The week in radio: The Rise of the Robots; I, Robot; In Our Time: John Clare

Isaac Asimov’s prophetic play and Adam Rutherford’s The Rise of the Robots revealed that our fear of machines is nothing new

Mechanical silver swan that entranced Mark Twain lands at Science Museum

An 18th-century automaton admired by US writer to be star attraction at London museum’s Robots exhibition

Brad Stone: ‘We should watch Uber and Airbnb closely’

The author of new book The Upstarts on how the new breed of tech startups changed the rules of the game

The Attention Merchants review – how the web is being debased for profit

Tim Wu on a decades-long campaign to monetise attention which has reached new intensity in the Facebook age

Libraries are dying – but it’s not about the books

The internet stole the monopoly on knowledge but it can’t recreate a sense of place. Revival is possible

Why does Bill Gates want you to read The Myth of the Strong Leader?

The Microsoft billionaire’s annual reading list includes a 2014 study by British political scholar Archie Brown – a choice, he says, that was inspired by the US election

Verse goes viral: how young feminist writers are reclaiming poetry for the digital age

Fusing writing, music, art and technology, a new generation is taking poetry beyond the bookstore

Jarett Kobek: ‘The internet has been enormously detrimental to society’

The author of Silicon Valley satire I Hate the Internet on the evils of social media, and how novelists have failed to tackle it

You can’t judge a book by its cover – if you’re a robot

An algorithm has been built to predict a book’s genre by its cover. Sadly for online booksellers, it doesn’t do a very good job

Ted Chiang, the science fiction genius behind Arrival

The award-winning writer’s complex, thoughtful and futuristic stories should prove fertile ground for film-makers now Hollywood has discovered him

Tetris: The Games People Play by Box Brown review – the history of a global phenomenon

This story of idealism, legal wrangling and vast profits reveals a fascinating moment in cultural history

Minecraft, books, panto… and pugs! YouTube star DanTDM opens up

His games channel has 12.7m subscribers, but Daniel Middleton’s horizons are expanding into publishing and theatre

TinyLetter: the mini saviour of modern poetry?

TinyLetters are a simple but radical new email marketing tool that could save poetry and short fiction from obscurity by winning authors a bigger audience

Read it and bleep: is virtual reality the future of storytelling?

The inaugural Future of Storytelling festival afforded a glimpse at a new era of narrative collaboration. Are notions like reader, author and page a thing of the past?

In the age of the algorithm, the human gatekeeper is back

The rise of algorithms has been relentless, but we need human input in our world of technological innovations