Apple has revealed a 29 armed robot that can rip apart an iPhone in 11 seconds for recycling. It is hoped the machine will help recycle silver, tungsten and other metals from the handsets. The system started to operate at full capacity last month and can take apart one iPhone 6 every 11 seconds to recover aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, cobalt, gold and silver parts, according to Apple. The system started to operate at full capacity last month and can take apart one iPhone 6 every 11 seconds to recover aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, cobalt, gold and silver parts, according to Apple. It has already been installed near Apple's HQ in Cupertino, and it plans to build a second in Europe.

Engineers are testing a new robot rescue system in the Greek islands, hoping it will be able to save some refugees while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece.

In 2014, Google went on a robot spending spree, buying a handful of companies working on various technologies to help robots see, walk, and grasp objects. It seemed that the company was intent on building advanced new robots that might transform factories and even our homes. But last week Bloomberg reported that Google wants to sell the most striking of the companies it acquired, Boston Dynamics. The company's impressive two- and four-legged robots were apparently too far from being marketable. Google has not given up on robots, but appears to have decided to be more realistic about what it can achieve. "When you're making a product, you have to pick what it's going to do and a price point, and the target customer," says Helen Greiner, who cofounded iRobot, a successful manufacturer of household robots such as the Roomba, and is now CEO of drone builder CyPhyWorks.

Those who work in professions from warehouse staff to hotel concierges may soon count a robot among their colleagues. While Amazon has pioneered the use of robots in its fulfillment centers, its robots are still largely separated from human workers (see "Inside Amazon"). The next generation of workplace bots will work in much closer proximity to regular employees. Some will replace workers entirely, but most will simply take on the more mundane tasks of a human's job. Clearpath Robotics, a company based in Ontario, Canada, launched a robotic platform designed to take on the work done by forklift truck drivers in warehouses and factories.

From self-driving vehicles and semi-autonomous robots to intelligent algorithms and predictive analytic tools, machines are increasingly capable of performing a wide range of jobs that have long been human domains. A 2013 study by researchers at Oxford University posited that as many as 47% of all jobs in the United States are at risk of "computerization." And many respondents in a recent Pew Research Center canvassing of technology experts predicted that advances in robotics and computing applications will result in a net displacement of jobs over the coming decades – with potentially profound implications for both workers and society as a whole. The ultimate extent to which robots and algorithms intrude on the human workforce will depend on a host of factors, but many Americans expect that this shift will become reality over the next half-century. In a national survey by Pew Research Center conducted June 10-July 12, 2015, among 2,001 adults, fully 65% of Americans expect that within 50 years robots and computers will "definitely" or "probably" do much of the work currently done by humans.

"I wish I could touch you," Theodore says, laying in bed. Until she speaks up, tentatively. "How would you touch me?" It's a famously poignant scene from the movie Her, as the character Theodore is about to make vocal love to an artificial intelligence living in his ear. But according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren't science fiction. In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year. The talking, bio-monitoring Bragi Dash will be reaching early Kickstarters soon, while fellow startup Here has raised 17 million to compete in the smart earbud space.

The Department of Defense announced in early February, in an address to the Economic Club of Washington by Defense Scretary Ashton Carter, that its Strategic Capabilities Office was innovating "new roles and game-changing capabilities to confound potential enemies." The Washington Post's Dan Lamothe wrote an exclusive piece on the SCO, a hitherto unknown agency within the DoD, on March 8. In that piece, Lamothe explained that the future of war is now- and the future is the SCO's artificial intelligence. The SCO's drone program, Perdix, originated at MIT in 2010- 2011. They fit easily in the hand and are surprisingly light-weight.

Robots learn socially accepted behavior by reading and understanding children's books, particularly stories about chivalry. Researchers developed a technology called "Quixote" that can teach robots how to align their goals with proper human behavior in social settings. The increasing growth of artificial intelligence has come with fear that these robots could be a threat to humanity. To lessen this anxiety, a team of researchers developed a method that will train AI how to behave in social settings. The new technology is called "Quixote" and it teaches robots to read children's stories, understand acceptable social behavior in societies and learn standard event sequences.

When a person's intelligence is tested, there are exams. When artificial intelligence is tested, there are games. But what happens when computer programs beat humans at all of those games? This is the question AI experts must ask after a Google-developed program called AlphaGo defeated a world champion Go player in four out of five matches in a series that concluded Tuesday. Long a yardstick for advances in AI, the era of board-game testing has come to an end, said Murray Campbell, an IBM research scientist who was part of the team that developed Deep Blue, the first computer program to beat a world chess champion.

Google's AlphaGo computer program has won a third and decisive encounter with a top-ranked player of the Chinese board game Go in a victory marking significant developments in artificial intelligence. Lee Sedol, who is the world's second best player of the strategy game, lost three games in a row in Seoul this week, with the latest AlphaGo victory on Saturday handing Google the best-of-five match. "I've never played a game where I felt this amount of pressure, and I wasn't able to overcome this pressure," Lee said at a post-game press conference. Go has simple rules, but is highly intuitive and complex in practice. Mastering it has been an exceptionally difficult task for even the world's best IT designers.