Soon, software will know how you feel--and will use that data to sell you things. The gig economy will go global (but it's not Uber-take-all). The tech industry will finally be inclusive. AI will achieve something like common sense, and it will be open source too. But that future won't build itself. Actual people (at least for now) have to make these things happen, and they aren't the C-suite hotshots you always hear about. The 25 people in these pages are the unsung creative, technical, and social visionaries working to bring the incredible world of tomorrow to you today. Get to know them now. Welcome to our second annual Next List. Surveillance is about to get much harder for overly snoopy governments. In November 2014 the Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp made a big change to its Android app: It encrypted messages so that even Facebook can't descramble them, no matter how many court orders the company receives. But the crypto software wasn't written by a Facebook employee.

Online shopping giant Rakuten Inc. is venturing into the uncharted territory of drone delivery, enabling golfers to order snacks, beverages and golf equipment while playing a round. Rakuten on Monday announced the nation's first drone delivery service, a monthlong experiment from May 9 at Camel Golf Resort in Chiba Prefecture. Rakuten will then consider whether to continue and expand the service based on the results. "We decided to provide a delivery service in golf parks, since there are regulations that restrict drones from flying over crowded areas such as (urban) yards and verandas," said a Rakuten spokeswoman. A smartphone Android application will be used by golfers to have food, drink and equipment delivered to fixed pickup points.

Diffbot, an artificial intelligence company that helps clients extract and combine data from multiple Web sources, announced today it raised 10 million from investors including Tencent and Felicis Ventures to expand its "knowledge-as-a-service" offerings to businesses and consumer apps. The Palo Alto, CA-based startup, founded in 2009, still has a tiny staff of 14. But Diffbot's ambition is huge: to catalog trillions of facts across the Web--many of them drawn from page elements such as comment forums, which can't be mined by traditional search engines. The startup says it has made a significant start on that goal, having indexed 1.2 billion entities such as people, products, and places since the middle of last year. Its Global Index also encompasses 10 to 20 times that number of facts, says Diffbot founder and CEO Mike Tung.

AlphaGo, Google's artificially intelligent computer program, beat a professional human Go player last October in 4 out of 5 matches. Go is a very complex board game to master and has been around since the 1000s. The game requires the players to think ahead a few moves and consider what the opponent might or might not do. Tasks that involve a lot of decision-making or snap decisions have typically been difficult for computers to achieve. AlphaGo is helping to break that barrier.

Poaching is one of the greatest threats in the conservation of wildlife, and even patrol rangers' extreme efforts are not enough to completely fend off poachers, especially in very large protected areas. "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active, and habitual," said Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at the University of Southern California, in a statement. With these in mind, researchers, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, have developed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based application employing game theory to efficiently map out patrol routes and areas. According to the press release of National Science Foundation, game theory uses mathematical and computer models of conflict and cooperation between rational decision-makers to predict the behavior of adversaries and plan optimal approaches for containment. The application, dubbed "Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security" or PAWS, uses mathematical models to effectively analyze data from previous patrols and evidence of poaching.

Jia Yeuting may be a relative unknown in the rarefied world of Silicon Valley but the billionaire Chinese businessman in charge of the conglomerate LeEco -- which is also funding Faraday Future -- is not afraid to ruffle some pretty big feathers, taking aim at both Apple and Tesla in his first interviews with Western media. Jia called Apple "outdated," claiming the reason for Apple's slowing growth in the key Chinese market was down to a lack of innovation from the iPhone maker, pointing to the launch of the iPhone SE as an example. "From an industry insider's perspective, this is a product with a very low level of technology," Jia told CNBC. "We think this is something they just shouldn't have done." Not content with take aim at Apple, Jia, who last week launched LeEco's first self-driving car, also took aim at Tesla, saying his company would eclipse Elon Musk's electric vehicle efforts.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the buzzword in almost all industries. Decision-makers want to make use of massive data they get from various sources. This is where data analytics and artificial intelligence come into play. According to Reportbuyer, the AI market is estimated to grow to 5.05 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 53.65 per cent from 2015 to 2020. This growth can be attributed to factors such as diversified application areas, improved productivity and increased customer satisfaction. The AI market in APAC is expected to grow at the highest CAGR between 2015 and 2020.

The world's largest ad agency has hired its first artificially intelligent creative director – the rookie at McCann Erickson's Japan office is named AI-CD?. The move reminded me of an episode in the US TV series Mad Men. It is 1969, and the fictional ad agency installs its first computer, a room-filling IBM machine. "Why not let every client who sets foot in that door know that this agency has entered the future?" says one of the partners at the firm, proudly. The creative department stands grimly by, wondering if that future will include them. In 2013, Oxford economists released a widely cited projection that 47 per cent of jobs were at risk of automation.

Inside a large, windowless room in an electronics factory in south Shanghai, about 15 workers are eyeing a small robot arm with frustration. Near the end of the production line where optical networking equipment is being packed into boxes for shipping, the robot sits motionless. "The system is down," explains Nie Juan, a woman in her early 20s who is responsible for quality control. Her team has been testing the robot for the past week. The machine is meant to place stickers on the boxes containing new routers, and it seemed to have mastered the task quite nicely. But then it suddenly stopped working. "The robot does save labor," Nie tells me, her brow furrowed, "but it is difficult to maintain."

Korea has announced plans to invest roughly 100 billion won (approximately 87.2 million) to foster the development of supercomputers in the country, according to the Korea Times. Following the 5-game Go match between Google's AlphaGo programme and Go World Champion Lee Se-dol, there has been a rise in interest in AI within the country. The attention has seemingly prompted the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning to invest 10 billion won annually for the next 10 years to boost the growth of artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet-of-Things technologies and other emerging industries through supercomputers. Alongside this investment, the government has also committed to bolster its cloud computing credentials, both domestically and internationally. At a recent cloud conference, the ministry announced plans to increase the adoption of cloud computing from 6.4% to 13% over the next 12 months, as well as targeting international growth for Korean cloud computing companies.