Almost 30 years ago, Bob Thomas, then an MIT professor, published a book called "What Machines Can't Do." He was focused on manufacturing technology and argued that it wasn't yet ready to take over the factory from humans. While recent developments with artificial intelligence have raised the bar considerably since then for what machines can do, there are still many things that they can't do yet or at least not do well in highly reliable ways. AI systems may perform well in the research lab or under highly controlled application settings, but they still needed human help in the types of real-world work settings we researched for a new book, Working With AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration. Human workers were very much in evidence across our 30 case studies.

The 2020 iPad Pro takes 2018's wow-factor redesign and beefs up the camera on the back with lidar (light and radar) technology, commonly used in self-driving cars, not tablet computers. The new £769 iPad Pro is essentially identical and just as stunning two years on as the original, here reviewed in its larger 12.9in form starting at £969 plus the Smart Keyboard Folio costing £199. The tablet has four excellent speakers in the sides, a USB-C port, magnetic wireless charger for the Apple Pencil stylus and a little pogo-pin smart connector on the back for keyboard cases. The camera lump has grown on the back, mirroring that used on the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, featuring a dual camera system and the lidar scanner – more on those in a moment. The Apple A12Z Bionic processor is the same as the A12X Bionic used in the 2018 iPad Pro, but with an eight-core GPU instead of seven. It performs the same: fast and smooth.

For years, people have joked that Boston Dynamics is more a maker of viral videos than of robots. The company has dazzled (and sometimes creeped out) the internet with clips of its robotic dog Spot walking, climbing stairs, jumping, dancing, and gyrating--but not doing any real work. In September, though, the company (which was previously part of Alphabet's X research arm) started leasing Spots to companies that want to put it to work, at least in pilot projects. The first to debut a full application using Spot is a German-American firm called HoloBuilder. It's equipped the robot to regularly walk large construction sites, collecting 360-degree images, a la Google Street View, so engineers can track the progress of work.