The United Nations has been warned that its protracted negotiations over the future of lethal autonomous weapons – or "killer robots" – are moving too slowly to stop robot wars becoming a reality. Lobbying for a pre-emptive ban on the weapons is intensifying at the UN general assembly in New York, but a deal may not emerge quickly enough to prevent devices from being deployed, experts say. "There is indeed a danger now that [the process] may get stuck," said Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. "A lot of money is going into development and people will want a return on their investment," he said. "If there is not a pre-emptive ban on the high-level autonomous weapons then once the genie is out of the bottle it will be extremely difficult to get it back in."

It is predicted that driverless cars will prevent the vast majority of crashes and dramatically reduce the cost of insuring a car, according to industry experts. Volvo's chief executive will tell a seminar on driverless cars on Tuesday that autonomous vehicles are the "single most important advance in automotive safety" in years. The Swedish carmaker's boss, Håkan Samuelsson, will cite US government research predicting that driverless cars will lead to an 80% fall in the number of car crashes by 2035. Even when an accident cannot be avoided, the impact speed will also drop due to automatic crash avoidance systems, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The result will be a huge decrease in the cost of car insurance premiums, according to separate research by insurer Swiss Re and the technology group Here. Premiums in the 14 largest car markets in the world are set to drop by $20bn (£13.5bn) by 2020 alone, according to their projections.

On Saturday at a NASCAR track in Florida, a humanoid robot named SCHAFT, created by a team of engineers from the University of Tokyo, performed a series of emergency tasks including using a hose, drilling a hole into a wall, walking through doors and driving a golf cart. SCHAFT ran away from the competition, with only a robot from DOD-funded Boston Dynamics staying close. These two robots, along with six others from private companies and university labs around the world, performed these tasks under the watchful eye of DARPA, the secretive defense research branch of the U.S. military. DARPA said the purpose of the competition was to begin modeling a robot that could be used on the surface of Mars. But many suspected that DARPA sponsors the competition to advance the use of robots like those on the battlefield.

The ongoing battle for Mosul, one of the largest cities in Iraq, has involved thousands of government-backed troops and allied fighters steadily advancing on the last urban stronghold of the terror group ISIS. In addition to elite Iraqi counter-terrorism troops, battle-hardened Kurdish peshmerga fighters and U.S. air support, ISIS fighters are facing a unique foe in the form of a remotely controlled combat vehicle developed by two brothers in Baghdad. Dubbed "al-robot," the device is a four-wheeled armored vehicle, considerably smaller than a Humvee or tank, with a 12.7mm cannon and side-mounted 70mm rockets. The main gun is equipped with a thermal-imaging camera that allows the device to be used at night. It is being used in the field during the battle for Mosul by the Iraqi Army's Popular Mobilization Unit, which reported its first use on Tuesday. In a statement to Vice News affiliate Motherboard, the PMU said the robot would be used for three primary missions: "Nighttime hunter missions, daytime combat missions and all-day support role for any troops requiring it."

Are robots capable of moral or ethical reasoning? The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems. "Even though today's unmanned systems are'dumb' in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we've seen before," Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research told Defense One. "For example, Google's self-driving cars are legal and in-use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch-up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications. We do not want to be caught similarly flat-footed in any kind of military domain where lives are at stake."

This week, the California Department of Motor Vehicles released its final regulations for the testing of autonomous vehicles on the roads of the state. They create a process for companies like Google, Nissan, Mercedes Benz, and the rest of the automakers to test out cars that can drive themselves under certain circumstances. By the end of the year, the DMV will issue an even more important set of regulations that will govern how the public can operate these cars. This is not an easy task, nor one that the regulators asked for. When the California legislature passed Senate Bill 1298 (Vehicle Code Section 38750), they tasked the agency with creating rules that would both encourage the development of autonomous vehicles while protecting the public.

Artificial intelligence is already in use across surveillance networks around the world. At high security sites like prisons, nuclear facilities or government agencies, it's commonplace for security systems to set up a number of rules-based alerts for their video analytics. So if an object on the screen (a person, or a car, for instance) crosses a designated part of the scene, an alert is passed on to the human operator. The operator surveys the footage, and works out if further action needs to be taken... BRS Labs' AISight is different because it doesn't rely on a human programmer to tell it what behaviour is suspicious. It learns that all by itself.

In about A.D. 1300 the Anasazi people abandoned Long House Valley. To this day the valley, though beautiful in its way, seems touched by desolation. It runs eight miles more or less north to south, on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, just west of the broad Black Mesa and half an hour's drive south of Monument Valley. To the west Long House Valley is bounded by gently sloping domes of pink sandstone; to the east are low cliffs of yellow-white sedimentary rock crowned with a mist of windblown juniper. The valley floor is riverless and almost perfectly flat, a sea of blue-gray sagebrush and greasewood in sandy reddish soil carried in by wind and water. Today the valley is home to a modest Navajo farm, a few head of cattle, several electrical transmission towers, and not much else. Yet it is not hard to imagine the vibrant farming district that this once was. The Anasazi used to cultivate the valley floor and build their settlements on low hills around the valley's perimeter. Remains of their settlements are easy to see, even today. Because the soil is sandy and the wind blows hard, not much stays buried, so if you leave the highway and walk along the edge of the valley (which, by the way, you can't do without a Navajo permit), you frequently happen upon shards of Anasazi pottery, which was eggshell-perfect and luminously painted. On the site of the valley's eponymous Long House--the largest of the ancient settlements--several ancient stone walls remain standing. Last year I visited the valley with two University of Arizona archaeologists, George Gumerman and Jeffrey Dean, who between them have studied the area for fifty or more years. Every time I picked up a pottery shard, they dated it at a glance. By now they and other archaeologists know a great deal about the Anasazi of Long House Valley: approximately how many lived here, where their dwellings were, how much water was available to them for farming, and even (though here more guesswork is involved) approximately how much corn each acre of farmland produced. They have built up a whole prehistoric account of the people and their land. But they still do not know what everyone would most like to know, which is what happened to the Anasazi around A.D. 1300. "Really, we've been sort of spinning our wheels in the last eight to ten years," Gumerman told me during the drive up to the valley. "Even though we were getting more data, we haven't been able to answer that question."

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have teamed up to encourage Web page operators to make the meaning of their pages understandable to search engines. The move may finally encourage widespread use of technology that makes online information as comprehensible to computers as it is to humans. If the effort works, the result will be not only better search results, but also a wave of other intelligent apps and services able to understand online information almost as well as we do. The three big Web companies launched the initiative, known as Schema.org, It defines an interconnected vocabulary of terms that can be added to the HTML markup of a Web page to communicate the meaning of concepts on the page.

When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes and workplaces more automated. At the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a contest held over the weekend in California, two dozen extremely sophisticated robots did their best to perform a series of tasks on an outdoor course, including turning a valve, climbing some steps, and opening a door (see "A Transformer Wins DARPA's $2 Million Robotics Challenge"). Although a couple of robots managed to complete the course, others grasped thin air, walked into walls, or simply toppled over as if overcome with the sheer impossibility of it all. At the same time, efforts by human controllers to help the robots through their tasks may offer clues as to how human-machine collaboration could be deployed in various other settings. "I think this is an opportunity for everybody to see how hard robotics really is," says Mark Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, now owned by Google, which produced an extremely sophisticated humanoid robot called Atlas (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Agile Robots").