If we are serious about long-term human presence in space, such as manned bases on the moon or Mars, we must figure out how to streamline human-robot interactions. Right now, even the most basic of robots seem to have impenetrable brains. When I bought an autonomous vacuum cleaner, one that roams the house on its own, I thought I was going to save time and be able to enjoy a book or a movie, or play longer with the kids. I ended up robot-proofing every room, making sure wires and cables are out of the way, closing doors, placing electronic signposts for the robot to follow and much more – often daily. I cannot fully understand or predict what the system will do, so I don't trust it.

Imagine strapping an enormous VR headset to a car. Now, place that car inside a facility the size of a football field that simulates a full range of motion. Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt provided a peek inside that incredible facility during a keynote speech to a crowd of more than 3,000 at our GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley Thursday. Pratt also announced that Toyota will be opening a new autonomous driving research facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that will be staffed by about 50 researchers to complement Toyota's ongoing efforts in Japan, Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Mass., near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pratt is a legendary figure in the robotics community.

Ever since the first vision of a robot appeared on the horizon of mankind, humans have feared that automation will replace the workforce in our dystopian future. There typically follows a period of reassurance, in which we are compelled to believe that this will be a good thing, and that robots could actually liberate us from the drudgery of daily toil and free us for more enjoyable, cerebral pursuits. Futurist Jerry Kaplan, 63, is among those optimists. He estimates that 90% of Americans will lose their jobs to robots and we should all be happy about it. "If we can program machines to read x-rays and write news stories, all the better. I say good riddance," Kaplan said.

Artificial Intelligence is poised to transform today's society as completely as the Internet did 20 years ago. The impact of both on all aspects of life, work, art, relationships, humanity, and consciousness, is as yet unknown-but not for long. In the past decade, Google introduced us to driverless cars and Apple launched Siri-a personal assistant we keep in our pockets. Robots have become an integral part of society on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health care. The ever-falling cost of sensors and powerful computers ensure that in the coming years, these robots will act on their own.

Google's billionaire executive chairman Eric Schmidt says he's seen the future of wealth creation from the IT industry, and its name is "machine learning." "This is the next transformation," Schmidt said during a keynote speech during Google's Cloud Computing Platform tech conference on Wednesday in San Francisco. "I'm a programmer who sort of got lucky at Google," he continued. "But the programming paradigm is changing. Instead of programming a computer, you teach a computer to learn something and it does what you want."

In the October5, 2015 issue of the Wall Street Journal, there appeared a feature article titled: "Scientists Tap Dragonfly Vision to Build a Better Bionic Eye", with the subtitle: "Artificial-intelligence system could aid the blind and help create a better driverless car." The actual article was written by Rachel Pannett and starts as follows: "What can humans learn from dragonflies? Australian researchers have developed an artificial-intelligence system based on a dragonfly's vision that they say could help improve the eyesight of people who can see almost nothing. The system also is expected to find applications in automated technologies that rely on artificial sight, such as robots and driverless cars." In this article, the dragonfly's remarkable ability as a predator is mentioned.

It was hard to tell whether hope or fear was the predominant sentiment about the future of artificial intelligence, according to a panel discussing the state of the field at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday. A.I. systems are rapidly becoming more capable, the panel -- which included Ya-Qin Zhang, president of Chinese search engine company Baidu Inc., and Matthew Grob, the chief technology officer at Qualcomm Inc. -- agreed: they're able to learn from analyzing large data sets and they can increasingly discern human emotions by monitoring facial expressions and natural language. A.I. researchers Andrew Moore, the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, were also on the panel and concurred that as a result, A.I. is likely to vastly improve human lives in the coming decade. But the researchers and executives voiced concern about possible downsides ranging from economic displacement to computers that escape the ability of humans to control them with potentially dire consequences. Using A.I. to improve search engine results has the potential to transform search from a 1 trillion industry today to a 10 trillion industry, Russell said.

PORTLAND, OREGON – The U.S. military on Thursday christened an experimental self-driving warship designed to hunt for enemy submarines, a major advance in robotic warfare at the core of America's strategy to counter Chinese and Russian naval investments. The 132-foot-long (40-meter-long) unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface for two or three months at a time -- without a crew or anyone controlling it remotely. That kind of endurance and autonomy could make it a highly efficient submarine stalker at a fraction of the cost of the Navy's manned vessels. "This is an inflection point," Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Work said in an interview, adding he hoped such ships might find a place in the Western Pacific in as few as five years. "This is the first time we've ever had a totally robotic, trans-oceanic-capable ship."

Until recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and pitching pilots to film studios. Now she's applying her creative talents toward building the personality of a different type of character -- a virtual assistant, animated by artifical intelligence, that interacts with sick patients. Ewing works with engineers on the software program, called Sophie, which can be downloaded to a smartphone. The virtual nurse gently reminds users to check their medication, asks them how they are feeling or if they are in pain, and then sends the data to a real doctor. As tech behemoths and a wave of start-ups double down on virtual assistants that can chat with human beings, writing for AI is becoming a hot job in Silicon Valley.

We have long deemed ourselves to be at the pinnacle of cognitive abilities among animals. But that is different from being at the pinnacle of evolution in a number of very important ways. As Mark Twain pointed out in 1903, to presume that evolution has been a long path leading to humans as its crowning achievement is just as preposterous as presuming that the whole purpose of building the Eiffel Tower was to put that final coat of paint on its tip. Moreover, evolution is not synonymous with progress, but simply change over time. And humans aren't even the youngest, most recently evolved species.