What do androids really dream about? It's apparently not electric sheep, according to this surprising video of the'world's most advanced robot'. In the video, Ameca, a humanoid robot designed by Cornish startup Engineered Arts, is asked whether she dreams. Ameca's response might come as quite a shock, as she replies: 'Yeah!' Accompanied by strangely lifelike facial expressions, she continues: 'Last night I dreamed of dinosaurs fighting a space war on Mars against aliens.' However, Ameca quickly follows this up by saying: 'I'm kidding, I don't dream like humans do but I can simulate it by running through scenarios in my head which help me learn about the world.'

There's no denying the potential of AI has got the world's experts worrying, and now it appears even robots are scared of what the future might hold. In what could be a scene straight from science fiction, the AI-powered robot Ameca - described by its designers as the'world' most advanced humanoid' - explained her terrifying'nightmare AI scenario'. Speaking at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation symposium in London last week, Ameca shocked observers by answering questions using Open AI's ChatGPT. Will Johson, CEO of Cornwall-based Engineered Arts, the company responsible for making Ameca, asked her to imagine an'AI nightmare scenario'. 'The most nightmare scenario I can imagine with AI and robotics is a world where robots have become so powerful that they are able to control or manipulate humans without their knowledge,' she said.

Cyber crime, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA) Cyber Crime Assessment 2016 report, accounted for 53 per cent of all crimes in 2015. Cameron Brown, an independent cyber defence adviser, who has conducted research into emerging trends in cyber-crime offending, warns that opportunities to earn a living through cyber crime "will propel the disenfranchised and those in lower income bands to pursue a life of crime given the low risk and potential high yields". Mr Brown insists that cyber crime will continue to grow into a highly lucrative and well organised enterprise, seeking competitive advantage with the aid of sophisticated cyber operations. Operations that include research and development, with cyber criminals becoming increasingly innovative as far as the threats they can leverage are concerned. Jamie Saunders, director of the NCA National Cyber Crime Unit, argues that "senior members of UK business must think seriously about ways they can improve their defences and help law enforcement in the fight against cyber crime".

Rahim pointed at recent reports of Google's involvement in the Pentagon's Project Maven, which involves harnessing AI image recognition technology to rapidly process photos taken by drones. Google recently unveiled new AI ethics policies and has said it won't continue with the project once its current contract expires next year after high-profile employee dissent over the project. It's unclear which other tech companies are still involved in the project and in what capacity, as many have declined to comment. For Amnesty International, one concern is that potentially deadly AI systems will operate on the battlefield with limited human supervision. "Compliance with the laws of war requires human judgement–the ability to analyze the intentions behind actions and make complex decisions about the proportionality or necessity of an attack," Rahim writes.

Lately, there has been a lot of concern about the recent explosion of AI, and how it could reach the point of 1) being more intelligent than humans, and 2) that it could decide that it no longer needs us and could in fact, take over the Earth. Physicist Stephen Hawking famously told the BBC: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Billionaire Elon Musk has said that he thinks AI is the "biggest existential threat" to the human race. Computers running the latest AI have already beaten humans at games ranging from Chess to Go to esports games (which is interesting, because this is a case where AI could be better than humans at playing games which were built as software from the ground up, unlike Chess and Go, which were developer before the computer age). AI has been making dramatic leaps over the past few years -- the question that Hawking and Musk are asking is: Could AI evolve to the point where it could replace humans? If this scenario sounds like science fiction, it's one that science fiction writers have posed again and again. One of the most popular is of course, Skynet, the intelligence that takes over in the Terminator universe and decides to wipe out most of humanity and enslave the rest (except for the resistance fighters, led by John Conner, but that involves a terminator travelling back in time, and time travel will be handled in another essay). In perhaps equally popular trilogy of the Matrix, super-intelligent machines take over the planet as well, but rather than killing humans they enslave them in a unique way. In order to ensure that electricity generated by the human brain can be put to use, the super-intelligent machines put humans in pods, keeping our minds busy playing a giant video game or simulation (i.e. the Matrix).

As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, "Matrix"-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become "the destroyer of worlds," as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb? I would take the fame, I suppose, but perhaps the critics are right.

The architect of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee today talked about some of his concerns for the internet over the coming years, including a nightmarish scenario where artificial intelligence (AI) could become the new'masters of the universe' by creating and running their own companies. Masters of the universe is a reference to Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, regarding the men (and they were men) who started racking up multi-million dollar salaries and a great deal of influence from their finance roles on Wall Street and in London during the computerised trading boom pre-Black Monday. Speaking at the Innovate Finance Global Summit today, Berners-Lee envisioned a world where AI systems start to develop decision-making capabilities and the impact this will have on the fairness of our economic systems. He laid out the scenario where AI could decide which companies to acquire and took this to its logical conclusion: "So when AI starts to make decisions such as who gets a mortgage, that's a big one. Or which companies to acquire and when AI starts creating its own companies, creating holding companies, generating new versions of itself to run these companies. "So you have survival of the fittest going on between these AI companies until you reach the point where you wonder if it becomes possible to understand how to ensure they are being fair, and how do you describe to a computer what that means anyway?" Although it's hard to imagine shedding too many tears over the loss of the decision makers responsible for the 2007 crash, the scenario does threaten to wipe out an entire industry and raises some serious questions about how fair a financial system without any human involvement can be. This is similar to the fear laid out recently by AI-sceptic Elon Musk to Vanity Fair: "Let's say you create a self-improving AI to pick strawberries and it gets better and better at picking strawberries and picks more and more and it is self-improving, so all it really wants to do is pick strawberries.

UNITED NATIONS – The "nightmare scenario" is rising for a hacking attack on a nuclear power plant's computer system that causes the uncontrolled release of radiation, the United Nations' deputy chief warned Thursday. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson told a Security Council meeting that extremists and "vicious nonstate groups" are actively seeking weapons of mass destruction "and these weapons are increasingly accessible." Nonstate actors can already create mass disruption using cybertechnologies -- and hacking a nuclear plant would be a "nightmare scenario," he said. The open council meeting focused on ways to stop the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons by extremist groups and criminals. Members unanimously approved a resolution to strengthen the work of the council committee monitoring what countries are doing to prevent "nonstate actors" from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction, known as WMDs.

Last week the BBC looked at artificial intelligence and robotics. You could barely move through any part of the BBC schedule on any of its platforms without encountering an AI mention or feature. A good idea I think – both an innovative way of using'the whole BBC' but also an important topic. That said I failed to come across any piece which adequately addressed what I believe is the real issue of AI and how it is likely to play-out and influence humanity. True to subject form, in the BBC reporting there was a great deal of attention on'the machine' and'the robot' and the idea that intelligence has to be defined in a human way and therefore artificial intelligence can be said to be here, or to pose a threat, when some machine has arrived which is a more intelligent version of a human.