Artificial intelligence is already in use across surveillance networks around the world. At high security sites like prisons, nuclear facilities or government agencies, it's commonplace for security systems to set up a number of rules-based alerts for their video analytics. So if an object on the screen (a person, or a car, for instance) crosses a designated part of the scene, an alert is passed on to the human operator. The operator surveys the footage, and works out if further action needs to be taken... BRS Labs' AISight is different because it doesn't rely on a human programmer to tell it what behaviour is suspicious. It learns that all by itself.

Last month at South by Southwest, while swiping through the dating app Tinder, some festival attendees came across an attractive 25-year-old brunette named Ava. Ava used correct punctuation and referred to people by their first name. She also asked beguiling questions like, "Have you ever been in love?" and "What makes you human?" Ava was later revealed to be a chatbot, devised by a marketing department to promote Alex Garland's new movie, Ex Machina. The film follows a young programmer, Caleb (played by Domhnall Gleeson), who wins a competition to spend a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the reclusive CEO of a large tech company who asks him to perform a Turing test on Ava, a new humanoid artificial intelligence he's created. The SXSW stunt succeeded in fooling a number of people, many of whom eventually caught on to the fact that Ava's questions felt less like flirting and more like a Turing test turned on them. Still, Tinder Ava captured what Ex Machina is actually about: a machine who can think, feel--and manipulate people--just like a human being.

Helen Greiner, of US company iRobot Corp, is here promoting a carpet cleaning robot. They're small, unobstrusive, and seem happy to do a job few if any of us enjoy. Such is the appeal of iRobot Corporation's vacuum cleaner known as Roomba that the Massachusetts-based company has already sold more than a million of them in the US. Some, says iRobot chairwoman Helen Greiner, have been named. "Rosie is a highly popular (name) and so is Abby or Agnes," Ms Greiner says.

IT'S the year 2040 and Ray Hammond is getting advice from his software assistant Maria. Located in an implant just behind his left ear, Maria has a direct connection with Mr Hammond's brain. Linked with Google and other search engines, Maria is able to filter, search and speak softly to Mr Hammond, as quietly and as transparently as if she were his own thoughts. Financial service providers, banks and retailers have made it their business to connect with Maria. As a result, she is able to provide Mr Hammond with the best deals around.

In the movie Her, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, a middle-aged writer named Theodore Twombly installs and rapidly falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system who christens herself Samantha. Samantha lies far beyond the faux "artificial intelligence" of Google Now or Siri: she is as fully and unambiguously conscious as any human. The film's director and writer, Spike Jonze, employs this premise for limited and prosaic ends, so the film limps along in an uncanny valley, neither believable as near-future reality nor philosophically daring enough to merit suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, Her raises questions about how humans might relate to computers. Twombly is suffering a painful separation from his wife; can Samantha make him feel better?

In a small, dark, room off a long hallway within a sprawling complex of buildings in Silicon Valley, an array of massive flat-panel displays and video cameras track Grit Denker's every move. Denker, a senior computer scientist at the nonprofit R&D institute SRI, is showing off Bright, an intelligent assistant that could someday know what information you need before you even ask. Initially, Bright is meant to cut down on the cognitive overload faced by workers in high-stress, data-intensive jobs like emergency response and network security. Bright may, for instance, aid network administrators in trying to stop the spread of a fast-moving virus by quickly providing crucial infection information, or help 911 operators send the right kind of assistance to the scene of an accident. But like many other technologies developed at SRI, such as the digital personal assistant Siri (now owned by Apple), Bright could eventually trickle down to laptops and smartphones.

To shush the music, he simply holds a finger up to his lips. And when he gets up from the couch and leaves the room, his TV screen pauses automatically. Banjara is a cofounder of PredictGaze, a startup that combines gaze detection, gesture recognition, and facial-feature recognition to create more natural ways to control everything from your TV to your car. While many people are just getting their hands on their first touch-screen gadget, PredictGaze is one of a slew of companies betting that touch-free controls will be the next big thing. With front-facing cameras being embedded in all sorts of gadgets, it's not hard to imagine.

If Algirdas Budrys–who signed his work "Algis Budrys" and answered to "Ajay" among the regular Americans with whom he lived–maintained an apprehensive watchfulness toward much of the human race, it wasn't without justification. To start with, as the small son of Lithuania's consul general in Königsberg, East Prussia, he had seen Adolf Hitler pass in full Nazi pomp, while the citizens of the city where Immanuel Kant lay buried whipped themselves into such frenzies of admiration that they soiled themselves and defecated in public. More than seven decades later, dying in a Chicago suburb, Budrys still remembered what he had seen from the second-story window of his parents' apartment on that spring day in 1936. He told me, "After the Hitlerjugend walked through, Hitler came by in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up. I'm sure he had an iron bar up his sleeve, because he couldn't have kept his arm that particular way for so long otherwise."

This article appears in the March/April 2007 issue of Technology Review. Last year, Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, stood on a beach in southern France, watching the sun set, studying a document he'd printed earlier that afternoon. A March rain had begun to fall, and the ink was beginning to smear. Five years before, he'd agreed to lead a diverse group of researchers working on a project called the Semantic Web, which seeks to give computers the ability–the seeming intelligence–to understand content on the World Wide Web. At the time, he'd made a list of goals, a copy of which he now held in his hand. If he'd achieved those goals, his part of the job was done. Taking stock on the beach, he crossed off items one by one. The Semantic Web initiative's basic standards were in place; big companies were involved; startups were merging or being purchased; analysts and national and international newspapers, not just technical publications, were writing about the project. Only a single item remained: taking the technology mainstream.

Hollywood has always been interested in science--and has employed consultants to get it right throughout most of its history. It's a relationship, though, that has been controversial at times, and in this article we look at how technical advisors resolve the tension between accurate science and dramatic storytelling. As an investigator and science planning engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Kevin Grazier, Ph.D., spends a lot of time with his head in the stars. Most days, he's concerned with the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. But every now and then he wrestles with the challenges of a more far-out world: "Battlestar Galactica"--a contemporary remake of the classic 1979 television show.