It is an issue troubling some of the greatest minds in the world at the moment, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk. SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk described AI as our'biggest existential threat' and likened its development as'summoning the demon'. He believes super intelligent machines could use humans as pets. Professor Stephen Hawking said it is a'near certainty' that a major technological disaster will threaten humanity in the next 1,000 to 10,000 years.

An NHS hospital trust has become the first to use AI robots as secretaries in an effort to cut costs. Ipswich Hospital, run by East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Trust, has'employed' three virtual workers to free up staff from'mundane and repetitive tasks', such as submitting scans and blood test results. This is thought to allow real medical secretaries more time to focus on patient care, with the system being eight times more productive than human staff, the trust claims. The system, which is run by a computer, has been in place since July and has saved more than 500 hours of work, according to the trust's deputy director of ICT Darren Atkins. Over the next nine months, the AI programme will save them £220,000, he added.

Flying warehouses, robot receptionists, smart toilets… do such innovations sound like science fiction or part of a possible reality? Technology has been evolving at such a rapid pace that, in the near future, our world may well resemble that portrayed in futuristic movies, such as Blade Runner, with intelligent robots and technologies all around us. But what technologies will actually make a difference? Based on recent advancements and current trends, here are five innovations that really could shape the future. Many typical household items can already connect to the internet and provide data.

"Front-facing robots play an important role in data gathering, and can then make connections. For instance, they can store a query and intelligently offer relevant information to a guest in future," says Pemberton. Crucially, such data can be amassed in a centralized location and delivered on demand locally, so the preferences of a guest staying in a hotel in Miami will be captured and reapplied when she checks into a hotel belonging to the same chain in say, London.

Two Belgian hospitals have added an innovative staff member to their reception desks: humanoid robots called Pepper. The robots took up assistant reception duties at hospitals in Ostend and Liege on Monday.. Related: Man v machine: can computers cook, write and paint better than us? The humanoid assistant, which has a screen on his chest and a round head, is the first robot in the world to be used to greet people in a medical setting, his software creators said. Standing 140cm (4ft 7in) tall and equipped with wheels under his white frame, Pepper can recognise the human voice in 20 languages and detect if he is talking to a man, woman or child. In Liege the robot helper, who costs about 30,000 ( 23,000), will for the moment remain in the hospital's reception area. But at the AZ Damiaan hospital in Ostend, he can accompany visitors to the department they are looking for, said Raphaël Tassart of the Belgian firm Zora Bots which developed the software inside his robot brain.

Not all questions are asked with the same intention. Humans tend to address the implicit meaning of the question (that contributes to its pragmatic force), which requires knowledge of the context and a degree of common ground, more so than addressing the explicit propositional content of the question. Is recognizing the pragmatic force in today's human-robot dialogue systems worth the trouble? We focus on display questions (questions to which the asker already knows the answer) and argue that there are realistic human-robot interaction scenarios in existence today that would benefit from the deeper intention recognition. We also propose a method for obtaining display question annotations by embedding an elicitation question into the dialogue. The preliminary study of our robot receptionist shows that at least 16.7% of interactions with the embedded elicitation question include a display question.