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.

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.

In Leena Krohn's novella "Datura, or A Figment Seen by Everyone," the narrator, who works for a paranormal-news magazine, transcribes the inscrutable fifteenth-century text known as the Voynich manuscript while slowly poisoning herself with the seeds from a datura plant. Datura is known to cause delirium and dissociation, but it may also ease the symptoms of asthma, which the narrator has. Though she is skeptical of supernatural phenomena, the datura slowly undermines that skepticism; each day seems to bring one serendipitous event after another, not to mention mild hallucinations. The narrator describes feeling as though meaning is floating on the surface of things, untethered from their physical reality. "What does the word refer to," she asks, in a deconstructionist turn, "does it really signify anything at all?"

London, Sep 13(ANI): A new artificial intelligence computer programme, which can beat 99 per cent of fantasy football players, could one day be used to save lives by selecting a dream team of medical staff. In fantasy football, participants play as a manager and select teams using real-life football league players, with 15 to a squad, no more than three from any one team, and within a set budget, and only a limited number of player transfers are allowed throughout the season. The researchers behind the software replicated the results of previous seasons of fantasy football, and the three computer scientists behind the software found that against the league's 2.5 million human participants in 2010, it would have beaten all but 2,500 people Now, the team from the UK and Greece hope their research can be used to assign teams of emergency workers based on the different abilities of available personnel. This season the researchers hope to test the software in a live fantasy football competition, and they also hope that once the programme is perfected, it can be put to life-saving solutions in the real world. "Team formation is a significantly challenging problem for existing emergency responders, and typically what they do is they train a lot, and they try and understand each other and try to understand what other capabilities they might need for different kinds of emergencies," the Daily Mail quoted Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn of the University of Southampton, as saying.

According to the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, every psychologist must at some point in his or her career write a sentence of the form: "The human being is the only animal that ----". It is not only psychologists who feel impelled to write "the Sentence", as Brian Christian calls these statements of human uniqueness. Versions of the Sentence can be found scattered throughout the writings of theologians and atheists, rationalists and existentialists, revolutionaries and reactionaries and every sort of social and cultural theorist. The attributes that are supposed to make human beings special have varied. Often those who insist that we belong in a different category from other animals fix on consciousness as the definitive human attribute.

"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.

COMPARED with their human counterparts, today's game-playing computer programs are really quite boring. However skilful they may be, each is only ever good at one game. Take the chess-playing computer Deep Blue, developed by IBM. Although it beat human world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, present it with much simpler games such as checkers or noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) and it wouldn't have a clue where to begin. "Deep Blue can't play checkers at all," says Michael Genesereth, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

A crossword-solving computer program yesterday triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English. The competition took place in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. WebCrow took on 25 human competitors, mostly conference attendees, while more than 50 crossword enthusiasts and AI researchers competed online. Among the five crosswords were two American-style ones from that day's editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.