Twisted rebar, concrete, and splintered furniture lay scattered across the floor of this room. Our view through a jagged hole in the wall looks out on the city, showing steady civilian traffic crossing a bridge over a river below. 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. An Army major beside me, Paul Tyrrell, scans the high-rises on the other side of the river through his laser rangefinder. He is the frontline eyes of the coalition, responsible for calling in air strikes. A platoon sergeant named Donald Prado tells Tyrrell that an office tower half a mile to the west is an enemy stronghold. Prado radios in for the Air Force to drop a smoke screen for cover.

ROBONAUT Not all NASA robots drive around poking at rocks. Robonaut is the same size and shape as a person in a space suit, so it can handle tasks typically performed by humans – its hands are even better articulated than an astronaut's gloved digits. The fact that it looks like Boba Fett? 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.

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."

As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. 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. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.

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.

The Pentagon's blue-sky research agency is readying a nearly four-year project to boost artificial intelligence systems by building machines that can teach themselves -- while making it easier for ordinary schlubs like us to build them, too. That path fell out of favor among computer scientists years ago as a means of creating artificial intelligence; we'd have to understand our own brains first before building a working artificial version of one. But the agency thinks we can build machines that learn and evolve, using algorithms -- "probabilistic programming" -- to parse through vast amounts of data and select the best of it. After that, the machine learns to repeat the process and do it better. But building such machines remains really, really hard: The agency calls it "Herculean."

SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon spacecraft into orbit Sunday night despite losing an engine shortly after lift off. The launch occurred at 8:35 p.m. EDT and was first time a Falcon 9 rocket has flown without a delay on the first scheduled launch time. But while the rocket was climbing through the atmosphere, SpaceX did experience an engine failure. It appears that one of the nine Merlin engines exploded, but SpaceX is saying that is not the case. The flight continued and, as designed, the other eight engines were more than enough to deliver the Dragon spacecraft to its proper orbit. "Falcon 9 did exactly what it was designed to do," SpaceX said in a statement.

On a giant flat-screen TV in an old Emeryville, California warehouse, a floating orb fires red, blue, pink, and yellow beams into a honeycomb of hexagonal blocks. The blocks are black, white, and gray, but as the beams hit them, they change--flashing, fading, absorbing color. And when they do, scores tally just above. On the same screen, from adjacent windows, three commentators provide additional color, as if this was a videogame championship. "You can see who's being owned, and who's doing the owning," says one, a theoretical physicist named Hakeem Oluseyi. The other two commentators are veteran white-hat hackers, experts at reverse-engineering software in search of security holes.

While Google was building an artificial intelligence that could beat a grandmaster at the ancient game of Go, University of Cincinnati alum took a different tack. They designed an AI that could take on a fighter pilot. Dubbed ALPHA, this system recently beat retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee in multiple flight simulator trials, as the researchers explain in a paper recently published in the Journal of Defense Management. The idea isn't to replace human fighter pilots. According to Nicholas Ernest, a University of Cincinnati alum and the founder of Psibernetix, the company that developed ALPHA, this AI may ultimately act as a kind of digital assistant that provides real-time advice to pilots.

Dharmendra Modha walks me to the front of the room so I can see it up close. About the size of a bathroom medicine cabinet, it rests on a table against the wall, and thanks to the translucent plastic on the outside, I can see the computer chips and the circuit boards and the multi-colored lights on the inside. It looks like a prop from a '70s sci-fi movie, but Modha describes it differently. "You're looking at a small rodent," he says. He means the brain of a small rodent--or, at least, the digital equivalent. The chips on the inside are designed to behave like neurons--the basic building blocks of biological brains.