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.

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.

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.

Boston Dynamics The desire to make robots seem gentle and appealing is not foremost among Boston Dynamics' priorities. Its thuggish looking creations, usually inspired by an animal, have largely been developed for the US military, for purposes which are delicately described as "search and rescue" tasks. Boston Dynamics has also developed a humanoid prototype called Atlas, which is able to, in the company's words, "lift, carry and manipulate the environment" Schaft If Meka is providing the foundations for the top half of Google's robot, Schaft may offer the bottom. The Japanese designed robot, which stays balanced even when jostled, trounced its rivals at a recent robotics competition held by the US department of defence. Redwood Robotics Comprising of the amalgamated expertise of three major developers, including Meka, focused on the elusive goal of developing a fully functioning robotic arm.

One of the UK's most congested highways, connecting the busy container port at Felixstowe to Birmingham, is to become Britain's first internet-connected road in a pilot project that could pave the way for everything from tolls to self-driving cars. A network of sensors will be placed along a 50-mile stretch of the A14 in a collaboration between BT, the Department for Transport and the Cambridge start-up Neul, creating a smart road which can monitor traffic by sending signals to and from mobile phones in moving vehicles. The technology, which sends signals over the white spaces between television channels instead of mobile phone networks, could even pave the way for government systems to automatically control car speeds. The telecoms watchdog Ofcom, which on Wednesday approved the project as part of its new blueprint for how Britain will use spectrum, is already forecasting what high technology traffic systems will look like. "Sensors in cars and on the roads monitor the build-up of congestions and wirelessly send this information to a central traffic control system, which automatically imposes variable speed limits that smooth the flow of traffic," Ofcom said.

You may not have noticed it, but over the past year Google has bought eight robotics companies. Its most recent acquisition is an outfit called Boston Dynamics, which makes the nearest thing to a mechanical mule that you are ever likely to see. It's called Big Dog and it walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. It's the size of a large dog or small mule – about 3ft long, 2ft 6in tall, weighs 240lbs, has four legs that are articulated like an animal's, runs at 4mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, climbs muddy hiking trails, walks in snow and water, carries a 340lb load, can toss breeze blocks and can recover its balance when walking on ice after absorbing a hefty sideways kick. There, you will find not only a fascinating video of Big Dog in action, but also confirmation that its maker has a menagerie of mechanical beasts, some of them humanoid in form, others resembling predatory animals.

Google's recent acquisition of Boston Dynamics marks its eighth robotics purchase in the past six months, showing Google's "moonshot" robotics vision is more than just a pet project. Boston Dynamics is the most high-profile acquisition, however, instantly adding world-leading robotics capability, including robots that can walk all on their own, to Google's arsenal – as well as significant links to the US military – conjuring images of Skynet and the artificial intelligence-led robot uprising straight out of the 1984 film The Terminator. Boston Dynamics is an engineering and robotics design company that works across a wide range of computer intelligence and simulation systems, as well as large, advanced robotic platforms. The company was created as a technology spin-off from Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Prof Marc Raibert in 1992, then the founder and lead researcher of the Leg Lab – a research group focussed on systems that move dynamically, including legged robots. Raibert describes the Boston Dynamics team as "simply engineers that build robots", but in reality Boston Dynamics is much more than that.