Myrna (Jennifer Dale) must have had better blind dates. Her table for two is hemmed in by strange shrouds in tall vitrines. And as she makes small talk with her date Karsh (Vincent Cassel), the restaurant's owner, it becomes clear her surroundings are attached – architecturally, financially and intellectually – to a cemetery. And not just any cemetery: its headstones have screens. Because the bodies are swaddled in natty, camera-riddled, internet-enabled shrouds, you can come here to watch your loved ones decompose.

Alec was looking at one of the most powerful minds in history. A crystal brain frozen in mid-explosion, as if someone had pressed a pause button. We wanted a mind better than ours. The young researcher sighed and drummed his slender fingers on the transparent compu-table. He stared through the tinted window into the sterile supercooled room that housed its mighty prisoner.

Each month, Future Tense Fiction--a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives--publishes a story on a theme. Stop me if you've heard this one before." David had heard this one before, but he needed a job. He folded his hands in his lap and summoned the patience he'd learned sitting through Talmudic debates. He waved for Aiden Shure, Town of Our Own's CEO, to continue. "It's a dive bar, lots of rough language from the other patrons, but the bartender says, 'Father, what can I get you?' The priest says: 'Well, I have to lead Mass in the morning, but a wee nip can't hurt. Gimme three fingers of Irish whiskey and cut it with holy water.' So the bartender runs over to the church next door, borrows a bit of holy water, and makes the drink. The priest is satisfied, so the bartender moves on: 'Rabbi, what can I get you?' The rabbi says, 'Well it is the Sabbath day, but if it's not too much work I wouldn't say no to a glass of kosher wine from the vineyards of the Holy Land.' So the bartender finds a bottle of sweet Israeli red, and the rabbi thanks him." Aiden told the joke like he'd practiced it a lot while stuck in traffic. David braced for the punchline he knew was coming. "So the bartender turns to the robot, which has been quietly listening to the other patrons.

Natural world interaction (NWI), the pursuit of arbitrary goals in unstructured physical environments, is an excellent motivating problem for the reintegration of artificial intelligence. It is the problem set that humans struggle to solve. At a minimum it entails perception, learning, planning, and control, and can also involve language and social behavior. An agent's fitness in NWI is achieved by being able to perform a wide variety of tasks, rather than being able to excel at one. In an attempt to address NWI, a brain-emulating cognition and control architecture (BECCA) was developed. It uses a combination of feature creation and model-based reinforcement learning to capture structure in the environment in order to maximize reward. BECCA avoids making common assumptions about its world, such as stationarity, determinism, and the Markov assumption. BECCA has been demonstrated performing a set of tasks which is non-trivially broad, including a vision-based robotics task. Current development activity is focused on applying BECCA to the problem of general Search and Retrieve, a representative natural world interaction task.