Five years ago, when I was trying to name this column, I found that all the clever technology titles involving bytes, bits and so forth had already been taken. So I thought: since I'm interested in how technology will affect us in years to come, why not "Practical Futurist"? It seemed humorous at the time: how many futurists are known for practicality? But within months, people were referring to me as a futurist. And thus I learned my first lesson about the profession: the way you become a futurist is simply to call yourself one. So at the end of July I couldn't resist the opportunity to join more than a thousand fellow futurists at the World Future Society's annual meeting in Toronto, Canada.

Do you think Twitter elected Donald Trump?" a high profile tech exec asked me moments after Trump won. Of course, Twitter didn't cast a vote -- people all around the country chose to elect Trump -- but it's impossible to look at this election without analyzing the internet's role in shaping it. There were fake news stories trending on Facebook; Twitter bots that trolled users by the thousands; and Wikileaks emails that showed how hackers can influence the election. Tech platforms took on a different shape and wielded a new power. There has never been a more important time for tech leaders to own their platforms, understand the implications of algorithms, and engage in the challenging conversations about exactly what their roles are. Justin Kan, Y Combinator partner and Twitch founder, acknowledged an insular mindset in Silicon Valley, one that has made it harder for tech leaders to understand or relate to those who feel disenfranchised. New technologies like self-driving cars will have a huge impact on people who worked as cabbies or truck drivers -- and Silicon Valley wasn't prepared to offer solutions. "Are those people going to lose their jobs?

For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips's technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone. But in 2008, Mr. Phillips's company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. "I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market," Nuance's chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation. Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci's company filed the first of six lawsuits. Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci's firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees. When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won.

UPDATE 9/28 10:55 a.m.: Looks like the embargo on the videos was broken. At least one person has posted videos on YouTube. UPDATE 9/28 12:26 p.m.: Videos were removed. Sorry, folks, we'll have to wait for the official vids. UPDATE 9/30 4:05 a.m.: Video of Boston Dynamics' new, bigger quadruped, called AlphaDog, is here.

PETMAN is an adult-sized humanoid robot developed by Boston Dynamics, the robotics firm best known for the BigDog quadruped. Today, the company is unveiling footage of the robot's latest capabilities. The humanoid, which will certainly be compared to the Terminator Series 800 model, can perform various movements and maintain its balance much like a real person. Boston Dynamics is building PETMAN, short for Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin, for the U.S. Army, which plans to use the robot to test chemical suits and other protective gear used by troops. It has to be capable of moving just like a soldier -- walking, running, bending, reaching, army crawling -- to test the suit's durability in a full range of motion.

We've seen all kinds of crazy jumping robots, from humanoids to grasshoppers to soft and flexible spheres. But when you start making small robots, like seriously small robots (on the millimeter scale), you have to find new ways to get them to jump, and the Army Research Laboratory has teamed up with the University of Maryland to develop a couple clever ideas. Pictured above is a four millimeter-long robot, complete with a power source, an integrated control system, and light sensors. To move, it relies on on the rapid conversion of stored chemical energy to gas in a chemical reaction, which is just a fancy way of saying either "rocket motor" or "controlled explosion." Underneath the robot is a small chip of nanoporous silicon that gets infused with a sodium perchlorate oxidizer, and when a current heats up the chip, it ignites, propelling the robot upward.

I am pleased to welcome you to our center. Our mission is to advance the state of the art in intelligent systems through the research and development of intelligent embodied agents such as autonomous robots. Current R&D includes skill learning for humanoid robots, perception learning for mobile robots, and memory structures for task learning for cognitive robots. Our center is collaborating with NASA-Johnson Space Center (Acquisition of Autonomous Behaviors by Robot Assistants), University of Massachusetts (Robot Skill Learning), and The University of Reading, UK (Cognitive Robotics and Control). Currently we are collaborating with the Emergency Department in Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Triage robotic system design and development).

The Integrated Course of Action Critiquing and Elaboration System (ICCES) integrated several available technologies based largely on AI techniques, ranging from machine-understandable course-of-action representations entered via sketching and constrained natural language to interleaved adversarial planning and scheduling. The experiment involved comparing processes and products of military decision making with and without the decision aids. The results alleviated concerns about potential negative impacts of such tools on the creative aspects of the art of war, showed potential for dramatic time savings during MDMP, and confirmed the technologies' maturity and suitability for near-future deployment.

Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine"spoke" more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation. He can remotely operate doors, an artificial hand, and an electronic wheelchair. Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years. "They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle,operate our society increasingly well without us," he concludes, oddly cheery.

Few concepts capture the human imagination more than robots, undoubtedly because they are often designed to mimic us. Even their technological development seems to parallel our advances. We can judge the progress of our ability to harness scientific achievement simply by looking at a robot and asking this question: Exactly how much is this machine like a human? Or as Matt Mason, head of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, says, "In studying robotics we're really just studying ourselves." To take a measure of our progress, Discover offers a look in that mirror as we analyze the 25 greatest stepping-stones in robotics, points in time where science fiction meshes with science fact.