IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS 0. AND THEN THERE WAS 1. That 3-gigabyte genome sequence represents the prime coding information of a human body -- your life as numbers. Biology, that pulsating mass of plant and animal flesh, is conceived by science today as an information process. As computers keep shrinking, we can imagine our complex bodies being numerically condensed to the size of two tiny cells. These micro-memory devices are called the egg and sperm. They are packed with information. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. That life might be information, as biologists propose, is far more intuitive than the corresponding idea that hard matter is information as well. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn't feel like we knocked into information.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. Seventeen of the world's most wired minds stake their names – and their cash – on the future. Pronouncements about the future come easy. Even when made with an air of authority, they're usually just cheap talk, rarely revisited. Only the tiny fraction that have proven correct tend to be remembered, when their authors want to take credit. The Long Bets Foundation, a new project masterminded by Well founder Stewart Brand and Wired editor at large Kevin Kelly, hopes to raise the quality of our collective foresight by incorporating money and accountability into the process of debate. If someone makes a grandiose claim, any skeptic can challenge it – "Would you bet on that?" – and the Long Bets Foundation will keep tabs on the wager, whether it takes five years or five decades to come to pass. If proven right, a predictor can relish the victory; if wrong, the challenger gets the glory. By preserving the terms of the wager in public view, Long Bets promises to be more than a service for confident prognosticators. Over time, it hopes to foster better understanding of how predictions in aggregate work out in reality – what kinds of truths are easiest (or hardest) to forecast, and what kinds of people are right (or wrong) most reliably. Following are the first-ever "long bets."

From airport tarmacs to online job banks to medical labs, artificial intelligence is everywhere. In the 1960s, cyberneticians predicted that machines would be smarter than people within 20 years. Artificially intelligent computers would be building cities on Mars and solving diplomatic crises at home. But somewhere between promise and production, the fantasy got derailed. AI came to mean a computer that could beat the pants off most chess players, but not one that could vacuum the living room or understand why it's a bad idea to spread toothpaste on toast.

What if large groups of people could go beyond ridesharing – replacing traditional car ownership altogether through on-demand access to the cars they want: a convertible in the summer, an SUV for winter ski trips? What if driving skills could be computed as a score that warned us of bad drivers nearby – real time, on the road – also enabling navigation systems to offer safer alternative routes? Imagine if we could get rid of traffic jams and accidents altogether. Or how about if our cars picked up our groceries on their own -- and dropped us off at the airport like a self-contained limo service? What if automakers could subsidize our car purchases by working with telecommunications and other companies that want to capitalize on the lifetime revenue opportunity of a connected driver?

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms it can use for something else

If two junior Navy officers have their way, the warships of the future will be floating factories that create everything from food to robots and spare parts -- all thanks to 3-D printers. Shipyards will use them on a vast scale. And when the ships need more raw materials, they'll link up with "biomining" ships that harvest raw materials from the sea. Writing in Proceedings, the influential journal of the U.S. Naval Institute, the pair write that the growth of 3-D printing machines could change almost everything about how the Navy builds stuff "through the design and construction of ships, submarines, aircraft, and everything carried on board." On a smaller scale, they write that 3-D printers could change the way the Navy handles logistics and the way it produces tools, components and supplies for its ships.

Cars are getting smarter and beginning to react on their own, but the gray matter manning the helm is still the vehicle's Achilles heel. So to really get inside a driver's head, automakers are going through their faces, analyzing expressions and muscle movements to determine whether the person at the wheel is too distracted, too tired or even too angry to safely control their ride. In conjunction with PSA Peugeot Citroën, scientists at the Transportation Center and Signal Processing 5 Laboratory of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland are developing a technology that uses a camera to capture facial expressions and software to look for telltale signs of distraction as well as emotions that could indicate that the driver is not up to the task at hand. Think of it as a concerned co-pilot who can not only read your mood, but also take action before your mental condition clouds your driving decisions. "We aim at optimally exploiting computer vision technologies to improve safety and comfort in cars through more natural human-machine interfaces," Jean-Philippe Thiran, the director of EPFL's Signal Processing 5 Laboratory, told Wired.

LOS ANGELES--Will.i.am sounds congested and subdued, his batteries running low after a high-octane appearance on The Ellen Show earlier that day. He's longing for 2025, when an artificial intelligence will be able to tell him to take it easy. "Will, you sound like you are stuffy," he says in the voice of this fictional AI. "What did you eat recently? Stay away from sweets because they are causing you more mucus. You should get some rest tonight. I'm going to cancel your appointments from 7 pm. I've already bought you some epsom salts from CVS. Go and pick them up."

A few years ago, Benedikt Groß and Joey Lee made an atlas of all the swimming pools in Los Angeles. Big Atlas of LA Pools used satellite imagery to create an exhaustive visual overview of Angeleños' love affair with pools--all 43,123 of them. While assembling the book, Groß, a computational designer, and Lee, a geographer, noticed something else in the images: Buildings look a lot different when seen from 400 miles up. Sometimes, they look like letters. A year later, Groß and Lee launched a Kickstarter for Aerial Bold, a project devoted to finding all the human-built letters of the world.

Google is teaching machines to play Atari games like Space Invaders, Video Pinball, and Breakout. At DeepMind, a Google subsidiary based in Cambridge, England, researchers have built artificial intelligence software that's so adept at these classic games, it can sometimes beat a human player--and a professional, at that. This may seem like a frivolous, if intriguing, pursuit. If a machine can learn to navigate the digital world of a video game, Google says, it eventually could learn to navigate the real world, too. Today, this AI can play Space Invaders.