Researchers in Texas are developing robots that have minds of their own. The scientists are creating systems that can learn for themselves and be able to operate in the home, the workplace and even on the sports field. The University of Texas, Austin team is incorporating artificial intelligence into its machines so that they can deal with real-world situations. Science fiction films predicted that in the future we would have intelligent robots. In the Day the Earth Stood Still, we had the sinister Gort; in Forbidden Planet there was Robby; and in the TV series Lost In Space it was Zachary Smith's nemesis, the Robot.

Researchers have demonstrated how garbled speech commands hidden in radio or video broadcasts could be used to control a smartphone. The clips, which sound like the Daleks from Doctor Who, can be difficult for humans to understand but still trigger a phone's voice control functionality. The commands could make a smartphone share its location data, make calls and access compromised websites. One security expert said users could switch off automatic voice recognition. The researchers - from the University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University - explored whether audio commands "unintelligible to human listeners" were still interpreted by smartphones as voice commands.

As a child, growing up with the 1970's and 80's episodes of the BBC TV series, the only way I could be convinced to watch the Saturday tea-time showings of Dr Who was by robbing the family dog of its worn old blanket and sitting with it over my head, peering at the TV (with its'remote' control attached to the TV unit on a cable) through a chewed hole. It was my way of convincing my 8-year old myself that I was safe and that it wasn't all real. And yet, even stripping away the blanket and upgrading the TV (and remote control) tech quite a bit, and replacing the Daleks with for example, Arnie's Terminator, the Matrix's Machines, Ex Machina's Ava (or even the comedy Fembots in Austin Powers), man's age-old fear of the machine and relentless need to fight, overpower and destroy it hasn't really changed that much … even if some of the methods have. From the industrial revolution onwards, our relationship with machines and technology of any variety has always been'love/hate'. Even the fact that films like Wall-E, Big Hero and the Iron Giant, and characters like The Hitchhiker's' bulbous Marvin and Star Wars' R2-D2, C-3PO and more recently, BB-9, have such a fond film-following stems in part from our need to'humanise' robots and make them less scary.