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."

Sure, there are some morally and ethically questionable aspects of an unstoppable privatized security bot, but the armor and cyborgian capabilities are pretty freaking awesome. Why? Turns out we just don't have the battery power to operate a suit with that many moving parts for any length of time. Most iPhones barely last a full day on a charge, and a Tesla Model S can only make it about 300 miles before it needs to be plugged in--and that battery weighs more than 1,300 pounds (and is likely incapable of keep a human's organs running while being shot at). "That's one serious limitation that our technology is not approaching yet," says Charles Higgins, an electrical engineer and professor of neuroscience at the University of Arizona. "In order to do a real RoboCop like you see in the movie, you need to have a very compact power source that's going to power all those motors all day--it doesn't look like RoboCop has to plug in every hour."

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms it can use for something else

A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze's new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough. After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn't a movie about technology. With that, the film took shape. Sure, it takes place in the future, but what it's really concerned with are human relationships, as fragile and complicated as they've been from the start. Of course on another level Her is very much a movie about technology. One of the two main characters is, after all, a consciousness built entirely from code.

When we think about machine vision, we usually think about it in a human context. We build systems that can recognize faces in our photographs or count the number of cars in a traffic jam. Rare is the computer that's watching on its own terms. That got artist Ben Grosser wondering: Why not let a computer watch something for its own sake? What would that even look like?

In an age when technology companies routinely introduce new forms of everyday magic, one problem that remains seemingly unsolved is that of long-form transcription. Sure, voice dictation for documents has been conquered by Nuance's Dragon software. Our phones and smart home devices can understand fairly complex commands, thanks to self-teaching recurrent neural nets and other 21st century wonders. However, the task of providing accurate transcriptions of long blocks of actual human conversation remains beyond the abilities of even today's most advanced software. When solved on a broad scale, it is a problem that might unlock vast archives of oral histories, make podcasts easier to consume for speed-readers (tl;dl), and be a world-changing boon for journalists everywhere, liberating precious hours of sweet life.

Human: what is the purpose of life? Machine: to serve the greater good. Human: what is the purpose of living? Human: what is the purpose of existence? Machine: to find out what happens when we get to the planet earth.

I'm fairly new to San Francisco, so I'm still building my mental database of restaurants I like. But this weekend, I know exactly where I'm heading to for dinner: Nick's Crispy Tacos. Then, when I get home, I'm kicking back to a documentary I've never heard of, a Mongolian drama called The Cave of the Yellow Dog. An artificially intelligent algorithm told me I'd enjoy both these things. I'd like the restaurant, the machine told me, because I prefer Mexican food and wine bars "with a casual atmosphere," and the movie because "drama movies are in my digital DNA."

For many families, the tablet has become the central, shared computing device in the home. It's a hub for learning, for entertainment, and for staying connected. But what if your tablet was even more interactive? What if it woke up when you came home, recognized your face, and suggested a couple of things you might want for dinner? What if, when asked a spoken question, it could tailor its answer directly to you, instead of just offering a blanket response? A new device called Jibo can do these things, and it could mark the next step in group computer interaction in the home.