In a recent episode of Star Trek: Discovery, the crew struggled with the question of how to trust their newly sentient ship's computer Zora. The issue of trust came to a head when Zora made a unilateral decision the crew didn't like. In the face of such insubordination, is there any way the crew could trust Zora to follow the chain of command? Today's AI is many years away from suddenly waking up sentient, but the question of trust is front and center in every professional's mind. If there's a chance that some AI-driven software might get an answer wrong – either clearly incorrect or perhaps more perniciously, subtly biased – then how can we ever trust it?

In Star Trek: Discovery the answer appears to be yes, which means an old rule from The Original Series has suddenly been reversed. In the big Discovery mid-season finale "...But to Connect," David Cronenberg's Dr. Kovich returns to pass judgment over the sentient shipboard AI known as Zora (Annabelle Wallis). Here's how this episode references The Next Generation and also reaches back to one famous Original Series story about an AI gone berserk. Although much of the Discovery mid-season finale focuses on the actions the Federation will or won't take to retaliate against the unknown species that created the Dark Matter Anomaly, the bigger change is the fact that the status quo of the sentient starship computer, Zora, has taken an uplifting turn. Because Zora has achieved total sentience, Kovich is brought in to assess her.

It may not look like much -- more cute toy than futuristic marvel -- but this robot is at the center of an experiment in France to change care for elderly patients. When Zora arrived at this nursing facility an hour outside Paris, a strange thing began happening: Many patients developed an emotional attachment, treating it like a baby, holding and cooing, giving it kisses on the head. Zora, which can cost up to $18,000, offered companionship in a place where life can be lonely. Families can visit only so much, and staff members are stretched. Patients at the hospital, called Jouarre, have dementia and other conditions that require round-the-clock care.

For years, it gave the impression that it was content to live in its own little corner of the gaming world, making well-received updates to its own franchises, without really caring about what the wider industry was doing. Now we know that for all that time, it was watching and learning. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the result of that examination: a game that marries the best bits of the franchise's long history with the best bits of the rest of the gaming world, and produces something even greater than the sum of its parts. At its heart, Breath of the Wild is an open-world exploration game, in the vein of titles such as Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and FarCry 4. After completing the small starting area (and these things are, of course, relative: that area feels about as large as the entire Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time), Link is thrown into a world scattered with quests to complete, people to meet and monsters to defeat. He can find and climb towers to mark new areas on the map and travel at speed between them.

Robots have already invaded the operating room in some hospitals, but in Belgium they will soon be taking on the potentially more difficult task -- for robots, at least -- of greeting patients and giving them directions. The Citadelle regional hospital in Liège and the Damiaan general hospital in Ostend will be working with Zora Robotics to test patients' reactions to robot receptionists in the coming months. Zora already has experience programming the diminutive humanoid robot Nao to act as a chatty companion for the elderly, offering it as a form of therapy for those with dementia. Now the Belgian company is working with Nao's newer, bigger sibling, Pepper. Both were developed by French robotics company Aldebaran, now owned by Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank.

Robots have already invaded the operating room in some hospitals, but in Belgium they will soon be taking on the potentially more difficult task -- for robots, at least -- of greeting patients and giving them directions. The Citadelle regional hospital in Liège and the Damiaan general hospital in Ostend will be working with Zora Robotics to test patients' reactions to robot receptionists in the coming months. Zora already has experience programming the diminutive humanoid robot Nao to act as a chatty companion for the elderly, offering it as a form of therapy for those with dementia. Now the Belgian company is working with Nao's newer, bigger sibling, Pepper. Both were developed by French robotics company Aldebaran, now owned by Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank.

Belgian prime minster Charles Michel's recent drive to promote the country as a positive place for investment is understandable after recent terrorist activity in Brussels, but it seems he may have missed an opportunity. Right on his doorstep, in the northern Belgium coastal town of Oostende, he has a company programming and selling robotsthat help humans dance, sing and learn new skills. The global robotics market is expected to be worth 1.5bn ( 1bn) by 2019 and although currently dominated by projections for industrial robots, demand for business and consumer robotics is expected to grow seven times faster than in manufacturing. "Belgium is Belgium," says Tommy Deblieck, co-founder of QBMT Solutions, the company behind the Zora social robot. "The government has a digital agenda and we said: 'What about robotics?' The only answer we got was: 'Oops, we forgot about that.'"