Will Smith is science fiction's leading man. He kicked extraterrestrial ass in Independence Day and Men in Black, dodged satellite surveillance in Enemy of the State, and crushed a giant mecha-tarantula in Wild Wild West. In July, the high tech bad boy goes back to the future in I, Robot as a police detective investigating a murder allegedly committed by a bot. Driving through Manhattan's West Village in his black SUV, the former Fresh Prince admits he's all about getting geeky with it. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links.

In the summer of 2008, at an artificial intelligence confab deep in Silicon Valley, Yahoo! senior research scientist Deepak Agarwal revealed that the web giant was using automated algorithms to select news stories on its famous front page. These algorithms, he said, had boosted click-through-rates by 25 to 30 per cent, driving millions of additional dollars in ad revenue. When we approached Agarwal after his presentation to discuss the new technology and identified ourselves as The Register, he promptly buttoned his lip. We could only hope he would have done the same with The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or Mom and Pop's Shoestring Guide to All Things Artificial Intelligence, and three years later, our hope is still alive. This week, Raghu Ramakrishnan – Yahoo!'s chief scientist for search and cloud platforms – sat down with The Register to explain the technology in detail, boasting that click-through rates have now risen more than 270 per cent on the "Today" news module at the heart of the Yahoo! home page. Known as CORE – short for Content Optimization and Relevance Engine – the system doesn't replace human editors.

I once wrote on this page, "Science fiction is to technology as romance novels are to marriage: a form of propaganda" (see "Against Transcendence," February 2005). This represents my sincere view, but stated so baldly, without elaboration, the remark implies a contempt I do not feel. If it is propaganda, I am its happy dupe; and if I am a technology editor and journalist today, it is because between the ages of seven and fourteen, I read little but science fiction. I grew up on a farm on the North Coast of California that had at one time been a kind of hippie commune. Around the various cabins on the property were dozens of yellowed paperbacks of the sort that the counterculture loved; and when I recall my childhood all at once, it is perpetually summer, and I am alone in a field or a tree house, reading Alfred Bester, Algis Budrys, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, or Robert Heinlein.

The ferry arrived, the gangway went down and 7-year-old Emma Powell rushed toward the Statue of Liberty. She climbed onto the grass around the star-shaped foundation. She put on a green foam crown with seven protruding rays. Turning so that her body was oriented just like Lady Liberty's, Emma extended her right arm skyward with an imaginary torch. Then I took my niece's hand, and we went off to buy some pretzels.

Apple has released huge updates to its music apps, helping them work better together and with the company's new hardware. Both GarageBand and Logic Pro X – respectively the consumer and pro versions of Apple's music creation tools – have received major updates. The versions for the iPhone, iPad and Mac have all got updates, which allow the three to work together better. Chief among the updates is that both apps will now support the new Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro. Apple has now updated almost all of its apps to make use of the small touch screen, and in the music app it provides new buttons – which allow it to be used like a piano or a drum kit – all of which can be customised.

A US study ran a head-to-head comparison between doctors and a series of symptom checkers using what are known as clinical vignettes. Clinical vignettes have been used for many years to help hone trainee doctors' diagnostic skills. They are essentially diagnostic puzzles based on real-life case reports designed to test training and clinical knowledge. The researchers provided 45 clinical vignettes to more than 200 doctors. They found doctors were twice as likely to diagnose accurately first time compared with online symptom-checking applications.

Originating as a BBC radio series in 1978, Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Douglas wrote five parts from 1979 onwards (the first sold 250,000 in three months), introducing the world to Marvin the Paranoid Android, the computer Deep Thought, space guitarist Hotblack Desiato (named after Adams's local estate agent) and the Guide itself, a remarkably prescient forerunner to the internet. Aldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough. Set aboard a vast generation starship millennia after blast-off, the novel follows Roy Complain on a voyage of discovery from ignorance of his surroundings to some understanding of his small place in the universe. Complain is spiteful and small-minded but grows in humanity as his trek through the ship brings him into contact with giant humans, mutated rats and, ultimately, a wondrous view of space beyond the ship. One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953) - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale. Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory with which to combat the fall into barbarianism of the Human Empire, and sets up the Foundation to foster art, science and technology.

Babylonians develop the clepsydra, a clock that measures time using the flow of water. It's considered one of the first "robotic" devices in history. For centuries, inventors will refine the design. Around 270 BC, the Greek inventor Ctesibius becomes famous for a water clock with moving figures on it. The Greek philosopher Aristotle imagines the great utility of robots, writing, "If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords."

On-screen robots tend to rise up and crush their puny human masters with alarming regularity. "I decided to log every single incidence of artificial intelligence or robots in the history of cinema," Adam Rutherford, a British geneticist and author who served as AI consultant on the recent film "Ex Machina", tells CNET's Crave blog. "I think I calculated that 65 percent of them end up being a threat, and the rest of them are just servile." Speaking at a London event to promote the DVD and Blu-ray release of the critically acclaimed movie -- which tells the story of a humanoid robot cooked up by reclusive Web billionaire Nathan (played by Oscar Isaac) -- Rutherford says our yearning to portray robots on screen is one way in which we figure out our own minds. "It's the question of what makes us human," he says.

The Shimada family gathers around Paro, a cuddly, furry seal designed by Japanese roboticists to engage patients suffering from dementia--or in the Shimadas' case, to serve as a virtual pet. Its sensors allow it to discern the presence of people and respond to touch by wiggling its body and emitting seal-like cries. Its electronic brain has a rudimentary ability to learn words taught by its users and respond with sounds and movements. Some critics of social robots worry that the time spent with such devices could supplant interactions with real people, further distancing impaired people from society.