TV review: Brave New World With Stephen Hawking; Origins of Us

I was worried, because of the name in its title, that I might not entirely understand Brave New World With Stephen Hawking (Channel 4), that it might be some sort of televised version of A Brief History of WTF. I needn't have; it's basically Tomorrow's World (ah, remember?), but bigger, glossier, better. With lots of top TV science people doing bits. And Hawking narrating, using his new voice. The voice will take some getting used to: there's something of Kitt the Knightrider car about it. But it is much easier to listen to for any length of time than the old one with the funny intonation, the one Hawking had when he used to be in Radiohead and The Simpsons.

So this opener is about machines. And an extraordinary driverless car which is brilliant if only because it means that Jeremy Clarkson will not just be cross, he'll be redundant as a human being (unless he is already). The car has been created – annoyingly somehow – by Google. It will do everything soon, including control your mind (unless it does already).

The car is brilliant though; it sends out pulses and lasers, knows where it is and what's around it. Not only can it negotiate a difficult course at speed, but it already works on the road. To the extent that the state of Nebraska is in the process of passing laws about autonomous vehicles. Not so much Tomorrow's World then, as Later Today's World. This car can even join a busy motorway from a slip road, which makes Google a better driver than my mum.

In Switzerland, Mark Evans, usually to be found Insides Nature's Giants, drives a different kind of vehicle, a motorised wheelchair, using only the power of his mind. Joy Reidenberg, usually with Mark tugging at whales' intestines, reports on an amazing exoskeleton that enables paralysed people to walk again, and can give one man the strength of three. In Italy, the theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili meets a toddler robot that learns by experience, like a human child. And in the Canary Islands Maggie Aderin-Pocock looks through a telescope that may look like a big roll-on deodorant, but is so powerful it can see the beginning of the universe.

It's seductive, sexy science – gizmos and gadgets that are immediately and obviously impressive. Presented by a new breed of TV science people who don't have wild hair or white coats. That's fine by me. And there are plenty of big questions there too, if you peer beyond the technology. About whether there's life elsewhere, for example. And how our role changes in this technological revolution. I mean, if machines can drive better than us, and work and think and even learn, it won't be long before it's not just the car we're taking a back seat in. We'll be redundant, all of us Jeremy Clarksons. Now that is scary.

If that one is about the future, and our imminent demise, then Origins of Us (BBC2) is about the past and the beginning. It's presented by Dr Alice Roberts, number two BBC science totty (after Brian Cox). Dr Alice is amazing – she does anatomy, medicine, geology, history, hearty outdoor stuff that involves brightly coloured technical clothing, wild swimming, you name it. This one is about bones, and what skeletons say about our evolutionary  journey.

Roberts goes to Africa, where it all began, and meets some chimps, and some of our ancestors, in skeleton form. She speaks in that way Cox does, full of ecstatic wonder and amazement, as if everything she's saying is extraordinary. It is, I guess; the story of our evolution, how an ape stood up, then walked out of the forest, and made tools that in turn shaped our anatomy. Perhaps the driverless cars and robot children we're creating now will shape our anatomy in future – we'll be blobs, then sterile blobs, then nothing.

Not quite yet though. And Roberts is neither a blob, nor nothing. She stands in front of the enormous African sun, beaming and magnificently backlit. And again, this time later in the day, burnished bronze and statuesque in the low sun. Then running, like a gazelle across the savannah to some suitable electronic music, against the sun again, always against the sun.

Even on a treadmill in a lab at Harvard University she's filmed against the light. It's now practically impossible to think of Dr Alice Roberts without a halo. She is the golden girl, in a golden glow. She's amazing.