Where are the robots, exactly? One answer—if you read the steady flow of doomy articles online — is that automation is everywhere, not just all over the media but (you would have to conclude) thoroughly infiltrating the economy. In that sense, the trend seems omnipresent even as it spawns a kind of free-floating dread amongst the chattering class. Yet, that can’t be right. Almost nothing in today’s economy is evenly distributed, whether it be technology, productivity, output, or inclusive prosperity.

Some of the world’s leading robotics and artificial intelligence pioneers are calling on the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots. Tesla’s Elon Musk and Google’s Mustafa Suleyman are leading a group of 116 specialists from across 26 countries who are calling for the ban on autonomous weapons.

The rise of military ‘killer robots’ is almost inevitable and any attempt at an international ban will struggle to stop an arms race, according to a former defence chief who was responsible for predicting the future of warfare.

The technology took years to develop, and now a Chinese firm is using it in a massive new US factory that will churn out 1.2 million t-shirts per year.

Perhaps the best way to think of what makes a human being human is to look at something that seems almost human and subtract the difference. Whatever is left over is what is unique to us. That seems to be the thinking behind the Finnish photographer Maija Tammi’s One of Them Is a Human #1, a portrait of Erica, the Japanese android who was declared the most realistic female human robot of 2016.

Thanks to incredible advancements in artificial intelligence robots have quickly become man’s best friend, but getting them to actually work together is still a tough challenge to overcome. The way that most of even the most intelligent robots are built leads them to want to kind of do their own thing, but a team of researchers has just developed a system that completely changes things and allows their bots to not just coexist, but to actually team up and become something even greater.

In one of the most beautiful theaters of Italian tradition, Maestro Bocelli sang as YuMi directed “La Donna è Mobile,” the famous aria from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” YuMi continued conducting as soloist Maria Luigia Borsi sang the classic soprano aria “O mio babbino caro” from “Gianni Schicchi” by Puccini.

Artificial intelligence researchers at MIT have developed a virtual reality system for robots that allows humans to control them remotely. The system works by using hand controllers and multiple sensor displays to enable users to teleoperate a robot using an Oculus Rift headset. A paper detailing the system was presented this week at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The country's gender gap has left young men desperate for high-tech alternatives.

The comfort a robot pet provides the aged is like all cat love: hard to understand, but it works. By Jeremy D. Larson (Mar. 24, 2016)

Salad bars are magnets for bacteria and viruses. Even if the sprouts and ranch dressing aren't tainted, the serving utensils may be. The Silicon Valley start-up Chowbotics has devised what it says is a partial solution. Its device, which it calls Sally the Salad Robot, is aimed at reducing the risk of food-borne illness by assembling salads out of precut vegetables stored in refrigerated canisters.

Japanese technology company Sony will return to the robotics field with a refreshed version of Aibo, a household robot resembling a dog. The new version of the dog-robot -- originally launched in 1999 and halted in 2006 as part of Sony's cost-cutting and reorganisation efforts -- will be equipped with internet connectivity as well as artificial intelligence, according to Nikkei Asian Review.

With all the recent talk of AI posing existential risks to humanity and our privacy, Japanese company Omron is taking a softer, more innocuous approach. Specifically, with its table tennis robot Forpheus, which strives to pursue “harmony of humans and machines” by patiently teaching us how to play ping-pong.

Chinese startup Unitree Robotics unveils Laikago quadruped robot

Robots will soon be roaming up and down the aisles in 50 Walmart stores, scanning for out-of-stock items and other errors.

Robots have ruled industrial production for decades in many fields, from the auto industry to food processing and consumer electronics. The Singularity...

Women in Saudi Arabia have scorned the government's decision to grant citizenship to a female robot who, unlike them, does not need a male guardian or have to cover her head in public. Social media was abuzz with questions about whether the robot, Sophia, who was unveiled at a technology conference in the capital Riyadh last week, will be treated like other women in the conservative kingdom now that she is a citizen.

Hundreds of artificial intelligence experts have urged the Canadian and Australian governments to ban “killer robots”. They say that delegating life-or-death decisions to machines crosses “a clear moral line”, and that the development of autonomous weapons will result in machines, rather than people, deciding who lives and who dies. Such systems, including drones, military robots and unmanned vehicles, should be treated in the same way as chemical weapons, biological weapons and nuclear weapons, they say.

Harvard’s robot bees have really evolved over the years. The RoboBee project was first unveiled in 2013, when the bots were only capable of takeoff and flying. Since then, they’ve been modified to stick to surfaces and swim underwater, and now their creators say they’re able to dive in and out of water — a big achievement for a tiny robot bee.

Do we have the courage to act now?