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.

Except in fanciful movies like 2003's The Matrix Revolutions, where fearsome squid-like robots maneuvered with incredible ease, most robots are too clumsy to move around obstacles at high speeds. This is true in large part because they have trouble judging in the images they "see" just how far ahead obstacles are. This week, however, Stanford computer scientists will unveil a machine vision algorithm that gives robots the ability to approximate distances from single still images. "Many people have said that depth estimation from a single monocular image is impossible," says computer science Assistant Professor Andrew Ng, who will present a paper on his research at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in Vancouver Dec. 5-8. "I think this work shows that in practical problems, monocular depth estimation not only works well, but can also be very useful."

The world's climate could soon resemble the urban smog shown in the popular science fiction movie Blade Runner, suggests a report by UN scientists working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Blade Runner - the story of a policeman on the trail of four murderous genetically-engineered androids - was one of the first sci-fi blockbusters to paint a dystopian (i.e. Although set in 2019, the film deals with issues and problems familiar to us today, says Ed Lawrenson from Sight and Sound magazine. "Blade Runner was always a film that is very much about'now'. It shows a future that can be recognised by people, because it is based on trends that we can see around us." Director Ridley Scott took issues already noticeable in the 1980s, such as urban development, genetic engineering, and, of course, climate change, and took them to what he thought was their next logical stage.

Computer giant IBM pitted robotic trading agents, known as "bots", against humans in trading commodities such as pork bellies and gold. The bots made 7% more cash than the humans, according to a report in New Scientist magazine. Researchers say the successful experiment presages increased use of artificial intelligence in financial markets, where computerised trading already plays an important role. But since none of the humans were investment professionals, traders will argue that it is too early to consider replacing them with machines. In IBM's test, six bots and six people traded against each other - half were buyers and half sellers.

For the purposes of this list, only the first category is interesting, because these are true AI agents. Agents in this category have sensing and reasoning abilities that can be quite different than humans and have to be based on some sort of artificial knowledge structure and reasoning process. What I find most interesting is to examine how this mechanism is defined and what its capabilities are. The sensing and reasoning mechanisms are effectively identical to humans. This allows the film to treat the behavior as if it were identical to humans (or nearly so, e.g.

Entrepreneurs need little convincing that technology is important, rapidly evolving, and likely to have a profound impact on their businesses. But keeping track of developments, and knowing where to focus one's attention, is anything but straightforward. Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers (pdf) say the impact of constant technological breakthroughs represent a "megatrend" – a change so big that "every business should develop an emerging technology strategy". They have highlighted eight key areas that all businesses should pay attention to. The artificial intelligence market is growing rapidly and forecast to be worth $36bn by 2025.

Telenor Group's Research arm today publishes the key global Tech Trends identified for the coming year. The search to digitize activities in our daily lives and in business will only accelerate now that technological platforms are maturing and moving into test mode. "Last year we highlighted several important developing trends and predicted that these would gain speed and attention during the year. IoT is on our list again for 2017, but we also claim that social media fatigue could be starting to appear, that chatbots are hot, that 5G will show itself in demos and pilot installations long before the standard is ready, and that the ethics of AI will be a hot topic," says Bjørn Taale Sandberg, Head of Telenor Research. The trends were identified through observations, patterns and supporting data from the continuous research conducted by Telenor's scientists in select expert fields.