For this week's Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled "Strange Playfellow." It was about an artificially intelligent machine named Robbie that acts as a companion for Gloria, a young girl. Asimov was not the first to explore such technology. In Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R.," which débuted in 1921 and introduced the term "robot," artificial men overthrow humanity, and in Edmond Hamilton's 1926 short story "The Metal Giants" machines heartlessly smash buildings to rubble.

In Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction story "Robbie," the Weston family owns a robot who serves as a nursemaid and companion for their precocious preteen daughter, Gloria. Gloria and the robot Robbie are friends; their relationship is affectionate and mutually caring. Gloria regards Robbie as her loyal and dutiful caretaker. However, Mrs. Weston becomes concerned about this "unnatural" relationship between the robot and her child and worries about the possibility of Robbie causing harm to Gloria (despite it's being explicitly programmed to not do so); it is clear she is jealous. After several failed attempts to wean Gloria off Robbie, her father, exasperated and worn down by the mother's protestations, suggests a tour of a robot factory--there, Gloria will be able to see that Robbie is "just" a manufactured robot, not a person, and fall out of love with it.

In 2019, Greta Gerwig became the latest in a line of writers, directors, and producers to make a pilgrimage to a toy workshop in El Segundo, California. Touring the facility, the Mattel Design Center, has become a rite of passage for Hollywood types who are considering transforming one of the company's products into a movie--a list that now includes such names as J. J. Abrams (Hot Wheels) and Vin Diesel (Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots). The building has hundreds of workspaces for artists, model-makers, and project managers, and it houses elaborate museum-style exhibitions that document the company's history and core products. These displays can help a toy designer find inspiration; they can also offer a "brand immersion"--a crash course in a Mattel property slated for adaptation. When a V.I.P. visits, Richard Dickson, a tall, bespectacled man who is the company's chief operating officer, plays the role of Willy Wonka. He'll show off the sixty-five-year-old machines that are still used to affix fake hair to Barbies; he'll invite you to inspect life-size, road-ready replicas of Hot Wheels cars. The center even boasts a giant rendering of Castle Grayskull, the fearsome ancestral home of He-Man.

When AI agents don't align their actions with human values they may cause serious harm. One way to solve the value alignment problem is by including a human operator who monitors all of the agent's actions. Despite the fact, that this solution guarantees maximal safety, it is very inefficient, since it requires the human operator to dedicate all of his attention to the agent. In this paper, we propose a much more efficient solution that allows an operator to be engaged in other activities without neglecting his monitoring task. In our approach the AI agent requests permission from the operator only for critical actions, that is, potentially harmful actions. We introduce the concept of critical actions with respect to AI safety and discuss how to build a model that measures action criticality. We also discuss how the operator's feedback could be used to make the agent smarter.

A robot is being trained to recognise signs of dementia – by watching TV. Robbie the Robot, believed to be the first gadget of its kind, binge-watched ITV soap opera Emmerdale to learn how to recognise facial expressions. The machine monitored 65,082 images of the character Ashley Thomas – who developed dementia – from more than 13 episodes of the programme. Already able to spot aggressiveness and depression – possible signs of the degenerative brain disease – researchers hope Robbie will help diagnose patients. And they will now show it scenes from the sitcom Friends to help it learn about social interactions.

Visual object recognition, speech recognition, machine translation – these are among the "holy grails" of artificial intelligence research. But machines are now at a level that the benchmark performance for these three areas has reached, and even surpassed, human levels. Moreover, in the space of 24 hours, a single program, AlphaZero, became by far the world's best player in three games – chess, Go, and Shogi – to which it had no prior exposure. These developments have provoked some alarmist reporting in the media, invariably accompanied by pictures of Terminator robots, but predictions of imminent superhuman AI are almost certainly wrong – we're still several conceptual breakthroughs away. On the other hand, massive investments in AI research, several hundred billion pounds over the next decade, suggest further rapid advances are not far away.

Back in 1999, I was asked to write a short article for Sm@rt Reseller magazine about the future of computing, because (allegedly) science fiction authors are in the business of contemplating the future. Science fiction authors often consider what might happen "If this goes on--" where technology writers are best at "Here's what we've got." Some of the trends toward convergence seemed obvious to me at the time, so I put down a few thoughts…which turned out to be far more prescient than I expected. But, see, here's the thing: Science fiction authors don't predict the future. It's just that once in a while, something that someone imagines does end up as a fact, and this is why some people think science fiction is a literature of prediction.

"The truck regarded them calmly, its receptors blank and impassive. It was doing its job. The planet-wide network of automatic factories was smoothly performing the task imposed on it five years before, in the early days of the Total Global Conflict." Written by famous and farsighted Phillip K. Dick in 1955, his central characters, three human survivors of the War, fight these factories and finally succeed in regaining control by eventually turning them against each other and thus making them destroying themselves. Above scenario describes a world in which humans constantly struggle to outsmart machines that are as smart as mice.

Henry Wellman is the Harold W. Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Kimberly Brink is a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov collected a series of his short stories on robots in his now famous anthology I, Robot. The series "revolutionized science fiction ... and made robots far more interesting than they ever had been," according to the Saturday Evening Post. I, Robot begins with a lesser-known story: Robbie.

Relonch wanted me all to fall in love with photography again this CES. But its camera is so radically different from everything I've used before, I struggled to put my faith in its promise. The company is based in Palo Alto, California, and its pitch is simple, if very Silicon Valley: A camera as a service. You hand in your old shooter (yes, really) and in return you get the 291, a unique leather-bound DLSR-shaped camera. It has an APS-C sensor, a fixed, 45mm-equivalent lens, an electronic viewfinder, a shutter key and, importantly, a 4G radio inside.