The movie, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was directed by Ridley Scott and stars a young Harrison Ford. For those of you who hadn't seen it, the story is set in a futuristic Los Angeles, AD 2019, just a few years down the road from us. Many regard it as a cult movie, a "neo-noir" or cyberpunk classic, in spite of its poor box office performance in the U.S. Some critics consider it one of the best movies ever made. Be it as it may, the movie does touch upon some very fundamental issues concerning the meaning of being human, which are well worth taking a closer look. From our 2011 perspective, the first thing we notice is how off the movie is in terms of predictions.

Some predict that technology will become more advanced than the human brain. Some predict that technology will become more advanced than the human brain. Ayesha and Parag Khanna are co-directors of the Hybrid Reality Institute. Ayesha is author of Straight Through Processing for Financial Services. Parag is senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance.

Ray Kurzweil is, by all accounts, a genius. He holds nineteen honorary doctorates, has founded a half-dozen successful companies, and was a major contributor to the field of artificial intelligence. He built some of the first practical systems for recognizing speech and scanning text. Time magazine recently featured Kurzweil on its cover, and Fortune described him as "a legendary inventor with a history of mind-blowing ideas." And now he has a new book, with a subtitle that suggests he has found another such idea: "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed."

Last spring, I taught a literature seminar called "Before Wikipedia." The subject was the history of encyclopedic writing, from ancient times to the present day. We read excerpts of Isidore of Seville's "Etymologies" and Diderot's "Encyclopédie" alongside works by Calvino, Sebald, and Flaubert. The word "Wikipedia" in the course title seemed to attract an unusual preponderance of science majors for a seminar in comparative literature. There were physicists and mathematicians, a cluster of coders, an engineer, a neuroscience major.

When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of illuminating the present, Jules Verne got some things right in his time, Aldous Huxley got others, and George Orwell got still others. In our time--in this terror-haunted interlude (we hope) of background-hum dread and well-founded paranoia--no literary divinator gets it righter than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick, author of "Clans of the Alphane Moon" and dozens of other books, and inspirer of some of Hollywood's spookiest dystopias, including "Blade Runner," "Total Recall," and "Minority Report." And this is odd, given that he has been dead for twenty years. It would be interesting to get his take on the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. The Information Awareness Office plays it so weird that one can't help suspecting that somebody on its staff might be putting us on.

"When Lionardo was at Milan the King of France came there and desired him to do something curious; accordingly he made a lion whose chest opened after he had walked a few steps, discovering himself to be full of lilies." Constructing a mechanical lion that could walk, let alone present flowers to the king, can't have been a simple task back in 1515 – even for a genius like Leonardo da Vinci. How he managed this feat remained a mystery until 2000, when US robotics expert Mark Rosheim came to a surprising conclusion. Pulling together fragments of notes and drawings, Rosheim worked out that the lion was almost certainly powered by a clockwork cart illustrated in da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus (see Illustration) Intriguingly, Rosheim suggested that the cart's steering mechanism was controlled by arms attached to rotating gears. With this design it would have been possible to control the automaton's movements simply by changing the position of these arms – in other words, Rosheim argues, da Vinci's lion was not only clockwork, it was also programmable.

"Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply." So said the armed robot in Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie RoboCop. The suspect drops his weapon but a fault in the robot's software means it opens fire anyway. Nearly two decades later, such fictional weapon-toting robots are looking startlingly close to reality – and New Scientist has discovered that some may eventually help to decide who is friend and who is foe.

Beating people at Scrabble is already no contest for computer programs, which can easily memorise entire dictionaries. Now a Scrabble-playing program has gone one better by playing dirty. Developed by Eyal Amir and Mark Richards at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the program is able to predict which letter tiles other players hold, and use this information to choose moves which block a high-scoring word that an opponent might otherwise have played. This aggressive gaming style gives it the edge over previous Scrabble programs, which focus solely on maximising their own scores. To predict what tiles other players hold, Amir and Richards's program begins by eliminating those tiles that have already been played. It then narrows down the possibilities by assuming that the tiles left on an opponent's rack after they make a move do not include any letters that could have been used to form higher-scoring words than the word the opponent actually played.

A robotic wine taster, capable of distinguishing between 30 different varieties or blends of grape, has been developed by engineers in Japan. The idea is to automate wine analysis so that retailers and customs officials can easily check that a wine is indeed what its label declares. The wine-bot was developed by scientists from NEC's System Technologies laboratory and Mie University, both in Japan. It is about twice the size of a 3-litre wine box and consists of a microcomputer and an optical sensing instrument. For analysis, a 5 millilitre sample of wine is poured into a tray in front of the machine.

JUST after midnight, the last subway car slips into its sidings in Hong Kong and an army of engineers goes to work. In a typical week, 10,000 people carry out 2600 engineering works across the system – from grinding rough rails smooth and replacing tracks to checking for damage. People might do the work, but they don't choose what needs doing. Instead, each task is scheduled and managed by artificial intelligence. Hong Kong has one of the world's best subway systems.