting nervous jokes about #Skynet will somehow forestall its rise. AI raises unsettling questions about our place in the economy and society; even if by some miracle 99 percent of employers agree not to use robots to automate labor, that still leaves many hardworking people potentially in the lurch.

Google has launched a project to use artificial intelligence to create compelling art and music, offering a reminder of how technology is rapidly changing what it means to be a musician, and what makes us distinctly human. Google's Project Magenta, announced this month, aims to push the state of the art in machine intelligence that's used to generate music and art. "We don't know what artists and musicians will do with these new tools, but we're excited to find out," said Douglas Eck, the project's leader in a blog post. "Daguerre and later Eastman didn't imagine what Annie Liebovitz or Richard Avalon would accomplish in photography. Surely Rickenbacker and Gibson didn't have Jimi Hendrix or St Vincent in mind." Google has already released a song demonstrating the technology.

The unusual shelter has been set up at the V&A Museum in London as part of a new "Engineering Season" that runs until November. It was created by a group from the University of Stuttgart in Germany: Achim Menges, an experimental architect and professor; Jans Knipper, a structural engineer and professor; Moritz Dorstelmann, a research associate and doctoral candidate at the university; and Thomas Auer, a climate engineer. It's called the Elytra Filament Pavilion, and it takes inspiration from the hardened "elytra" wings used by flying beetles. While they're shooting through the air, these insects raise their forewings into a flat, open position, revealing a pair of softer and more powerful sails underneath. "The shell of the flying beetle is a very light structure, because, well, the beetle has to fly," Knipper says.

A woman from Cairns, Australia, used Siri to call an ambulance for her one-year-old daughter when she stopped breathing. Stacey Gleeson grabbed her iPhone and ran to the child's room to help her but dropped it as she turned on the light. She shouted at the handset to activate Siri and told it to get the emergency services on speakerphone as she began CPR. Ms Gleeson told the BBC she feels it may have saved her daughter's life. She instructed Siri to call an ambulance on speakerphone and was able to communicate with the emergency services while resuscitating Giana.

About a year ago, when I was hanging out at a bar after work, talking about dating--the swipes, the winks, awkward IRL meetups, and, in my case, a message from a swinger who wanted me to help him with a woodworking project in his garage while his kids were at school--a friend brought up a new site called the League. "There's a wait list," she said. "I want to get on it." The League, for the uninitiated, is the ivy-covered country club of dating apps, designed for people who are "too popular as it is." There's a rigorous screening process--"We do all that dirty work for you"--that takes into account where your diplomas come from, the prestige of your titles, and, crucially, your influence on social media.

In the cosmic scale of things, black holes are a dime a dozen. Despite this, and despite what Christopher Nolan's sci-fi blockbuster "Interstellar" would have you believe, we humans have never actually seen one with our eyes. A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's artificial intelligence laboratory and the Harvard University revealed Monday that they had developed an algorithm that may allow us to actually "see" black holes. "We would never be able to see into the center of our galaxy in visible wavelengths because there's too much stuff in between," Katie Bouman, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the new algorithm, said in a statement. "A black hole is very, very far away and very compact. To image something this small means that we would need a telescope with a 10,000-kilometer diameter, which is not practical, because the diameter of the Earth is not even 13,000 kilometers."

The robots are coming, and at least some lawmakers in Congress expect them to make a lot of jobs obsolete when they get here. "There are assembly lines where you already look out on a field of robots that can work 24-7, they don't need health insurance, they don't take vacations and they don't get sick," Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) "I think it's coming faster than anybody realizes," he said of the shift to machine workers. Coats and other lawmakers are starting to think about "technological unemployment," or the replacement of workers with self-checkout aisles, driverless vehicles, medical robots and other automations. They have different ideas about how to prepare for the coming workforce overhaul, but most agree that it's going to take new thinking about how people are educated and trained.

Why do you think technologies such as AI and predictive coding are apparently gaining momentum in term of their uptake in the UK legal market? First and foremost, the legal market isn't an isolated bubble. There is so much happening right now in the world at large about AI and cognitive computing that the legal market simply can't be immune. Our behaviours in the workplace are driven (and increasingly so) by our experiences in the rest of our lives, so when there's a constant stream of mainstream news about AI, it's inevitable that it must impact the legal market. Add into the mix a number of other legal market factors – the increasing price sensitivity of clients, the explosion in data, the long-standing feeling that there must be a better way to do repetitive knowledge tasks than simply adding more junior lawyers – and you've got the perfect conditions for these technologies to take hold.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc and UBS Group AG are exploring the use of artificial intelligence software to judge applicants on traits - such as teamwork, curiosity and grit - that help in the workplace but don't always show up on a resume or come through in an interview. Banks are turning to the hiring software at a time when they are under pressure to cut costs and finding it difficult to lure and retain top talent. Bank executives hope that artificial intelligence will help them avoid the expense of problem hires and turnover, industry sources said. "Up until this point, technology has only allowed you to find the best resume, but now it's a way of truly understanding the people that are applying," said Mark Newman, chief executive of Salt Lake City, Utah-based HireVue, a video-interviewing platform that uses artificial intelligence to screen applicants. Several banks are in the early stages of adding artificial intelligence software to complement in-person interviews and other traditional hiring processes.

One of these commercials for Clorets mints is being billed as the first campaign from McCann Erickson Japan's new AI creative director. The other is the work of a human. One is about a flying dog. The other features a barefoot calligrapher. Mondelez brand Clorets Mint Tab is asking the Japanese public to vote on which ad is more effective, without telling people which one is the product of artificial intelligence.