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.

United Press International is a leading provider of news, photos and information to millions of readers around the globe via UPI.com and its licensing services. With a history of reliable reporting dating back to 1907, today's UPI is a credible source for the most important stories of the day, continually updated - a one-stop site for U.S. and world news, as well as entertainment, trends, science, health and stunning photography. UPI also provides insightful reports on key topics of geopolitical importance, including energy and security.

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.

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.