September's emissions scandal rocked Volkswagen - but it's not the only issue the German car giant has. Alongside other German manufacturers, it faces a major challenge from the digital revolution sweeping through the world of manufacturing, writes Sean Williams. Max Vilimpoc, a Berlin-based software engineer, worked as a contractor for VW until this year. What he saw there, while working on a raft of digital products, shocked him. VW, he says, approaches the design of digital products the same way it would design a car part or engine component.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of making smart machines, and it has come a long way since the term was coined in the 1950s. Nowadays, robots work alongside humans in hotels and factories, while driverless cars are being test driven on the roads. Behind the scenes, AI engines in the form of smart algorithms "work" on stock exchanges, offer up suggestions for books and films on Amazon and Netflix and even write the odd article. But AI does not have the greatest public image - often due to sci-fi films that display dystopian visions of robots taking over the world. Over the next week, the BBC will be looking into all aspects of artificial intelligence - from how to build a thinking machine, to the ethics of doing so, to questions about whether an AI can ever be creative.

Larry Page wants patients to hand over their data to researchers in order to save "100,000 lives". It's just one of the ideas expressed in a wide-ranging interview at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. But he added that consumers need to accept that a new era of open data is inevitable. Interviewed on the Ted stage by US television host Charlie Rose, Mr Page was asked why Google bought the UK machine learning firm DeepMind. "I was looking at search and trying to understand how to make computers less clunky and also thinking about how speech recognition is not very good," said Mr Page.

The nuclear reactor is breached and belching out toxic waste. A mere human would have no chance of survival. But the mechanised rescue team that clanks into action soon has the situation under control. This isn't fantasy - if the Pentagon has its way robot squads will soon handle such man-made disasters. To spur on the technology the US defence headquarters' research unit has selected 17 teams and their machines - from more than 100 who applied - to compete in the Darpa Robotic Challenge (DRC) trials near Miami, Florida this Friday and Saturday.

If you worry that the robots are coming, don't, because they are already here. Artificial intelligence agents are already involved in every aspect of our lives - they keep our inboxes free of spam, they help us make our web transactions, they fly our planes and if Google gets its way will also soon drive our cars for us. "AI's are embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives," head of AI at Singularity University, Neil Jacobstein, told the BBC. "They are used in medicine, in law, in design and throughout automotive industry." And each day the algorithms that power away, making decisions behind the scenes, are getting smarter.

Meet Atlas, a humanoid robot capable of crossing rough terrain and maintaining its balance on one leg even when hit from the side. These are the latest creations of Boston Dynamics, a US robotics company part-funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). The robots are part of Darpa's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation programme. Darpa says such robots "hold great promise for amplifying human effectiveness in defence operations". Referring to Atlas's ability to remain balanced despite being hit by a lateral weight, Noel Sharkey, professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, told the BBC: "This is an astonishing achievement... quite a remarkable feat."

The story of how the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park aided the allied code-cracking effort during World War II is becoming well known. Its claim to be a forerunner of modern-day computers is also well established. What is much less well known is the tale of how Colossus's story came to be told in the first place. It is a tale of how one man's dogged efforts overcame official secrets and official indifference to rewrite computer history. Computer scientist Brian Randell was the man who started uncovering the history of Colossus.

A US team aims to build a robot that can work out how to use nearby objects to solve problems or escape threats. The machine has been dubbed a MacGyver Bot, after the TV character who cobbled together devices to escape life-threatening situations. The challenge is to develop software that "understands" what objects are in order to deduce how they can be used. The US Navy is funding the project and says the machines might ultimately be deployed alongside humans. It is providing $900,000 (£562,000) to robotics researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to carry out the work.

One of the UK's earliest humanoid robots has been unearthed after spending 45 years stored in a garage. The robot's creator, Tony Sale, talks about how George came about. Rationing during and after World War II gave rise to the make do and mend ethos that saw many people exercise their ingenuity to feed and clothe themselves. Some, such as Tony Sale, took the scavenging attitude far beyond simply unravelling woollen socks to help patch a pullover. In 1950 Mr Sale, then aged 19, created a robot named George out of scrap metal that came from a crashed Wellington bomber. Pilot Officer Sale, as he was then, was stationed at RAF Debden where he was employed to teach pilots how to use radar.

A Canadian firm has courted controversy with its claim to have built a practical quantum computer, a feat thought to be decades away. Now, independent researchers are trying to understand whether it really can tap the strange world of quantum physics. For the modest sum of $15m (£9m), a start-up near Vancouver will sell you a black box the size of a garden shed with its logo emblazoned on the side in white neon. What if I told you the contents of the box were kept colder than the temperature of interstellar space? How about this: The box contains a machine that can solve some of the thorniest mathematical problems and could revolutionise computing.