Top 10 predictions In the 21st century, I bet the following 10 things happening: 1) Man/Women walking on Mars. As is currently happening in India and southeast Asia and with the advent of cheap labor and nearly free energy (Africa's desert is a prime location for solar power). It will surely attract hefty amounts of foreign investment 4) Genetic and Stem Cell research collide and make discovery's that lead to cures for almost all genetic disorders. It'll be like INTERPOL on steriods and very little red tape. Their capabilities powers will broaden with every terrorist attack.

Immediately after 9/11, politicians and pundits slammed the Bush administration for failing to "connect the dots" foreshadowing the attack. For two years now, left- and right-wing advocates have shot down nearly every proposal to use intelligence more effectively--to connect the dots--as an assault on "privacy." Though their facts are often wrong and their arguments specious, they have come to dominate the national security debate virtually without challenge. The consequence has been devastating: just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction. "No one in the research and development community is putting together tools to make us safer," says Lee Zeichner of Zeichner Risk Analytics, a risk consultancy firm, "because they're afraid" of getting caught up in a privacy scandal. The chilling effect has been even stronger in government. "Many perfectly legal things that could be done ...

Science fiction has a long tradition of pitting artificial intelligence (AI) against humanity in a struggle for dominance. Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering and a noted futurist and inventor, envisions a more co-operative future. He says the human brain will soon merge with computer networks to form a hybrid artificial intelligence. "In the 2030s we're going to connect directly from the neocortex to the cloud," said Kurzweil, speaking at the Exponential Finance conference in New York on June 3. "When I need a few thousand computers, I can access that wirelessly."

Contact centres have given a big thumbs-down to speech recognition, according to an IVR survey carried out by Call Centre Helper. Only 18% of contact centres (that fronted their calls with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system) used it in combination with speech recognition. The IVR survey was carried out on the Call Centre Helper website in February 2012 and had a total of 425 respondees. This seems to tie in with the latest figures kindly provided by Steve Morrell of ContactBabel from the latest Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide, showing an average of 10% of contact centres using speech recognition. The big problem seems to be the overall accuracy – particularly with regional accents.

Anybody who has been to British chef Heston Blumenthal's world-famous Fat Duck restaurant in the UK village of Bray will know that strange flavours do work together. There egg and bacon ice cream, snail porridge and tobacco-infused chocolate were born. Blumenthal has acquired something of a mad scientist reputation - half chef, half molecular physicist - but even he might raise an eyebrow at the possibility that a computer could create such daring and flavoursome recipes. But that is exactly what IBM is setting out to do as its increasingly intrepid supercomputer Watson takes on that most human of activities - cooking. Watson's flavourbots will be churning out recipes at the annual interactive, film and music festival SXSW, offering visitors to its base in Austin, Texas some hopefully algorithmically delicious dishes, served via a food van.

The vast brainpower of IBM's supercomputer Watson is to be utilised in Africa to attempt to solve some of the continent's most pressing problems. Better agriculture, education and health are just three of the improvements the system could bring, said the firm. Watson uses artificial intelligence to analyse huge amounts of data and can also understand human language. Experts said such a system could help the African economy "leapfrog" others. The project dubbed, Lucy, after the earliest known human ancestor fossil which was found in east Africa, will cost $100m (£61m) and take 10 years to complete.

This week, another chance to enjoy a virtuoso public performance by one of the most important philosophers in the English-speaking world today: John Searle, Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley. He's talking at'Towards a Science of Consciousness', a conference put on last year by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. More than 350 years ago, the great French philosopher, Rene Déscartes, declared that the mind is a thing that thinks and does not occupy space, whereas the body occupies space and does not think. The decisive argument for this, he said, is that body is by its nature divisible: you can cut it up into little pieces, but you can't do that with a mind. This seems to imply that the mind and the body have a different ontological status - in other words, you don't lump them together when you draw up your ontology, that's to say your inventory of what the universe contains. This is dualism, and John Searle's not happy with the idea. John Searle: I have been trying to get out of the consciousness business for a very simple reason: I think once we get it in a kind of shape where it admits of empirical study, it's essentially a problem for a neurobiologist.

"Wear that blue-colored dress today, it matches your new shoes." "Go to Tahiti on vacation, there is a good price now for tickets for this destination." All of these pieces of advice and more come from AI assistants. A wide range of these assistants have emerged to make our lives better: big ones like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and SoundHound and multiple startups that are trying to conquer the market. Alterrа, for example, will help you choose the country for your next vacation.

Microsoft's Kinect, the motion-sensing system that lets users play Xbox games without a controller, has been repurposed for many a hack, from steering RC cars to Whole Foods shopping carts. Now, researchers at North Carolina State University say they're employing the video game technology to gather information about how best to control a swarm of circuit-equipped cockroaches. Once the system is refined, a troop of these roach biobots could be sent into the wreckage of a collapsed building or an earthquake, in order to save your life. Late last year, the NC State engineers demonstrated how they could direct a remote-controlled roach through an S-shaped course with a 10 percent success rate. In this iteration of the experiment, the electronic backpacks lugged by the roaches--which take over their movements in a kind of creepy robo-possession--remain the same.

"Can you hold on a minute? I need to charge my robot." Uri Kartoun is developing robots, nicknamed EDNex and Clango, for handling suspicious packages. Down the hall, classmate Juan Wachs is working on a computer interface that responds to hand gestures. Both are enrolled in a joint master's/Ph.D. program in intelligent systems at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, located in Beersheba, Israel [see photo, " School Daze"]. But their reasons for choosing Ben-Gurion were very different and illustrate the range of issues prospective students should consider when choosing an engineering graduate program.