"When I think about the future of robots and society, I don't see machine overlords" Are you worried that AI-powered robots are going to steal our jobs and maybe kill us all? But it is time to play devil's advocate with yourself and consider whether the opposite might be true. My new novel, Automatic Noodle, out later this year, is about four robots who struggle to find employment in a country where humans have made laws preventing bots from unionising, opening bank accounts, voting and owning their own businesses. Yes, it is science fiction. But it is based on real tech – and, more importantly, it explores the implications of our deeply held suspicion that robots are evil.

From Siri and Alexa to driverless cars and robots, artificial intelligence and the many devices AI inhabits are well integrated into our everyday lives. But as the technology advances, ethical and moral questions arise. Ten Years Hence, an annual lecture series sponsored by the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, will explore advances in AI and the potential implications for the human community. The series "Automation, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence: The Decade Ahead" takes place on select Fridays from 10:40 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. in Mendoza's Jordan Auditorium. The Ten Years Hence speaker series explores issues, ideas and trends likely to affect business and society over the next decade.

In a soft-furnished studio space behind a warehouse in west Berlin, a group of international scientists are debating our robot future. An engineer from a major European carmaker is just finishing a cautiously optimistic progress report on self-driving vehicles. Increasingly, he explains, robot cars are learning to differentiate cars from more vulnerable moving objects such as pedestrians or cyclists. Some are already better than humans at telling apart different breeds of dog. "But of course," he says, "these are small steps."

Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are going to completely change how we live and work but the UK government is totally unprepared, MPs have warned. The Science and Technology Committee released a report on Wednesday warning that the UK government "does not yet have a strategy" for equipping citizens with the skills they need to flourish in a world where AI is more prevalent. It also has no strategy for dealing with the social and ethical dilemmas that AI advances present, according to the report. Acting chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Dr Tania Mathias MP, said in a statement: "Artificial intelligence has some way to go before we see systems and robots as portrayed in the creative arts such as Star Wars. At present, 'AI machines' have narrow and specific roles, such as in voice-recognition or playing the board game'Go'. "But science fiction is slowly becoming science fact, and robotics and AI look destined to play an increasing role in our lives over the coming decades.

Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are going to completely change how we live and work but the UK government is totally unprepared, MPs have warned. The Science and Technology Committee released a report on Wednesday warning that the UK government "does not yet have a strategy" for equipping citizens with the skills they need to flourish in a world where AI is more prevalent. It also has no strategy for dealing with the social and ethical dilemmas that AI advances present, according to the report. Acting chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Dr Tania Mathias MP, said in a statement: "Artificial intelligence has some way to go before we see systems and robots as portrayed in the creative arts such as Star Wars. At present, 'AI machines' have narrow and specific roles, such as in voice-recognition or playing the board game'Go'. "But science fiction is slowly becoming science fact, and robotics and AI look destined to play an increasing role in our lives over the coming decades.

Will we ever learn to love our robot future? With rapid advances in this technology – sex robots, companion bots and more are said to be around the corner – it seems a reasonable question to ask, especially given almost every fictional account of that future is still a dark "us and them" tale. With the reboot of sci-fi yarns such as Westworld and Humans on television, androids – the class of robots designed to be utterly human-like – are once again capturing our imaginations. It was in 1970 that professor Masahiro Mori from the Tokyo Institute of Technology predicted that as we try to make robots more human, we would reach a point where we were disturbed and repulsed by them as they became almost, but not quite, human. He labelled this effect the "uncanny valley" – hypothesising that when technology improved and robots became truly human-like, then we would once again feel comfortable with them.

Those are the robots we think about when we consider the future. I mean, I can't speak for anyone, you might have images of a future populated with robots like Wall-E (hah!) or Robot the robot off Lost in Space (really?) or Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina (too easy). But is that really how it's going to be? I look forward to the robot future, but let's face it - it's going to be boring. When I say boring, I don't mean you wouldn't be amazed if you fell through time right now and landed in the year 2100 and saw robots everywhere.