Over the weekend at the D23 Expo, Disney announced that it planned to create two new 14-acre "Star Wars" theme lands as part of its Disneyland and Disney World parks. The news, predictably, met with approval from the ranks of "Star Wars" supporters at the event. But the news of Disney's new theme parks has a far larger significance: it shows the extent to which science fiction is eating the world. And that's good news -- science fiction's growing mind share of the nation's youth is creating a stable base of future innovators. Think about it -- the generation that grew up on the Disney animation classics of the post-War era -- "Alice in Wonderland" (1951), "Peter Pan" (1953), and "Sleeping Beauty" (1959) -- has been replaced by a generation that grew up with "Star Wars" and all the other classic science fiction films of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Video game fans are familiar with the name Cortana. Now, Microsoft is hoping iOS and Android phone owners in search of a personal assistant app will get to know her, too. Microsoft's voice-enabled assistant Cortana -- named after the artificial intelligence featured in the Xbox franchise Halo -- launched for Apple and Android smartphones, giving users a way to quickly look up information or set reminders with simple voice commands. At times, Cortana is useful. But it appears clear it works best on its native home on a Windows device.

NEW YORK -- This year you can purchase a bit more of the sci-fi future. Hoverboards aren't quite what the name implies, but there's bona fide virtual reality, a droid you should be looking for and a basketball that improves your free throw, all one shopping-click away. These tech gadgets make the pocket-sized computer that talks to you and dials your friends seem quaint. But don't worry, there are plenty of smartphones on sale, too. Sphero's new $150 BB-8 droid is expected to be one of the hottest Star Wars gifts this holiday season.

Mike Soucie of Nest and other attendees at a conference on the'connected home' talk about how and when our homes could mirror the Jetsons' futuristic abode. Jane Jetson works out with a virtual instructor on a flat-panel TV, just one of many future-tech predictions the 1962 cartoon sitcom got right. Hanna-Barbera's pre-Apollo era sitcom imagined a space-age future that looks remarkably like our gadget-filled present. Jetpack fifty years into the future, and The Jetsons may even look like quaint, says one technologist immersed in high-tech homes. We may not yet possess flying cars or self-propelling space suits, but we do have vacuuming robots, wearable computers, video chat and, of course, a screen that keeps us up to date on all our news. To activate many of their at-home tech toys, a remote control was needed.

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Nobody wants to confront the idea of their own obsolescence. Still, sitting across a desk from Kris Hammond, in his office overlooking the lake shore in Chicago, it is hard not to at least have a sense of the inevitable. Hammond is the co-founder and chief scientist of a company called Narrative Science, which, among other things, has worked out a way of teaching machines how to write journalism. At the moment, the computers' output is limited to basic sports reports and business news. But Hammond is convinced this is only the beginning.

Erica enjoys the theatre and animated films, would like to visit south-east Asia, and believes her ideal partner is a man with whom she can chat easily. She is less forthcoming, however, when asked her age. "That's a slightly rude question … I'd rather not say," comes the answer. As her embarrassed questioner shifts sideways and struggles to put the conversation on a friendlier footing, Erica turns her head, her eyes following his every move. It is all rather disconcerting, but if Japan's new generation of intelligent robots are ever going to rival humans as conversation partners, perhaps that is as it should be.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner and RoboCop to The Matrix, how humans deal with the artifical intelligence they have created has proved a fertile dystopian territory for film-makers. More recently Spike Jonze's Her and Alex Garland's forthcoming Ex Machina explore what it might be like to have AI creations living among us and, as Alan Turing's famous test foregrounded, how tricky it might be to tell the flesh and blood from the chips and code. These concerns are even troubling some of Silicon Valley's biggest names: last month Telsa's Elon Musk described AI as mankind's "biggest existential threat… we need to be very careful". What many of us don't realise is that AI isn't some far-off technology that only exists in film-maker's imaginations and computer scientist's labs. Many of our smartphones employ rudimentary AI techniques to translate languages or answer our queries, while video games employ AI to generate complex, ever-changing gaming scenarios.

When he was in grad school, the roboticist Daniel Wilson installed 150 binary sensors in his house. They ranged from infrared motion sensors--the kind you find in taps and towel dispensers in public washrooms--to audio sensors, laser break beam sensors, and contact switches hooked up to overhead lights, furniture, and appliances. Over the next two years, Wilson collected data on every aspect of his daily routine, from how long he spent in the shower to how many times a day he opened the cutlery drawer. Pressure mats fixed to the bottom of his couch and chairs recorded how long he spent sitting down; a small, wireless microphone allowed him to turn lights on and off using just his voice. He even built a wireless toothbrush to record the time and length of his oral hygiene habits.

We are living in an "algorithmic culture," to use the author and communication scholar Ted Striphas's name for it. Google's search algorithms determine how we access information. Facebook's News Feed algorithms determine how we socialize. Netflix's and Amazon's collaborative filtering algorithms choose products and media for us. "Google announced a change to its algorithm," a journalist reports.