Faced with an enemy fighter jet, there's one sensible thing a military drone should do: split. But in December 2002, caught in the crosshairs of an Iraqi MiG, an unmanned US Predator was instructed to stay put. The MiG fired, the Predator fired back and the result, unhappily for the US, was a heap of drone parts on the southern Iraqi desert. This incident is often regarded as the first dogfight between a drone, properly known as an unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV, and a conventional, manned fighter. Yet in a way, the Predator hardly stood a chance.

Mapping the brain is all the rage. In 2009, the National Institutes of Health announced the Human Connectome Project, an ambitious multimillion-dollar initiative to produce a detailed map of the long-range connections in the human brain. Two years later, the Allen Institute for Brain Science launched the Allen Brain Atlas, a collection of online public resources that integrate information about gene activity with neuroanatomical data. And earlier this year, President Obama announced the Brain Activity Map project, which aims to "reconstruct the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. Now an international team of researchers led by Katrin Amunts of the Ju lich Research Center in Germany has created the most detailed map yet of the human brain.

He made contributions of crucial international significance in three distinct fields of endeavour. During the second world war, he developed code-breaking techniques which led to effective automatic deciphering of German high-level ciphers. In the 1950s, he worked with Anne on pioneering techniques which were fundamental in the development of in vitro fertilisation. Donald subsequently became one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, an area to which he devoted the remainder of his academic career. It was within this field that I came to know Donald as an inspirational supervisor of my PhD at Edinburgh - not only insightful, forceful and even heroic, but possessing a wicked sense of humour.

Within a decade millions of workers will be at home juggling their careers with caring for children and older relatives, Britain's leading management institute forecast yesterday. Dreams of a future when technological advances would liberate us from the daily drudge and allow more time for leisure appear to be fading, with futurologists predicting less talk about "work-life balance" and more about "work-life integration". A report on the nature of employment in 2018 predicts an exodus from the traditional workplace caused partly by environmental pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of commuting and partly by the demographic pressure of an ageing population, with fewer employees able to avoid looking after older relatives, leading to a blurring of boundaries between family and career. In a list of scenarios drawn up by the Chartered Management Institute and launched at a seminar in London yesterday by Sir John Sunderland, chairman of Cadbury Schweppes, companies were warned to prepare for a range of more remote possibilities, including a world under cyber attack, the use of holograms for communication between staff, and controlling employee behaviour by implanting microchips in their brains. More probable scenarios included a polarisation of businesses, with large corporations consolidating global control and becoming more powerful than the governments of some big countries.

Fulfilling the dreams of bosses everywhere, Wakamaru San is never late, doesn't gossip or throw sickies, and somewhat unnervingly never stops smirking. That's because one-metre tall Wakamaru is an android, whose idea of a tea break is to find the nearest power socket and recharge itself when its battery runs low. This Mitsubishi-made winsome bot is part of the vanguard of so-called "second generation" robots, autonomous machines designed to help around the home and workplace - permanently. In the first serious attempt to commercialise a robot that can work in the office, 10 little Wakamarus touting "strong receptionist skills" were recently taken on by an employment agency in Japan, where they are now for hire for £12,000 a year. Other bots are muscling in on Japan's increasingly mechanised construction industry, though those look far from the "humanoid" type robot, such as Wakamaru, that we have been led to expect by science fiction. In fact, really clever, human-like robots may still be decades away (see below) but gradually robot manufacturers are moving from creating machines that work mostly in the automotive sector to other industries, such as the food business, while many robots are becoming consumer products.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, someone had the idea that science would be at its most interesting when it was being subverted. Just as science itself was developing, storytellers began expanding the worlds of physics, biology, chemistry and engineering. They came up with a universe full of lightsabers, spaceships and robots, steeped in a heady brew of technobabble and draped on a background of journeys to exotic worlds. But science fiction is more than just pulp fiction; at its core is the desire to understand humanity's place in the universe. We asked leading scientists from around the world what science fiction meant to them: how they related to it and what influence it had on them.

When Haldeman returned from Vietnam, with a Purple Heart for the wounds he had suffered, he wrote a story about a pointless conflict that seems as if it will never end. It was set in space, and the enemies were aliens, but 18 publishers decided it was too close to home before St Martin's Press took a gamble. The book that "nobody wants to read" went on to win many prizes. It's not perfect - it's hard to take seriously a future in which hetereosexuality is a perversion - but the anti-war message is as powerful as ever. Known for his intricate short stories and critically acclaimed mountaineering novel Climbers, Harrison cut his teeth on SF. In typical fashion, he writes space opera better than many who write only in the genre. For all its star travel and alien artefacts, scuzzy 25th-century spaceports and drop-out space pilots, Light is actually about twisting three plotlines as near as possible to snapping point. This is as close as SF gets to literary fiction, and literary fiction gets to SF. Jon Courtenay Grimwood Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop Amateur stonemason, waterbed designer, reformed socialist, nudist, militarist and McCarthyite, Heinlein is one of the most interesting and irritating figures in American science fiction.

Hilton Nunez felt more like an air traffic controller than the commander of six Hunter unmanned aerial vehicles. A division commander wanted a UAV to check for surface-to-air threats. A corps commander sought one to fly far ahead of advancing troops to gather intelligence for the next day's war planning. There were never enough UAVs to go around. "There was a constant battle over who would control the UAVs," Nunez says.

The next time you beat your keyboard in frustration, think of a day when it may be able to sue you for assault. Within 50 years we might even find ourselves standing next to the next generation of vacuum cleaners in the voting booth. Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future. Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government's chief scientist. The paper covering robots' rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.

In Robert Harris's 2011 novel The Fear Index a secretive hedge fund builds a computer capable of making its own trading decisions. Gobbling up information, the machine starts to confuse its human creators by building huge stakes and making a handsome profit from a market panic. As they assess the outcome, one of the protagonists notes: "The beauty of it is that it was but 0.4 per cent of total market volatility. No one will ever notice, except us." As markets increasingly rely on computer algorithms, reality is imitating fiction: artificial intelligence is becoming a bigger part of investing and it is also helping regulators ensure that traders do not get away with bad behaviour.