23 February 2022
Machines that can mate and produce offspring can help us clean up nuclear sites, explore asteroids and terraform distant planets – but could they prove a threat, asks Emma Hart, who is helping develop them
20 November 2019
Sentient machines with empathy and morality are coming. We urgently need to make some life-and-death decisions about their rights
18 September 2019
Far from being a mystical “ghost in the machine”, consciousness evolved as a practical mental tool and we could engineer it in a robot using these simple guidelines
4 September 2019
The boom in online retail has left our streets clogged with polluting delivery vans. We navigate the high-tech solutions that will distribute your parcels without the damaging emissions
30 January 2019
Boston Dynamics builds robots that can open doors, dance and do parkour. The machine age is stepping up a gear, but first the bots need brains
2 August 2018
From Battlestar Galactica to The Terminator, on-screen robots have never been above a little rule-breaking. Could our new laws of robotics keep them in line?
1 August 2018
From election-rigging bots to potentially lethal autonomous cars, artificial intelligence is straining legal boundaries. Here's what we need to keep it in check
11 April 2018
From next month, EU citizens will have sweeping rights to know what computers are thinking about them – but can that work, and if so how?
19 December 2017
Will the machines rise up and enslave us? The history of incompetent robots, from klutzy cleaners to sense-mangling chatbots, suggests we can sleep easy
25 October 2017
We've lost faith in experts, but increasingly rely on strangers we meet online. Is it wise to replace long-evolved instincts at the click of a button?
