Drones are becoming more common in our skies, performing a variety of tasks, from taking photos to monitoring crops and potentially even delivering broadband. But there are strict rules about their usage, which has led some to come up with innovative ways to fly such vehicles more safely. "I'm using a dog leash for a small dog," says roboticist Sergei Lupashin as he demonstrates a new kind of consumer-friendly drone at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. By tethering it, he hopes the Fotokite, as it is called, can avoid some of the issues faced by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are banned without a special licence because of safety and privacy concerns. "It doesn't rely on GPS [ Global Positioning System], sophisticated machine vision, radio, it doesn't even use a compass. Most crashes today happen because of GPS, radio or piloting issues," says Dr Lupashin.

"I don't know what you mean - how about a web search for it?" If you want the latest football scores, to add meetings to your calendar or launch an app, today's virtual assistants are relatively good at understanding your voice and doing what's asked. But try to have the type of natural conversation seen in sci-fi movies featuring artificial intelligence systems - from HAL in 2001 to the sultry-voiced operating system Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her - and you'll find your device about as smart as a waterproof teabag. "Google and Apple are painfully aware that their systems are not getting better fast enough because right now Siri and Google Now and the other personal assistant type applications are all programmed by hand," says Steve Young, professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge. "If you speak to Siri about baseball it seems relatively intelligent, but if you ask it something much less common it doesn't really do anything except for a web search. "That's an indication that the programmers have been busy trying to anticipate what people want to ask about baseball but haven't thought about people who ask about, for example, GPU chips because you don't get many queries about that." Microsoft doesn't yet have a virtual assistant on its Windows Phone platform, but the company is experimenting with AI in lifts and reception desks at its headquarters. Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft's research unit, believes part of the solution involves allowing computers to look beyond questions posed. "The ability of a system to understand more broadly what the overall context of a communication is turns out to be very important," he told the BBC. "There are some critical signals in context.

With the London Symphony Orchestra performing machine-written symphonies, Amazon selling books written by algorithms and film-makers scripting screenplays after conversations with a PC, are computers evolving from being a mere tool into becoming a creative force in their own right? One of the differences between humans and machines has often been said to be creative thought. But several efforts are under way to let computers seek inspiration from their surrounding environment to create art. For example, a new experiment by Volkswagen creates music based on a car's speed, steering and whether it is in the city or countryside. Developed with the musicians Underworld - who composed the track played during the lighting of the London Olympics cauldron - the app generates music in real-time for passengers in the car.

In 1984, Canadian movie director James Cameron imagined a world in which computers achieved self-awareness and set about systematically destroying humankind. Skynet, the Terminator series computer network, was to go live in 2011 and bring the world to an end. Of course, we have just survived 2011 without such a cataclysmic event. And the closest we got to computers achieving self-awareness was Apple's Siri. It doesn't promise self-awareness per se, but does promise to listen and to learn - and hopefully not systematically destroy us.

Engineers have developed a robotic system that can evolve and improve its performance. A robot arm builds "babies" that get progressively better at moving without any human intervention. The ultimate aim of the research project is to develop robots that adapt to their surroundings. The work by teams in Cambridge and Zurich has been published in the journal PLOS One. It seems like a plot from a science fiction film: a robot that builds other robots - each one better than the previous generation.

Researchers have developed robots that learn to live with damaged parts in less than a minute, instead of the many hours needed by traditional self-learning systems. The system paves the way for robots to be used in a wide variety of settings, coping with damage that occurs in the real world. Possible applications include robots looking after the elderly, rescuing earthquake victims or doing housework. We marvel at the robots we see in films: some try to wipe out humanity, such as Ultron in the recent Avengers film, while others like C-3PO in Star Wars are helpful albeit slightly annoying. But they are the still the stuff of science fiction, partly because if the slightest thing goes wrong with a real-life robot it usually stops working altogether.

You may think you choose to read one story over another, or to watch a particular video rather than all the others clamouring for your attention. But in truth, you are probably manipulated into doing so by publishers using clever machine learning algorithms. Every day the web carries about 500 million tweets, 430,000 hours of YouTube video uploads, and more than 80 million new Instagram photos. Just keeping up with our friends' Facebook and Twitter updates can seem like a full-time job. So publishers desperately trying to get us to read and watch their stuff in the face of competition from viral videos and pictures of cats that look like Hitler are enlisting the help of data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

Sleepiness and stress are perennial risks for the long distance lorry driver, and accidents are sadly too frequent. However, a radical new driverless truck being trialled by Daimler may offer a solution. Earlier this month, the automotive giant was granted the first licence ever to test such a vehicle on a public highway by the US state of Nevada. Using a combination of GPS, radar and video cameras, the Freightliner Inspiration can drive by itself on open stretches of road, freeing a driver to take breaks, check his emails and even watch DVDs. The catch is that a qualified person must remain in front of the wheel at all times so they can take control if something goes wrong.

A hardware store in San Jose has a new star employee. It can speak English and Spanish, recognise any part at sight, and knows what the shop has in stock on a second by second basis. OSHbot, as it is called, measures roughly 5ft, and boasts a 3D scanner and touchscreen. "It's not just robots for robots' sake, or a marketing gimmick," insists Kyl Nel, executive director of Lowe's Innovation Labs. Lowe's is an American DIY chain, and the robot's ultimate employer.

The world's oldest technology magazine is the MIT Technology Review. Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2011 it produced a special supplement of original science fiction stories written by top writers from the genre. The Review says its normal mission is to identify important new technologies, and decipher the practical impact they will have on our lives. The sci-fi edition - with contributors such as Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear - was an attempt to do that in an unusual way. The magazine called this "hard" sci-fi.