Predicting the future is hard. It's nearly impossible to know what technological marvels await in the next few years, let alone the next eight decades. Undaunted, we've put together a list of 10 super-advanced technologies that should be around by the year 2100. Some of these technologies are rather "out there," but I'm reasonably confident in making these predictions. As radical as some of the items described here appear, most--if not all--should be around by the turn of the 22nd century.

In the fall of 2010, I traveled to New Zealand, and one of the places I visited was the small south island city of Christchurch. I was charmed by the tree-lined Avon River, the English-style cathedral in the main square, and the mountains looming in the distance. Inside the cathedral was a stack of poems with a moving message of peace. I saved one to tack on my cork board at home, where it remains to this day. Three months later I turned on the news to see the Christchurch cathedral splintered and broken, its spire crumbled to the ground.

TOKYO • Come 2020 when the Olympic Games are held in Tokyo, drone deliveries, driverless taxis, and home robots will be the norm in one part of Japan. Visitors will see a beeline of drones in the sky in Chiba prefecture, just an hour away from the capital by train. At the designated drone zone, to be called Drone City, there will be around 200 of these flying robots whizzing through the air across a 10km distance at any one time, delivering goods from warehouses in Tokyo Bay to apartments that come with built-in landing ports for delivery drop-offs. Leading drone expert and pioneer, Dr Kenzo Nonami of Chiba University, is looking forward to living in such an apartment in Drone City, due for completion in three years' time. "If you don't like drones, don't live there," quipped Dr Nonami, who has helped develop drone technology over the past 20 years, and who painted the 2020 vision to The Straits Times.

Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, called the nuclear catastrophes at Chernobyl and Fukushima events that people cannot yet fully fathom and warned against the hubris that humans have the power to conquer nature. The 68-year-old Belarusian writer was in Tokyo at the invitation of researchers at the University of Tokyo, where she gave a lecture on Friday. More than 200 people attended. The Nobel laureate, who writes in Russian, is known for addressing dramatic and tragic events involving the former Soviet Union – World War II, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the 1991 collapse of the communist state. Her style is distinctive in that she presents the testimonies of ordinary people going through traumatic experiences as they speak, without intruding on their narratives.

Summary: If you want to capitalize on all the amazing advancements in data science take a look at these two hot growth areas for IoT. It's likely that these will be where a lot of venture capital is invested over the next year or two. A lot of well deserved attention is being directed at speech, image, and text processing. The tools in this area are the CNNs and RNNs we've reviewed in recent articles. We'll continue to exploit and refine these capabilities probably for several more years but if you want to get out in front you really need to be looking for the next wave.

Japan plans to build a super-efficient computer that could vault it to the top of the world's supercomputer rankings by the end of next year. With a processing capacity of 130 petaflops, the planned computer would outperform the current world leader, China's Sunway TaihuLight, which delivers 93 petaflops. One petaflop is one million billion floating-point operations per second. Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) isn't just aiming to build the world's fastest supercomputers, it also wants to make one of the most efficient. It is aiming for a power consumption of under 3 megawatts -- a staggering figure, given that Japan's current highest entry in the Top500 supercomputer list, Oakforest-PACS, delivers one-tenth the performance (13.6 petaflops) for the same power.

During its wheeled treks on the Red Planet, NASA's Spirit rover may have encountered a potential signature of past life on Mars, report scientists at Arizona State University (ASU). To help make their case, the researchers have contrasted Spirit's study of "Home Plate" -- a plateau of layered rocks that the robot explored during the early part of its third year on Mars -- with features found within active hot spring/geyser discharge channels at a site in northern Chile called El Tatio. The work has resulted in a provocative paper: "Silica deposits on Mars with features resembling hot spring biosignatures at El Tatio in Chile." As reported online last week in the journal Nature Communications, field work in Chile by the ASU team -- Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer of the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration -- shows that the nodular and digitate silica structures at El Tatio that most closely resemble those on Mars include complex sedimentary structures produced by a combination of biotic and abiotic processes. "Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures," the researchers wrote in the study.

During its wheeled treks on the Red Planet, NASA's Spirit rover may have encountered a potential signature of past life on Mars, report scientists at Arizona State University (ASU). To help make their case, the researchers have contrasted Spirit's study of "Home Plate" -- a plateau of layered rocks that the robot explored during the early part of its third year on Mars -- with features found within active hot spring/geyser discharge channels at a site in northern Chile called El Tatio. The work has resulted in a provocative paper: "Silica deposits on Mars with features resembling hot spring biosignatures at El Tatio in Chile." As reported online last week in the journal Nature Communications, field work in Chile by the ASU team -- Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer of the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration -- shows that the nodular and digitate silica structures at El Tatio that most closely resemble those on Mars include complex sedimentary structures produced by a combination of biotic and abiotic processes. "Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures," the researchers wrote in the study.

Last week was an exciting one with some rumors about Apple's AAPL iPhone manufacturing in the U.S., Cisco's CSCO earnings report, Intel's INTC first AI Day plus lots more. In June this year, Apple requested its iPhone assemblers Pegatron and Foxconn to evaluate the feasibility of making the devices in the U.S. While Pegatron refused outright on cost considerations, Foxconn has decided to do the job. The study is likely to show that the cost increase, skill mismatch and supply chain problems (the supply chain is largely in Asia) would make this cost prohibitive. This would raise iPhone prices for consumers/squeeze Apple's margins.

Design mining [54, 55, 56] is the use of computational intelligence techniques to iteratively search and model the attribute space of physical objects evaluated directly through rapid prototyping to meet given objectives. It enables the exploitation of novel materials and processes without formal models or complex simulation, whilst harnessing the creativity of both computational and human design methods. A sample-model-search-sample loop creates an agile/flexible approach, i.e., primarily test-driven, enabling a continuing process of prototype design consideration and criteria refinement by both producers and users. Computational intelligence techniques have long been used in design, particularly for optimisation within simulations/models. Recent developments in additive-layer manufacturing (3D printing) means that it is now possible to work with over a hundred different materials, from ceramics to cells.