A woman who was walking her dog in Milton Keynes, England, saw a delivery robot plunge "straight into the canal." Starship Technologies has urged residents not to worry if they see one of its robots in distress. The company noted, however, that people should report any sightings of their machines "swimming or in any other odd situation." ESPECIALLY BALL HANDLING: A man, shooting hoops in the nude at a park in Longwood, Fla., at 7:30 on a Sunday night, told arresting officers that he thought playing naked would help improve his basketball skills. A 23-year-old man kicked several people out of his family's home in Glassboro, N.J., stole a neighbor's pickup truck and got into an accident involving two other vehicles.

It's the classic trope of buddy cop movies: you introduce two characters with little in common aside from the job that they do. Maybe one's a maverick and the other is a stickler for doing things by the book. At first they don't get along. Perhaps one is new to the precinct and the other fears that they're being phased out as a result. But, wouldn't you know it, they turn out to be a great team.

It's the classic trope of buddy cop movies: you introduce two characters with little in common aside from the job that they do. Maybe one's a maverick and the other is a stickler for doing things by the book. At first they don't get along. Perhaps one is new to the precinct and the other fears that they're being phased out as a result. But, wouldn't you know it, they turn out to be a great team.

In "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans," Melanie Mitchell, a computer science professor at Portland State University, tells the story, one of many, of a graduate student who had seemingly trained a computer network to classify photographs according to whether they did or did not contain an animal. When the student looked more closely, however, he realized that the network was not recognizing animals but was instead putting images with blurry backgrounds in the "contains an animal" category. The nature photos that the network had been trained on typically featured both an animal in focus in the foreground and a blurred background. The machine had discovered a correlation between animal photos and blurry backgrounds. Mitchell notes that these types of misjudgments are not unusual in the field of AI. "The machine learns what it observes in the data rather than what you (the human) might observe," she explains.

This is what many people fear when they think about artificial intelligence. But AI technology is often misunderstood, and the many benefits of machine intelligence are easy to overlook. The dystopian vision of AI as an omniscient superintelligence is nothing like the technology we see and use today. Contemporary AI is actually a cluster of related technologies--machine learning, supervised learning, and computer vision, for example--that allow companies to automate tasks at large scale. "There are a lot of real risks to AI," said CNET senior editor Stephen Shankland, like "job displacement, more advanced weapons, and new ways for humans to be bad to other humans."

It's 600 pounds of orange and black metal and whirring motors, a massive robotic arm that picks up car parts and places them on a table. Like its ancestors have done for decades, this industrial robot does the heavy lifting that no human worker could manage, and it does so with extreme speed and precision. Unlike its forebears, though, this industrial robot isn't confined to a cage: Most factory robots work in enforced solitude to make sure their human colleagues stay safe. This machine is working right alongside a human laborer. The robot places a part on the table, and the worker tightens bits with a wrench.

We're in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – driverless cars, virtual assistants and the gig economy are only a glimpse of what is still to come. Perhaps unsurprisingly, coverage of technological change is often pessimistic and focused on machines'taking our jobs'. And we can indeed already see some areas where this kind of displacement is taking place – in supermarkets, airports and banks – to name a few. But why are we so afraid of the future? Why is that the talk of the implications of artificial intelligence is about our soon-to-be robot overlords and mass unemployment, instead of the opportunities new technology presents?

Love it or loathe it, artificial intelligence is the new communications buzzword. And during the next few years, it's going to change the way we work. But should we be fearful of our new robot overlords, or be ready to join the AI revolution? During the past few months, we've been looking at how it works as part of our Talkwalker AI Engine launch. And with that, plenty of research around how artificial intelligence is affecting our lives. But what surprised me the most, was how divisive the subject is.

Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science will offer an undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence starting in the upcoming fall semester. The Pittsburgh-based school is the first to offer such a program in the US. Many industry experts believe there aren't enough qualified candidates in the workforce to fill all the vacancies that technology companies have for people with AI-related skills. This program could contribute quality candidates, though perhaps more importantly the prestige of Carnegie Mellon may spur other institutions to offer similar programs. Are you doing business in Amsterdam in May?

I have been interested in robots and robotics since I was very young. The term robot is attributed to the author Karel Čapek through his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which includes a factory that makes artificial people called roboti (robots) from synthetic organic matter.1 Most of us think of robots as mechanical contraptions, but the robots in R.U.R. were artificial humanoids grown from a process that produced living, thinking beings. My interest in robots was stimulated sometime in the 1960s by reading the novel I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.2 Since then, our imaginations have been sparked by other robots, including Gort, the menacing protector in The Day the Earth Stood Still;3 the robot in the television series and movie Lost in Space ("Danger, Will Robinson! Some of the robots have been humaniform (e.g., Gort, Hector, C-3PO, and Data) and others have not (e.g., HAL and R2-D2). I also remember as a teenager reading the comic books about Magnus, Robot Fighter, a human trained by a robot to battle rogue robots in the year 4000.10 The robotics imagined by Isaac Asimov followed (for the most part) four laws of robotics that he formulated: "(0) A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.