Within a decade cars could start driving themselves on highways and in less than 25 years automakers may be producing vehicles "smart" enough to chauffeur passengers through city streets, Stanford computer scientist Sebastian Thrun predicted Saturday in San Francisco. Thrun, who led the winning team in a robotic car race sponsored by the Pentagon in 2005, was one of four experts who spoke about the current and future state of robotics at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The association today wraps up a five-day event that attracted researchers from 60 countries to explore many fields including robotics. The term "robot" was coined in the 1920s when Czech playwright Karel Capek used the word "robota" -- relentless work or drudgery in his own tongue -- to describe a factory of mechanical creatures that eventually revolt. Deceased science fiction author Isaac Asimov popularized robots in the 1950s. The 1977 "Star Wars" movie made heroes of C-3PO and R2-D2.

Search, in its enlightened form, has the potential to be the hinge that finally connects humanity with machines in a way that lets us transcend our biological limitations. We are at a point in technical history where we have the pieces necessary to augment human abilities in ways that will give superpowers to those of us with access to these systems. The capacity to know anything that can be known and do anything anywhere in the world, no matter where your physical body lies, is as close to a reality as it has ever been. Machine Learning and Intelligence Machine learning--an area of AI focusing on systems that "learn" from data in order to navigate future similar scenarios--is one of the ways we've managed to give systems like search the ability to make sense of our analog world. Many of the seemingly magical experiences we have with technology, such as the incredible advances in speech recognition and the more personal interactions we have with retail sites like Amazon, come from this field of study.

A milestone in robotics history was left in the dust last October as four autonomous vehicles met a Grand Challenge set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). By driving themselves without any human guidance over 132 miles of desert trails, through narrow tunnels and down a treacherous mountain pass--and doing so at a pace that suggested they could take on even tougher courses--the machines surprised some veteran roboticists, who had predicted the Challenge would stand unanswered for years to come. On March 28, NOVA will broadcast an in-depth television documentary covering the 2005 Grand Challenge on PBS stations nationwide. The documentary features the commentary of Scientific American Senior Writer W. Wayt Gibbs, who covered the Grand Challenge for the magazine by embedding himself with the Red Team at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the leading competitors. Attracting aspirants from high schools to corporate skunkworks, the Grand Challenge produced many stories of dogged persistence, wrenching turnabouts and visionary ingenuity.

For more than 50 years, language scientists have assumed that sentence structure is fundamentally hierarchical, made up of small parts in turn made of smaller parts, like Russian nesting dolls. A new Cornell study suggests language use is simpler than they had thought. Co-author Morten Christiansen, Cornell professor of psychology and co-director of the Cornell Cognitive Science Program, and his colleagues say that language is actually based on simpler sequential structures, like clusters of beads on a string. "What we're suggesting is that the language system deals with words by grouping them into little clumps that are then associated with meaning," he said. Sentences are made up of such word clumps, or "constructions," that are understood when arranged in a particular order. For example, the word sequence "bread and butter" might be represented as a construction, whereas the reverse sequence of words ("butter and bread") would likely not.

The idea of Artificial Intelligence has captured our collective imagination for decades. Can behaviour that we think of as intelligent be replicated in a machine? If so, what consequences could this have for society? And what does it tell us about ourselves as human beings? Besides being a topic in science fiction and popular philosophy, AI is also a well-established area of scientific research.

A software program tracks your emotions as you watch a movie, creating an emotion catalog. Plenty of human-gadget interfaces can let you control a robot or a computer with your mind. But these communications are command-based -- your PR2 still can't tell whether you're asking it for a beer to celebrate, or to drink away your sorrows. An EEG-based affective computing system allows you to communicate your emotions, adding a new layer to human-computer interactions. In the video below, Robert Oschler of Android Review demonstrates EmoRate, a software program that catalogs his emotions.

Denton initially shod the Mantis in modified go-kart tires. "They worked out really well," he notes, "but they weren't very grippy." So he fabricated custom rubber feet, modeling the hexagonal pattern after off-road tires. Now he alternates shoes based on the terrain. In 2007, Matt Denton stopped on the side of the road near his home in Hampshire, England, to watch an excavator dig.

Deep in the bowels of Google's Google Brain, the company is asking the question: can neural networks create music? Google's Magenta project has an answer: yes. Whether that music is good, however... Google may have annihilated its human competition in the ancient game of Go, but human artists don't have to worry--yet--about losing their livelihoods. Still, it appears that Magenta could at least drop a riff or two that human artists could remix. Want to hear it for yourself?

Intel is in transition right now: An executive shakeup this month laid the path for new boss Venkata Renduchintala to put his imprint on the company's PC, Internet of Things and software operations. So no wonder the vibe at this week's Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen was mellow. Intel kept the show a low-key affair, choosing not to bring it to the attention of a worldwide audience, unlike previous years. But IDF Shenzhen remains an important event on Intel's calendar. China is a huge market, and it's also a place where the chip maker encourages small hardware shops in the alleys of Shenzhen to experiment with PC, mobile and now, IoT ideas.

WASHINGTON–Superintelligent computers could outsmart humans, but scientists largely dismiss any parallels to Terminator and a dystopian "rise of the machines" (much like the hapless scientists in the movies, it must be noted). The struggle between the thirst for research and the anxiety over the consequences was clear from "Are Super Intelligent Computers Really A Threat to Humanity?" a panel discussion held at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Tuesday morning. The risks of rogue machinery are not far off from the cautionary tales played out in movies including Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator of course, and most recently, Ex Machina. According to Stuart Russell of U.C. Berkeley, "if the system is better than you at taking into account more information and looking further ahead into the future, and it doesn't have the exactly the same goals as you…then you have a problem." A superintelligent computer could avoid being shut down by its creators, and that's when people might lose control of the machine, Russell warned.