In the early 1970s, programming computers involved punching holes in cards and feeding them to room-size machines that would produce results through a line printer, often hours or even days later. This is what computing had looked like for a long time, and it was against this backdrop that a team of 29 scientists and researchers at the famed Xerox PARC created the more intimate form of computing we know today: one with a display, a keyboard, and a mouse. This computer, called Alto, was so bewilderingly different that it necessitated a new term: interactive computing. Alto was viewed by some as absurdly extravagant because of its expensive components. But fast-forward 50 years, and multitrillion-dollar supply chains have sprung up to transform silica-rich sands into sophisticated, wondrous computers that live in our pockets.

But the drive also showed that the technology is not yet ready to realize its potential. Each day, Kodiak rotated a new team of specialists into the cab of its truck, so that someone could take control of the vehicle if anything went wrong. These "safety drivers" grabbed the wheel multiple times. Tech start-ups like Kodiak have spent years building and testing self-driving trucks, and companies across the trucking industry are keen to reap the benefits. At a time when the global supply chain is struggling to deliver goods as efficiently as businesses and consumers now demand, autonomous trucks could alleviate bottlenecks and reduce costs.

As the traffic lights turn from amber to red, Miranda Blogg accelerates towards them. "Here we go," she says. A dash-mounted screen in her Renault ZOE flashes a warning featuring a traffic light symbol. The screen erupts with a more aggressive visual display ("Stop!") accompanied by three loud, grating, beeps. "Whoops," she says, as she brakes, still well ahead of the lights.

Neuralink plans to test its brain machine interface technology with 4 of its N1 chips installed under patients' skin. Elon Musk believes that hooking our brains up to computers can help humans overcome disabilities and injuries and eventually compete with ever-smarter artificial intelligence. The billionaire said Sunday that his side startup Neuralink will show off an update to its developing brain-computer interface technology later this year that will be, in a word, "awesome." Last July, Musk said that the tech has already allowed a monkey to control a computer with its brain in tests and that he hoped "aspirationally" to have the device in a human patient with brain or spinal cord injuries, or congenital defects, by the end of 2019. That didn't pan out, and Musk now says it could happen "as soon as this year." He chimed in Sunday on a Twitter thread from noted tech investor and Tesla Motors true believer Cathie Wood that was originally published in mid-January.

It is the near future. You wake in a house warmed by a heat pump that extracts energy from deep below the ground and delivers it to your home. You rise and make yourself a cup of tea – from water boiled on a hydrogen-burning kitchen stove. Then you head to work – in a robot-driven electric car directed by central control network to avoid traffic jams. At midday, you pause for lunch: a sandwich made of meat grown in a laboratory.

Peter Cullen and the head of the famous character he voices, Optimus Prime. Peter Cullen and the head of the famous character he voices, Optimus Prime. For a generation of 1980s-reared cartoon-loving television viewers, Peter Cullen's voice as Optimus Prime in movies, TV shows, video games and even toys is instantly recognizable. He has continued to voice the character on and off throughout the years, and returned to Optimus earlier this year in Michael Bay's "Transformers: The Last Knight," which made more than $605 million worldwide this summer. In next year's "Bumblebee," the Transformers spin-off film that recently wrapped filming, Cullen's red, silver and blue Optimus Prime figures in the plot focused on the smaller but ever-popular yellow-and-black Autobot.

Back in 1995, the NavLab 5 team at Carnegie Mellon University launched an autonomous vehicle on a trip from Pittsburgh to San Diego. It averaged speeds above 60 mph. So if self-driving technology worked on a cross-country trip 22 years ago, why aren't roads filled with autonomous cars today? The reason is the technology remains closer to the research lab stage and is not ready for prime time, ay experts. Sensors must shrink, improve their range, particularly in bad weather, and become less expensive.

Self-driving vehicles will make the driver redundant, but long before that, smarter cars may leave the driver thinking about other things. Ford is already studying that problem, anticipating an evolution toward autonomous cars that will take a lot longer than projects by the likes of Google may suggest. For now, the motorist is still in charge--with some help. "We still have a driver-centric model. We still think the driver needs to be engaged," said Don Butler, Ford's executive vice president of connected vehicle and services.

Cognitive systems - in the form of ANN is a technology that High-Tech Bridge is particularly familiar with, because the company's ImmuniWeb web security testing platform is based on machine learning technology. High-Tech Bridge uses artificial neural networks (ANN) and advanced human augmentation to implement intelligent automation of vulnerability scanning, but each scenario needs careful preparation, and unsupervised ANN is not on the menu, as Kolochenko explained: "We continuously aggregate knowledge and skills of humans to feed into the ANN. You have to teach the network to make the decisions. Our intelligence needs to be very specific, so we use supervised learning."

Each company differs when it comes to their intended path. Google is approaching self-driving technology head on -- their strategy will likely mimic their approach to Android technology: licensing software to other hardware manufacturers. Google uses LiDAR technology, a complicated system of lasers and sensors that, as of this writing, is the most accurate form of autonomous tech. But it's expensive, and would require mass production to be affordable to consumers. Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a different approach by perfecting autopilot tech before branching out to totally autonomous vehicles. Recent news of the first passenger death in a Tesla may have deterred some, but advocates of autonomous tech emphasize that accident rates in a self-driving world will likely be far lower than they are today.