For many, pets are an essential part of childhood. Walking the family dog, feeding the class goldfish, chasing around an irritable cat that wants nothing to do with you whatsoever. For generations, pets were cute, furry creatures with the occasional scaled or feathered friend thrown in. But, for kids of the late 1990s, the entire concept of what a pet is, does and means was turned on its head. Suddenly, they could be more.

The irony, of course, is that this year the computer security industry, with $75 billion in annual revenue, has started to talk about how machine learning and pattern recognition techniques will improve the woeful state of computer security. "The thing people don't get is that cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially," said Marc Goodman, a law enforcement agency adviser and the author of Future Crimes. He added, "This is not about Matthew Broderick hacking from his basement," a reference to the 1983 movie War Games.

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her. It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone. Such a situation is still science fiction -- but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her. It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone. Such a situation is still science fiction -- but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her. It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone. Such a situation is still science fiction -- but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

The robots imagined by roboticist Hans Moravec in his 1990 book Mind Children are fascinating examples of evolution-compatible robots. Moravec calls them "robot bushes" because each limb branches fractally into more limbs. At the very tips would be tiny manipulators on a molecular scale, billions or even trillions of them. By touching an object with a million fingers, such a robot would be able to feel the bacteria and chemicals on its surface. It would be able to read an entire book at once by feeling the print on the pages.