A self-driving Lexus SUV owned by Google's parent company Alphabet struck a bus February 14 while it was testing on the streets of Mountain View, Calif. SAN FRANCISCO -- The FBI-Apple encryption battle is just the beginning of an important debate this country needs to have about what to do when U.S. innovation outpaces American law. The FBI's failure to get data it wanted from an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists -- despite significant help from Apple -- shows that time has arrived once again. As with the coming of the telephone, the car, the radio and TV, the spread of the mobile Internet has gotten ahead of case law. In this case, with hand-held smartphones now ubiquitous, a consumer technology has outstripped the ability of the government to complete an important terrorist investigation.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon could be able to listen in on voice communications in difficult environments and then quickly translate and transcribe them for use by intelligence analysts and combat troops by 2017, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Newly released DARPA documents show it is continuing the next two stages of its Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech program, which is aimed at separating speech from background noise, determining which language is being spoken and then isolating key words from that speech for analysis. The Air Force, DARPA says, is testing the third phase of the program in the field now, while "the research division of a government agency will be testing the speech activity detection algorithm to incorporate into their platform." References to "a government agency" usually refer to a part of the intelligence community, such as the CIA or National Security Agency. So far, DARPA has spent $13 million on RATS.

Google's self-driving car makes strides. This technology reporter got a chance to ride in the car and says it drives quite conservatively. IOWA CITY, Iowa -- An eastern Iowa county is one of the first across the USA to open its arms to driverless cars. Johnson County supervisors said Thursday they want the county on the forefront of research into autonomous vehicles, so they are allowing them on county streets. The cities of Coralville, Iowa City and North Liberty are expected to follow with their own resolutions.

Today, mathematics and computer science often appear as the province of geniuses working at the very edge of human ability and imagination. Even as American high schools struggle to employ qualified math and science teachers, American popular culture has embraced math, science, and computers as a mystic realm of extraordinary intellectual power, even verging on madness. Movies like A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, and Pi all present human intelligence in the esoteric symbolism of long, indecipherable, but visually captivating equations. One has to think of such prosaic activities as paying the mortgage and grocery shopping to be reminded of the quiet and non-revelatory quality of rudimentary arithmetic. Which is not to put such labor down.

Google DeepMind, the tech giant's London-based company most famous for its groundbreaking use of artificial intelligence, is developing a software in partnership with NHS hospitals to alert staff to patients at risk of deterioration and death through kidney failure. The technology, which is run through a smartphone app, has the support of Lord Darzi, the surgeon and former health minister in the Blair government who is director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. "Innovation is the only solution we have for a sustainable NHS, both economically and in meeting the challenges and demands upon it," Darzi told the Guardian in a preview of the technology. Darzi has led a team working on a smartphone app called Hark for the last five years, which DeepMind has now acquired and will develop. Hark identifies the tasks that need to be performed to prevent a patient who has been admitted to hospital deteriorating, allocates them to the right staff, and tracks what has been done – or not done.

Experts in artificial intelligence, lawyers and activists organized by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots gathered at the United Nations on Tuesday to warn against a growing reliance on cheap drones and "stupid AI" that can be unpredictable in the real world. "Terminator always comes up," Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the sci-fi cyborg on a mission to wipe out mankind. "But it's not really Terminator that we're worried about at the moment. I think that Terminator is perhaps 50 or so years away." But there are concerning technologies "only a few years, at best, away", Walsh said, and with semi-autonomous systems, such as drones, "it would take very little to remove the human from that loop and replace them with a computer".

Companies like Google and Tesla have held up autonomous vehicles as a panacea for road accidents, which claim over 32,000 American lives each year. This month, Obama put stock in that idea, signing a $305bn transportation bill that includes grants for self driving vehicles. That backs up 10 years of US Department of Transportation work on technical studies and policies surrounding autonomous cars. Many researchers say forecasting the impact of self-driving cars on reducing accidents is difficult because there just isn't enough real-life road testing and data to make a reliable forecast. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, however, found that over 90% of car crashes involve human error.

Though the idea of the "Babelfish" - a thing able to translate between any two languages on the fly - was created by the author Douglas Adams as a handy solution to the question of how intergalactic travellers could understand each other, it could be reality within 25 years. At least, that is, for human language. Prof Nigel Shadbolt, a close associate of the web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says that the idea of automatic machine translation "on the fly" is achievable before the world wide web turns 50. Shadbolt also forecasts that future changes to the web will mean people will be "connected all the time" to medical diagnostic systems – but also that search companies including Google and China's Baidu may face challenges as web use shifts from the desktop to handheld and mobile devices. Having first used the web in 1993, via an early version of the Mosaic browser while on a visit to Canada, Shadbolt now thinks that it opens up huge possibilities for artificial intelligence systems built by connecting computers across the web - so-called cloud computing - that will be able to enhance daily life.

The first London Technology Week drew together a cast of characters and ideas as varied and unpredictable as the sector they represent. From driverless cars to the ironic revelation that the capital's broadband network is sub-par, there was much to glean from five days of visionary thinking. Kit Malthouse, London's deputy mayor for business and enterprise, is no fan of tech giant Oracle. Malthouse told a tech week meeting that his top priority was to "take Oracle down", to much laughter in the room. Boris Johnson's sidekick later revealed that his issue with the company was its unwillingness to give a discount to the Greater London authority during austerity-driven budget cuts in 2010.

On 24 August 1965 Gloria Placente, a 34-year-old resident of Queens, New York, was driving to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Clad in shorts and sunglasses, the housewife was looking forward to quiet time at the beach. But the moment she crossed the Willis Avenue bridge in her Chevrolet Corvair, Placente was surrounded by a dozen patrolmen. There were also 125 reporters, eager to witness the launch of New York police department's Operation Corral – an acronym for Computer Oriented Retrieval of Auto Larcenists. Fifteen months earlier, Placente had driven through a red light and neglected to answer the summons, an offence that Corral was going to punish with a heavy dose of techno-Kafkaesque. It worked as follows: a police car stationed at one end of the bridge radioed the licence plates of oncoming cars to a teletypist miles away, who fed them to a Univac 490 computer, an expensive $500,000 toy ($3.5m in today's dollars) on loan from the Sperry Rand Corporation. The computer checked the numbers against a database of 110,000 cars that were either stolen or belonged to known offenders. In case of a match the teletypist would alert a second patrol car at the bridge's other exit. It took, on average, just seven seconds. Compared with the impressive police gear of today – automatic number plate recognition, CCTV cameras, GPS trackers – Operation Corral looks quaint.