It's hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione? With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive "long enough" to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he's 66 and he believes that "some of the baby-boomers will make it through"). Or with the fact that he's predicted that in 15 years' time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do.

The scientist behind Google Glass wearable technology has criticised the use of restrictive and "fear-based" testing regimes in education, describing a lack of innovation in the system as a crisis. Sebastian Thrun, who led the Google research lab responsible for self-driving cars and Google Glass, made the comments ahead of a meeting with education minister Michael Gove. Thrun, who is one of the world's most influential computer scientists, is exploring online collaborative education – known as Moocs, which stands for "massively open online courses". He has developed a project called Udacity, which is working with two colleges and workplace learning schemes. "The education system is based on a framework from the 17th and 18th century that says we should play for the first five years of life, then learn, then work, then rest and then die. I believe we should be able to do all those things all the time," said Thrun.

This isn't a far-fetched idea, and not just because robots have a long track-record of automating human labor. There are already algorithms that can write stories. Bots can easily be programmed to write other basic stories--things like box scores and real estate listings, even obituaries. In January, Wired had a news-writing bot produce a remembrance of Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence pioneer. The result was a little dry compared with the obituary for Minksy written by a human at The New York Times--but the machine version was decent.

Although the language of thinking is deliberate--let me think, I have to do some thinking--the actual experience of having thoughts is often passive. Ideas pop up like dandelions; thoughts occur suddenly and escape without warning. People swim in and out of pools of thought in a way that can feel, paradoxically, mindless. Most of the time, people don't actively track the way one thought flows into the next. But in psychiatry, much attention is paid to such intricacies of thinking.

IT'S the year 2040 and Ray Hammond is getting advice from his software assistant Maria. Located in an implant just behind his left ear, Maria has a direct connection with Mr Hammond's brain. Linked with Google and other search engines, Maria is able to filter, search and speak softly to Mr Hammond, as quietly and as transparently as if she were his own thoughts. Financial service providers, banks and retailers have made it their business to connect with Maria. As a result, she is able to provide Mr Hammond with the best deals around.

Victor Scheinman, who has died aged 73, designed the first electrically powered, computer-controlled industrial robot, proving that it was possible for machines to do complex manual work. Scheinman's invention, known as the Stanford arm, was a programmable robot with six rotational joints, allowing it to duplicate the shoulder, elbow and wrist movements of a human. Unlike previous machines, which could only perform one task repeatedly, the Stanford arm was capable of following a series of instructions. In 1974 an experimental arm built in accordance with Scheinman's design managed to assemble a car water pump without human help, using sensors to guide it. That same year Scheinman founded Vicarm Inc and began making his robot commercially. He soon fell in with the engineer and businessman Joseph Engelberger, who, with his colleague George Devol, had founded Unimation, the world's first robotics company.

In the late sixties while working at Ericsson he invented both sequence diagrams and use cases, and in later years worked on the SDL, UML and the RUP. We caught up with Dr Ivar Jacobson to hear his thoughts on where the industry is today, and where it will head in the future. Builder AU: What do you think of the state of software engineering today? Ivar Jacobson: What I see when I travel and talk to customers, participate in conferences and have discussions with experts around the world is that software development is very much still an immature discipline. We still rely on too much old work. Personally I am convinced we will change that dramatically, but it is a very slow process. I have been working on process improvement and new technologies for many years now, starting with component based development and then adding to that object orientation and now aspect orientation. I've been involved with new technology since the sixties, and I've been more optimistic than most -- it's my nature, but we are still struggling with basic stuff for many reasons.

Roomba has a new friend. Researchers have developed a robot that can help clean the kitchen. In a paper presented at Robotics Science and Systems in Rome in July, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison describe how they taught a Kinova Mico robot arm to help people do the dishes. The key, apparently, is slowing down and letting human team members take charge. "We want robots to follow our lead, or at least plan their actions with an awareness of ours," says Bilge Mutlu, associate professor of computer science, psychology, and industrial engineering and an author of the paper.

Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, envisions a day in the not too distant future when a patient with severe memory loss can get help from an electronic implant. In people whose brains have suffered damage from Alzheimer's, stroke, or injury, disrupted neuronal networks often prevent long-term memories from forming. For more than two decades, Berger has designed silicon chips to mimic the signal processing that those neurons do when they're functioning properly--the work that allows us to recall experiences and knowledge for more than a minute. Ultimately, Berger wants to restore the ability to create long-term memories by implanting chips like these in the brain. The idea is so audacious and so far outside the mainstream of neuroscience that many of his colleagues, says Berger, think of him as being just this side of crazy.

If Algirdas Budrys–who signed his work "Algis Budrys" and answered to "Ajay" among the regular Americans with whom he lived–maintained an apprehensive watchfulness toward much of the human race, it wasn't without justification. To start with, as the small son of Lithuania's consul general in Königsberg, East Prussia, he had seen Adolf Hitler pass in full Nazi pomp, while the citizens of the city where Immanuel Kant lay buried whipped themselves into such frenzies of admiration that they soiled themselves and defecated in public. More than seven decades later, dying in a Chicago suburb, Budrys still remembered what he had seen from the second-story window of his parents' apartment on that spring day in 1936. He told me, "After the Hitlerjugend walked through, Hitler came by in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up. I'm sure he had an iron bar up his sleeve, because he couldn't have kept his arm that particular way for so long otherwise."