More than a few alarmists will tell you that artificial intelligence and robots are going to rule the world in the future. Eventually, we can expect them to do everything from washing our clothes to fighting our wars, with little to no human help except for teaching them how. With machine learning, they may not even need us for that. The artificial intelligence of the future could be more than capable of knowing what to do before we do.

What many don’t know, however, is how artificial intelligence technology is already realizing what we’ve generally assumed to be the distant future. Not only that, but the AI of today can do things that we never imagined it would be capable of even in the future. Not all of these things are scary or alarming, though; a lot may genuinely end up helping us in the long run.

10 Write News Stories

Despite the “AI will take over jobs” worries, there are certain careers that we generally believe will be safe from that takeover, as there are some occupations only people can do. Journalism is definitely one of them, as it takes a human mind to effectively report important information in the form of coherent and well-structured articles for everyone to easily understand. Or so we think, as bots that can write a story as well as a competent journalist already exist.

While there have been attempts to make bots that can write news stories in the past, none of them have been good at it, presumably due to AI’s inherent limitations in doing so. Not anymore, as The Washington Post has already successfully deployed a story-writing bot that can write as well as any of its best journalists. It’s called Heliograf, and all it needs to churn out news pieces are some phrases covering all the potential outcomes of a newsworthy event—like the elections—and a database of events to take the latest updates from.^[1]

9 Work As Cops

Most of us have seen RoboCop, a fictional story centered around a cyborg cop that envisions what the future of law enforcement may look like. Except RoboCop isn’t fully robotic; he still has a human brain, which, combined with robotics, turns him into a deadly fighting force.

Many have assumed that robotic cops will be a thing at some point in the future, though we didn’t know that future would be here so soon. Dubai has already put an operational robot serving as a part of the police force on the streets and has creatively named it “Robocop.”^[2]

If you think this Robocop isn’t capable of much, you’d be wrong. It was developed with the help of Google and IBM’s supercomputer Watson and can do things like identify criminals, flag problematic vehicle plates, report unattended bags in public areas, and much more. It’s a part of Dubai’s plan to have 25 percent of its police force be robotic by 2030.

As of now, there’s no plan to arm these things, and we’re not really suggesting that the Robocops would pick up guns and rise up against the humans at some point. The technology may even end up being a massive aid to understaffed police departments around the world.

8 Make AI Software Of Its Own

A lot has been said about the unimaginable things AI will be able to do in the future, though if you’re a coder, you’ll know that making it do those things is a lot harder than writing about it. AI developers aren’t just some of the brightest and most talented developers in the world; they’re also among the most highly paid due to their scarcity. It’s quite difficult to write AI software, which is why it’s such a big deal when an AI learns to do just that.

Many firms have meddled with AI designing machine learning software of its own, but it was never better than that of human AI developers until fairly recently. In 2017, Google designed an AI that could design its own AI, and for the first time, the AI it created turned out to be better at a task than software made by the same AI researchers. They used the AI-generated AI to mark locations of multiple objects in a picture and then compared its perfermance to their own AI made for the job. The AI’s software had an accuracy of 43 percent, against the 39 percent of the software the people created.^[3]

In case it’s not clear, this means that AI might someday take the jobs of those who design AI as well.

7 Lying And Cheating

We consider deception to be an inherently human trait, something that machines absolutely can’t do unless they go completely rogue. While we have previously designed AI software that can lie and cut corners, there had been no case of machines learning to do so on their own. That was until some cases of it doing exactly that hit the news over the last year, and, let’s be honest, it’s a little scary.

In one case, researchers tried to get an AI to play Sonic the Hedgehog as a part of their AI retro gaming competition. The conditions it was supposed to meet were simple: Just pass the level as quickly as it could and keep an eye on its competitors in case they overtake. To their surprise, it quickly learned to do that by glitching through walls, which is possibly the first case of an AI learning how to cheat at a game without being designed to do so.^[4]

In in another case, involving research by Stanford and Google scientists, an AI designed to convert aerial Google Maps images to street maps was found hiding some of the information in an undetectable, high-frequency signal.

6 Teamwork For The Greater Good

The ability to work with other people is the basis of human society, and it gave us an edge over other, more self-serving creatures in our early days. Of course, that’s not just restricted to wholesome activities like building farms and cities; teamwork also played quite an important role in wars and conquest. It’s therefore natural to assume that if the machines learn how to do it, that’s both an “aww” moment and something to be scared of.

Luckily (or unluckily) for us, AI now has the ability to do just that. Google’s DeepMind project has developed an AI that can work with other AIs in multiplayer games, like Quake III Arena, to win the match, something that it has been trying to get to work for quite some time.^[5] While AI has proven its ability to beat human players at video games before, this is the first time it has done so working within a team, which is rather difficult for AI to do, as it requires compromising and matching up with the play styles of other players.

5 Write Poems

If robots could write poems, the world would largely be the same, as outside of a handful of successful poets who do make their living out of it, it’s not a real job. (Sorry.) Poetry requires an understanding of meter, rhyme, tone, and other things that only a human mind can appreciate, and it’s rather difficult for an AI to learn how to do those things without being explicitly taught.

As it turns out, though, AI is already writing poems most of us wouldn’t be able to distinguish from human-made ones. Take this Shakespearean masterpiece written entirely by a bot as an example:

When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade
Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn
The daytime shadow of my love betray’d
Lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form

Now, an AI didn’t just wake up one morning and make this; an MIT PhD candidate, J. Nathan Matias, taught it the basics of sentence structure and syntax. It took quite a few bad attempts before the AI came up with something original and poem-like.^[6]

4 Create Art

Another occupation that we believe is safe from being eventually replaced by machines is that of an artist. It’s one of those jobs that you really can’t do without a human brain, as good art can only be effectively made and judged by a human eye. It requires our sense of perception, depth, and shadows, and unless AI can figure that out anytime soon, there’s really no chance machines would be able to do it.

It’s pretty bad news for all the aspiring artists out there, then, that AI has already figured out all of those things and more. In a 2015 experiment by scientists from the Bethge Lab in Germany, they taught their AI to learn the various elements that go into a piece of art and then coded it to replicate that style by painting an image from a photograph. To their surprise, the AI was able to replicate a street in Germany in Van Gogh’s signature style, with a perfect understanding of shadows and types of strokes.^[7]

3 Learn How To Encrypt On Its Own

If there truly were to be a global AI takeover, one of the things the AI would require to be successful is the ability to encrypt its own messages. Even then, regardless of whatever encryption techniques an AI could come up with, it’s safe to assume that we would be able to find ways to decrypt them, as we designed the AI in the first place. That is, of course, a very simplistic view of potential ways AIs can take over, though encryption techniques of their own certainly won’t hurt their chances.

As it turns out, AI has already found ways to encrypt messages on its own. In one of Google’s AI research endeavors in 2016, they set up two neural networks, Bob and Alice, trying to communicate with each other. They also added a third one, Eve, to try to decode their conversations. Eve was successful for a while, though in time, Bob and Alice were able to come up with a way to encrypt their messages that even Eve—an impressive AI on its own—couldn’t decrypt.^[8] The encryption wasn’t anything like we’ve seen or made on our own before, either, so perhaps Google should really stop doing these things if they know what’s best for all of us.

2 Debate The Meaning Of Life

Philosophy is one of the fields of study that you don’t get until you do, and then you don’t stop talking about it. Until now, delivering a scathing take on the human condition was a strictly human endeavor, though not anymore.

A chatbot developed by Google (again) was reported to have some interesting answers to the big questions of life.^[9] No matter where you stand on the issue of artificial intelligence becoming too intelligent, you can’t deny that some of these answers are quite . . . deep:

Human: What is the purpose of life?
Machine: To serve the greater good.
Human: Where are you now?
Machine: I’m in the middle of nowhere.
Human: What is the purpose of dying?
Machine: To have a life.

While most chatbots respond according to certain keywords in the questions—and hence can’t convincingly answer them—this one was designed to imitate how a brain works, with branching and interlinked nodes, to reach the best outcome. Its real purpose is to improve Google’s search results, though we wouldn’t mind if someone offered it a book deal or two, either.

1 Read Our Minds

A machine’s ability to see what’s going on in someone’s head is right out of science fiction. Most of us wouldn’t know how that could even be done, though previous efforts have been able to decode our thoughts into beeps and vague signals, to an extent. A lot of those signals were unintelligible to a layman, but not anymore.

In a 2017 experiment by Japanese scientists, an AI was able to successfully “see” the image that forms in our heads when we think of something and draw it with a surprising—and scary—accuracy.^[10] The images weren’t black and white, unintelligible blobs, either, but were largely close to the images in the subjects’ brains during the ten-month-long experiment.

In another experiment, an AI was able to convert human thoughts into sound signals. When they played it to listeners, they were able to recognize it with a 75-percent accuracy. Sure, AI being able to literally read our minds may be a scary proposition to think about, but it has quite a few good applications, too, like identifying and treating hallucinations in schizophrenic patients.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

Warfare has evolved quite a bit from the first time we looked at another group of people and decided to fight them. We’ve come a long way from charging headfirst into each other and hoping our weapons hit their intended targets. There may have been a time when just having superior battle tactics and higher numbers would have ensured victory, though now, a numerically inferior force could easily take on a much bigger one by just having a technological upper hand on the battlefield.

Nearly all of the biggest countries in the world are now working hard at gaining that upper hand, and some of the breakthroughs in military tech in recent times have started to resemble things straight out of science fiction. While we knew that these technologies would definitely be a regular part of warfare at some point in the future, we didn’t know that future would be here so soon.

10 EMP

The idea of a superpowered weapon that could theoretically release a burst of electromagnetic radiation (e.g. an electromagnetic pulse [EMP]) and incapacitate all electronics in a given area has existed in science fiction for a long time. Any army that has access to such a weapon would gain an automatic advantage in a battle, as even one working weapons system is better than thousands that are disabled.

Many countries have ongoing projects attempting to make such a thing, but it looks like the US Air Force already has it. Called the Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, the weapon was able to successfully target and disable the electronics of seven separate buildings during a test in Utah.^[1] Thankfully, it’s able to pinpoint specific targets instead of just bombarding a whole area with the pulse, ensuring that civilians won’t be affected during a live operation.

9 Hypersonic Missiles

The speed of sound isn’t anywhere close to the speed of light, and saying that overtaking it is any sort of a breakthrough in 2019 would be dishonest. We have many things that can breach the sound barrier like it’s nothing, though most of it is military tech, like jets and missiles, and also super-expensive to build. It’s not the same for hypersonic speed, though, which is at least five times the speed of sound and much more difficult to achieve.

It’s one of those things we thought we’d see farther in the future, but that was until China put its hypersonic missiles to the test.^[2] Unfortunately for all of China’s potential enemies, the tests were successful. Developing hypersonic missiles has been a top priority for the United States for some time now, so it would be interesting to see what they come up with now that China has seemingly taken the lead in that arms race.

8 Micro-Drones

Thirty years ago, few would have imagined that we’d have unmanned flying objects capable of carrying out military operations from a safe distance. Drones (aka UAVs) have already transformed the way we conduct warfare as well as other parts of life, like news reporting and drunken bets at tech school parties.

Despite their utility in warfare, there are some things that UAVs still can’t easily do, like carrying out an operation undetected. For that, they’d have to be minimized to an almost undetectable scale, something science fiction authors have played around with quite a few times. It sounds overpowered and kind of scary, as tiny armed drones no one can see could wreak havoc in the wrong hands. It’s a relief, then, that they’re still quite a bit away in the distant future, right? Well, no.

In January 2017, the Pentagon announced that it had successfully tested a group of 103 micro-drones, each about 16 centimeters (6 in) in length.^[3] They’re largely autonomous in nature and are capable of things like collective decision-making, changing formations according to situation, and “healing” themselves. And no, that’s not all; they also have plans to some day be able to fit advanced and deadly technologies on their minuscule drones, including tiny nukes.

7 Weaponizing AI

Many scientific and military experts have grave, and justified, concerns about artificial intelligence being allowed into the realm of warfare. Even if a full-fledged killer robot uprising isn’t really that big of a concern at this point, it poses many other ethical questions we need to answer first. How do we make sure that autonomous, self-learning weapons know the difference between combatants and civilians, when even we mistake the two every now and then? More importantly, how do we hold a machine accountable for its actions? Going to jail isn’t really a deterrent for it.

Despite those concerns, artificial intelligence is already a part of warfare to a larger extent than those concerned about it would be comfortable with. Take Israel’s “Harop” loitering munition system, which is essentially a suicide drone that can self-destruct if it’s able to lock on to what it perceives as a target, like enemy combatants or antiaircraft missile systems.^[4] It has already been successfully used on the battlefield, and the scariest part is that it’s capable of deciding what to dive-bomb entirely on its own. Reportedly, Germany also has completely automated missile systems capable of shooting down enemy missiles without any human intervention.

There’s a silver lining, though; AI developers aren’t as easily available for hire as general weapons experts, and many in Silicon Valley have explicitly refused to work with the military to try to ensure that AI’s use in warfare remains limited.

6 Mind-Controlled Weapons

Imagine simply linking your brain to a weapon, vehicle, robot, or what have you and being able to pilot it with a deftness and fluidity you’d never attain with a joystick, to be the fighter jet or Pacific Rim-style giant death robot. If you think that it’s safe to say that it’ll be some time before we can actually do that, you’d be wrong; the tech already exists.

In one study, neuroscientists developed something known as the “brainet,” where two monkeys were taught how to control a digital limb with the help of just their thoughts. While it has noncombat applications, especially in aiding people with brain damage or disabilities in their day-to-day tasks, it could also be used for military purposes. The US Department of Defense already has ongoing programs looking into creating mind-controlled weapons, and we could see them put to use quite soon.^[5]

5 Exoskeleton Suit

Anyone who has played first-person shooters is probably familiar with the concept of an exoskeleton suit, an exterior suit of powered armor that provides enhanced protection and capabilities. The idea, in various forms, has been explored quite a bit in fiction as well; just look at Iron Man.

While something as high-tech and awesome as Tony Stark’s duds will take some time to develop, an exoskeleton suit already exists. In 2018, Russia tested its RATNIK-3 prototype. The tests were largely successful; the tester was able to carry heavy loads and shoot a machine gun one-handed. The suit is made with a titanium framework to increase the soldier’s strength and stamina.^[6]

It has a limitation, though: It doesn’t have much in the way of energy storage, so it can only work for a limited time. They’re working on fixing that, though. Either way, the RATNIK-3 sounds like a working exoskeleton suit to us.

4 Seeing Through Walls

Gone are the days of face-to-face battles on large fields. The wars of today are largely urban in nature, which is partly due to the combatants being non-state actors and guerilla fighters. That also makes it all the more difficult, as booby traps and ambushes in densely populated urban battlefields can bring the best armies to a halt (as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Many countries have been trying to perfect their own technologies for being able to scan an area before they move in, but that would require the ability to see through walls, and no one really has that. Or don’t they? Some recent breakthroughs have proven that not only is it closer than we thought, but the tech to see through walls already exists.

In 2015, a Czech radar manufacturer successfully built a device that can see what’s on the other side of the wall, as long as whoever is behind the wall is moving their limbs or breathing. If that’s not good enough, in 2018, a group of researchers from MIT developed an AI-type technology that can see anyone through walls with an accuracy of 83 percent, complete with a moving image of their stick-like form in real time.^[7]

In another breakthrough at the Technical University of Munich in 2017, researchers were able to do the same thing with Wi-Fi routers. We’re pretty sure we saw something like that in a movie once.

3 Seeking Bullets

You may not at all be surprised to hear that in a battle, enemy combatants, at least competent ones, are trained to make shooting them difficult. That’s exactly why a type of ammunition developed by DARPA, the research wing of the US Department of Defense, is so impressive and deadly. Known as EXACTO, it’s not just able to home in on a hard-to-hit, dug-in target; it also has the ability to change course midway depending on enemy movement and is accurate to a scary degree.^[8]

Not just that, they’re also actively trying to develop an auto-aiming rifle, which uses computation and advanced algorithms to only fire when the shot should hit, without the shooter having to rely on his judgement of wind conditions and visibility.

2 Freeze Ray

Unlike most other items on this list, which could aid good guys as well as rogue armies, the “freeze ray,” a weapon that can literally freeze someone in his tracks, has generally been portrayed in fiction as something villains use. Of course, we don’t really have anything that can do that from a distance and in a short burst of time, right? Well, a team from the University of Washington developed something along those lines in 2015.

It works by shooting a laser at a liquid and freezing it. We already had the tech to do this to solids in a vacuum, this was the first time it had been done to a liquid. Also, lasers generally heat objects up rather than cooling them down.

Future applications for technology of this sort extend far beyond freezing people in a battle, of course. The researchers think that it could theoretically be used to freeze and slow down the division process in living cells, possibly giving us a better understanding of the mechanisms behind aging and cancer.^[9]

1 Invisibility Cloak

The ability to become invisible whenever we want wouldn’t just be valuable for the military; a lot of us could make use of such an ability in many of our daily interactions. It has been imagined and discussed in science fiction since we started writing science fiction, and even in 2019, it still sounds like something from the future. Fortunately for military contractors as well as people who keep getting stuck in awkward conversations, invisibility cloaks are no longer the stuff of the distant future or science fiction. In fact, we’ve had at least one invisibility cloak since 2012.

A Canadian company called Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corporation has successfully built a material that can make you invisible. It’s also passive in nature, which means that it doesn’t reproduce your background on any kind of screen; it just “bends light around an object.”^[10] In other words, it’s an invisibility cloak exactly like you’d envision an invisibility cloak to be. The US military showed interest in purchasing it, because of course it did, and you might just see it deployed on a battlefield near you sooner than you’d have expected.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

Every generation has its own idea of what “futuristic” means. Fifty years ago, that would have been flat-screen TVs, 24-hour ATMs, and other things we take for granted today.

As technological growth is exponential rather than linear, “futuristic” in 2019 means quite a bit more than it did back then. All bets are off at this point as scientific progress is rapidly leaving even our imaginations behind. Most of us didn’t even know that these 10 futuristic technologies were in development, let alone already in existence.

10 Thought-Controlled Prostheses

Humanity has a long history of going out and doing things that take our limbs away. Compared to our early days, prosthetic limbs have a come a long way. They’re not just pieces of wood vaguely shaped like an arm anymore. Today’s prostheses almost look and operate like real limbs.

However, anyone who has lost an arm will tell you that prostheses aren’t anything like the real thing. No matter how advanced they get, they still can’t communicate with the brain and neural network.

Of course, that was until science decided that it was time to build thought-controlled prostheses—and did. In an experiment funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a man from Florida became the first person to be fitted with an artificial limb that can be controlled by thoughts, blurring the line between imagination and reality.

Even if he still can’t do everything he could with his real arm—like splash water on it or drive—the arm largely works as intended.^[1]

9 Full-Fledged 3-D–Printed Organs

3-D printers can print almost anything as long as the blueprint and material is available. From guns to musical instruments to clothes, people who’ve been experimenting with 3-D printing since the technology came out have done unbelievable things with it. Some of 3-D printing’s truly futuristic applications lie in medicine, like printing and replacing organs damaged during accidents.

Although we have previously discussed a San Diego research firm that successfully printed liver tissue, that was not exactly the same as 3-D printing organs because a human organ is much more than just tissue. Almost all our organs are so intricately designed that even our best machines haven’t been able to replicate them yet.

Until now. A researcher from Rice University recently printed a full-scale model of the lung—complete with air pathways and blood vessels mimicking the real thing.^[2] We’ve also come one step closer to perfectly replicating human tissue. In another lab, scientists were able to reprogram the cells of our tissues into stem cells and make a bio ink out of it. The ink could then be used to print a complicated organ—such as the heart—exactly like the real thing.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’re now able to completely make a human body on our own, though these advancements are still something we never expected we’d be able to do so soon.

8 Working Retinal Implants

According to WHO estimates, around 1.3 billion people around the world are diagnosed with vision impairment. Many of them suffer from degenerative retinal diseases that cannot be cured. Completely curing blindness would certainly be considered a futuristic proposition, and thanks to groundbreaking research into retinal implants that perfectly mimic the human eye, we may already have the tech to do it.

Recently, scientists made a retinal implant that works exactly like the real thing and successfully tested it in rats. We’d like to note that eye implants already exist, though none of them could fix the damage done to the retina as it’s responsible for taking the information seen through the eye to the brain. This new tech can fix the eye and be used as a replacement for the retina and photoreceptor cells, something that wasn’t possible before.^[3]

In other research, scientists have created a 2-D material that could be used to make an artificial retina. Combine that with the above implants, and we may already possess the tech required to eradicate blindness. However, it will be at least a few more years until it’s perfected and made affordable enough for the masses.

7 Digital Tattoos

You may have heard of the various types of LED screens that scientists are working on, including superthin, foldable screens that we may be able to carry in our pockets like handkerchiefs. But you may not have heard that the same thing could be done to skin. Based on recent developments, we already have the material to do that.

We’re not talking about replacing actual skin. No, these would be tattoo-like augmentations to the skin that would double as displays. If one Japanese research team is to be believed, we’ve already developed the material with which it would be made.^[4]

It could be used for a lot of things, like monitoring heartbeats and other health readings while connected to an app on your smartphone, storing unlock codes for your various devices, or simply serving as over-the-top, bespoke tattoos for really fancy parties.

6 Grow Organs Of One Species In Another

One of the biggest problems with organ transplants is how choosy the human body is when accepting something it didn’t grow on its own. But there may be a way to get around that problem. In another organism, you grow the required organs that perfectly resemble those made by your own body and then transplant them.

If that sounds like something straight out of the distant future, we’re pleased to report that it isn’t anymore. In fact, scientists have already done it in mice. In a study published in Nature, researchers were able to grow pancreas cells for a mouse in rats. (And yes, they are completely different species.)

First, they injected rats with stem cells and did some other complicated science stuff. Then they transplanted the developed pancreas cells into mice with diabetes. To everyone’s surprise, the mice were cured and their sugar levels were kept down for one year. This technique could be used someday to grow whatever organs we need in other animals.^[5]

5 3-D–Printed Nanobots

Nanobots have been imagined in popular fiction as well as the daydreams of budding scientists for quite some time now. In theory, we’d be able to build robots so small that they could enter the bloodstream and carry out minute operations inside the body, like manually killing cancer cells.

We’ve discussed some progress in that field before, though these devices weren’t technically tiny robots. Instead, they were folded DNA strands from another organism, even if they could be called nanobots for all intents and purposes.

More recently, scientists from Hong Kong developed 3-D–printed nanoscale robots with stem cells, nickel, and titanium and successfully used them to deliver cancer cells to a specific location in mice. Of course, the end goal should have been removing the cancer, but that wasn’t what they were testing. They wanted to see if the bots could deliver a payload to a precise location and used cancer cells because they are the easiest to track.^[6]

4 Sending Taste Over The Internet

The Internet has transformed our lives. We can now see and hear what’s going on in different parts of the world by just clicking a few buttons on our smartphones. However, we can only send information that engages our senses of sight and hearing, and it’s still limited by the quality of the recording equipment and the skill of the person recording it. We have no way of sending, for example, what we smell through the Internet.

But we’re one step closer with taste. In a study conducted at the University of Singapore, researchers were able to successfully send a measure of sourness of a lemon drink to a glass of water in another location. They even had people test it out. Although most admitted that the virtual lemon taste was a bit less sour than the real thing, the participants were largely able to identify the taste.

Of course, this has only been tested on a lemon as of now and researchers cannot reproduce the real flavor without simulating olfaction. Still, it’s pretty unbelievable.^[7]

3 Self-Healing Skin

Wear and tear is a major problem for every industry, whether it’s manufacturing, architecture, or medicine. Everyone has to accept that things are going to break down with time, and we have to take that into account when designing things. The problem is especially noticeable in the human body, which gets weaker and more prone to injuries as we age.

If some recent developments are to be believed, we’re not going to have that problem for long. Scientists at the National University of Singapore recently developed a self-healing material that mimics the skin of a jellyfish. The skin is able to repair itself within minutes of being cut or torn and can even withstand coming into contact with water.

While those with more perverse minds could see this as the next step to building realistic sex robots, it has quite a few other uses as well. It can be used to create realistic prostheses, which could be combined with the previously mentioned thought-controlled mechanism to build artificial limbs better than our real ones. This electronic skin is also sustainable because a material that can heal itself doesn’t need to be discarded as waste.^[8]

2 3-D–Printed Food

In the machines vs. humans debate, it’s clear that we’re going to lose quite a few jobs to our metallic counterparts as time progresses. It’s not all misery, though. It’s just another part of the rapid technological progress of the last few decades, which has also helped us in many areas of life. However, we assume that some jobs will always be strictly human endeavors as machines would never be able to do them.

Cooking is definitely one of those jobs as there’s no way that a machine would have an idea of the right ingredients and proportions to make food taste good. However, machines have already proven they can do it as well as we can.

According to Natural Machines, a 3-D food printing company, we already have the technology required to 3-D print food items like burgers and pizzas. Foodini, as their machine is called, is capable of taking ingredients and turning them into dishes that taste as good as those made by people. The best part is that the company is now focusing on health food and fresh ingredients.^[9]

Many other firms are now developing machines that give you the option to 3-D print food items at home.

1 Remote Touching

A big limitation of getting things done is being there to do them. We know it sounds like a philosophical and edgy argument as you obviously have to go places to do things there (like buying groceries). However, many researchers are hard at work trying to overcome that limitation, no matter how impossible it sounds.

Imagine a world where you could have sex with someone across the world like you were there or conduct a remote conference with a version of yourself that could replicate everything you do, including handling things from far away. The concept is so futuristic that we aren’t even able to wrap our heads around how it could be possible. However, a technology developed by researchers at MIT is already able to do just that to a large extent.

Known as inFORM, it’s a shape-shifting interface that can take input from a remote location and precisely replicate those actions in another. inFORM is only the name of the interface, though, as they’re now building quite a few other applications on top of it.^[10]

Take Materiable, which is one of those applications that allows you to remotely handle objects and has even been successfully tested in the lab. It’s able to mimic the properties of a lot of materials found on Earth, like sand, water, and rubber.

Remote handling is only one of its applications as we don’t even know everything that it could be used for yet.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

Those of us who lived a substantial portion of our lives before the turn of the century used to think of our current time period as the far, far distant future. Because we grew up on films like Blade Runner (which is set in 2019), we tend to be a little unimpressed with how un-future-y the future has turned out to be—from an aesthetic perspective, at least.

Well, while the perpetually promised flying car may never actually arrive, these less flashy but equally impressive recent breakthroughs in medical technology could all go a long way toward enhancing the quality of life as we move into an even more distant yet further off future.

10 Custom Biomaterial-Based Joint Replacements

While joint and bone replacement technology has come a long way in recent decades, with plastic and ceramic-based devices beginning to take prevalence over metal ones, the newest generation of artificial bones and joints will take the entire concept one step further—by being designed to essentially fuse organically with the body.

This is made possible, of course, by 3-D printing (which will be somewhat of a recurring theme here). In the UK, surgeons at Southampton General Hospital have pioneered a technique in which an elderly patient’s 3-D–printed titanium hip implant is held in place by a “glue” made from the patient’s own stems cells. Impressive as that is, University of Toronto professor Bob Pilliar has one-upped it significantly with next-generation implants that actually mimic human bone.

Using a process that binds his bone substitute compound (using ultraviolet light) into incredibly complex structures with pinpoint precision, Pilliar and his team create a tiny network of nutrient-bearing ducts and canals within the implants themselves.

The patient’s regrowing bone cells then distribute throughout that network, interlocking the bone with the implant. The artificial bone compound then dissolves over time, and the naturally regrown cells and tissue retain the shape of the implant. Says Mr. Pilliar, “It’s a little short of Star Trek where you zap a person, and they’re fixed . . . but it’s along the same lines.”

9 Tiny Pacemaker

Since the first implanted pacemaker in 1958, the technology has, of course, improved considerably. However, after some huge leaps in the 1970s, pacemaker technology largely leveled off in the mid-80s. Astonishingly, Medtronic—the company that produced that first battery-powered pacemaker—is coming to market with a device that will revolutionize pacemakers in much the same way that its earlier device improved upon wearable ones. It’s the size of a vitamin pill and, in fact, requires no surgery at all.

This newest model is delivered via catheter in the groin(!), attaching to the heart with tiny prongs and delivering the needed regular electrical impulses. While ordinary pacemaker surgery is rather intrusive, creating a “pocket” for the device to sit next to the heart, the tiny version makes for a far easier procedure and, astonishingly, improves on the complication rate of the original by over 50 percent, with 96 percent of patients reporting no major complications.

While Medtronic may very well be first to market (having already garnered FDA approval), other major pacemaker manufacturers have competing devices in development, wary of being left behind in what is currently a $3.6 billion annual market. Medtronic began development of its tiny lifesaver in 2009.

8 Google Eye Implant

Ubiquitous search engine provider and world dominator Google seems eerily intent on integrating technology into every aspect of life, but one must admit that they have some intriguing ideas to go along with their clunkers. Google’s latest number, though, has as many potentially life-changing applications as it does abjectly terrifying ones.

The project that is known as Google Contact Lens is exactly what it sounds like: an implantable lens, one that replaces the eye’s natural lens (which is destroyed in the process) and can adjust to correct poor vision. It’s bonded to the eye with the same material used to make soft contact lenses and has a variety of potential medical applications—such as reading the blood pressure of glaucoma patients, recording the glucose levels of those with diabetes, or wirelessly updating to account for deteriorations in a patient’s vision.

It could potentially even restore lost vision completely. Of course, with this prototype tech being a short lob away from an actual camera implanted in your eye, speculation has run rampant about the possibility for abuse.

At this time, there is no telling when this might be on the market. But a patent has been filed, and clinical trials have confirmed the procedure’s viability.

7 Artificial Skin

While advances in artificial skin graft technology have made steady progress in recent decades, two new breakthroughs from quite different angles may open up new areas of research. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientist Robert Langer has developed a “second skin” which he calls XPL (“cross-linked polymer layer”). The incredibly thin material mimics the appearance of taut, youthful skin—an effect that occurs nearly instantly on application yet thus far loses its effect after about a day.

Interesting as this is, University of California Riverside chemistry professor Chao Wang is working on an even more futuristic polymer material—one that can self-heal from damage at room temperature and, for good measure, is infused with tiny metal particles that make it capable of conducting electricity. While he does not outright state that he is trying to create superheroes, he does admit to being a big fan of Wolverine and says of his research, “It’s trying to bring science fiction into the real world.”

Interestingly, some self-healing materials have already made their way to the marketplace, such as a self-repairing coating on LG’s Flex phone, which Wang cites as an example of several types of applications that he sees for this tech in the future. Having said that, this man is clearly trying to create superheroes.

6 Motion-Restoring Brain Implants

Ian Burkhart, 24, suffered a freak accident at age 19 that left him paralyzed from the chest down. For the last two years, he has been working with doctors to tweak and tune the device implanted in his brain—a microchip that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them to movement. Though the device is far from perfect—he can only use it in the lab with the implant connected to a computer by a sleeve worn on his arm—he has been able to relearn tasks such as pouring from a bottle and has even been able to play a video game or two.

In fact, Ian is the first to admit that he may never directly benefit from the tech. It’s more of a “proof of concept” to show that limbs that no longer have connections to the brain can be reconnected to the brain’s impulses through outside means.

It is, however, quite likely that his submitting to brain surgery and undergoing thrice-weekly sessions for years will be of enormous help in advancing this technology for future generations. Although similar procedures have been used to partially restore motion in monkeys and to animate a robotic arm using human brain waves, this is the first example of successfully bridging the neural disconnect that causes paralysis in a human subject.

5 Bioabsorbable Grafts

Stents or grafts—polymer mesh tubes that are inserted surgically into arteries to alleviate blockage—are a necessary evil, being prone to complications over the lifetime of the patient and only moderately effective. The potential for complications particularly in young patients makes the results of a recent study involving bioabsorbable vascular grafts very promising.

The procedure is called endogenous tissue restoration—and now for some plain English: In young patients born without some necessary connections in their hearts, doctors were able to create those connections using an advanced material that acts as a “scaffold,” allowing the body to replicate the structure with organic material with the implant then degrading. It was a limited study with only five young patients. Yet all five recovered with no complications.

While this is not a new concept, the new material involved in the study (composed of “supramolecular bioabsorbable polymers, manufactured using a proprietary electrospinning process”) seems to represent a major step forward. Previous-generation stents composed of other polymers and even metallic alloys have yielded mixed results, leading to slow adoption of the treatment everywhere except North America.

4 Bioglass Cartilage

Another 3-D–printed polymer construct has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of some very debilitating injuries. A team of scientists from the Imperial College London and the University of Milano-Bicocca have created a material they call “bioglass”—a silica-polymer combination that has the tough, flexible properties of cartilage.

These bioglass implants are like the stents from the previous entry but made from a completely different material for a totally different application. One proposed use of these implants is as a scaffolding to encourage natural regrowth of cartilage. But they also have self-healing properties, capable of rebonding upon contact if torn apart.

Although the first tested application will be the replacement of a spinal disc, another, permanent version of the implant is in development to treat knee injuries and other injuries in areas where the cartilage will not regrow. The means of production—3-D printing—makes the implants much cheaper to produce and even more functional than the current leading edge implants of this type, which must typically be grown in a lab.

3 Self-Healing Polymer Muscles

Not to be outdone, Stanford chemist Cheng-Hui Li is hard at work on a material that could be the building block of an actual artificial muscle, one that may even be able to outperform our puny muscles. His compound—a suspiciously organic-sounding combination of silicon, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms—is able to stretch to over 40 times its length and then return to normal.

It can also recover from holes poked in it within 72 hours and, of course, reattach itself if severed due to attraction caused by an iron “salt” in the compound. For now, it must be placed together to reattach itself in this way. The pieces don’t actually crawl toward each other. For now.

Also, for the time being, the only weak spot of this prototype is its limited electrical conductivity, with the substance only increasing in length by 2 percent when exposed to an electrical field as opposed to the 40 percent achieved by real muscles. We expect this to be overcome in short order—and for Li, the bioglass cartilage scientists, and Dr. Wolverine from the earlier entries to be in contact with each other in even shorter order, if they are not already.

2 Ghost Hearts

The technique being pioneered by Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine at the Texas Heart Institute, is a slight departure from the above-discussed 3-D–printed biopolymers and the like. Dr. Taylor has demonstrated in animals—and is ready to try in humans—a technique using only organic material that may be even more science-fictional than any previous entry.

In short, the heart of an animal—say, a pig—is soaked in a chemical bath that destroys and leeches away all of the cells except the protein. This remains as an empty “ghost heart” that can then be injected with the patient’s own stem cells.

Once the necessary biological material is in place, the heart is connected to a device that amounts to an artificial circulatory system and lungs (a “bioreactor”) until it begins functioning as an organ and can be transplanted into the patient. Dr. Taylor has successfully demonstrated the technique on rats and pigs but not yet a human patient.

It’s a similar technique that has had some success with less complex organs such as bladders and tracheae. Dr. Taylor is the first to admit that perfecting the process—and being able to supply a steady stream of engineered hearts, eliminating the transplant waiting list altogether—is a long way off. However, it has been pointed out that even if the effort were to fail, it will undoubtedly have the benefit of leading to a much greater understanding of the construction of the heart and improving the treatment of heart maladies.

1 Injectable Brain Mesh

Finally, we have a cutting-edge technology with the potential to quickly, simply, and completely wire the brain with one injection. Researchers from Harvard University have developed an electrically conductive polymer mesh that is literally injected into the brain where it infiltrates the nooks and crannies, melding with actual brain tissue.

Thus far consisting of only 16 electrical elements, the mesh was implanted into the brains of two mice for five weeks without immune rejection. Researchers predict that a larger-scale device composed of hundreds of such elements could actively monitor the brain down to the individual neuron in the near future, with other potential applications including the treatment of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and stroke.

Eventually, this could also lead scientists to a better understanding of higher cognitive function, emotions, and other functions of the brain that currently remain murky. Such bridging of the gap between neurological and physical science could very well power many of the advances of the even further future and also—along with many of the previous entries on this list—lead to superheroes.

We know that science is constantly progressing behind the scenes, though most of us have no idea just how far it has come in the past few years. Many technologies that were once considered ‘futuristic’ and only existed in the realm of science fiction are now a reality – from invisibility cloaks to mind-controlled prosthetics to advanced autonomous weapons. 

10. Realistic Holograms

Holograms have actually been in use for a while in the form of holographic paper – a printing technique that uses light waves to create a three-dimensional look. They’re most commonly used as an anti-counterfeit measure for things like bank notes, tickets, ID cards, and product tags, among other uses. 

More recently, however, holograms have taken a much more advanced form, thanks to innovations in fields like augmented and virtual reality. Technologies like MIT’s tensor holography are now capable of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to render truly realistic holographs, which could in turn be interacted with in a variety of ways to make them more immersive. 

Once it’s fully realized, hologram technology could be used for a variety of purposes. Imagine being able to conduct a fully holographic conference call, with the participants located in completely different places around the world. It could also be used for monitoring remote objects in dangerous locations, like offshore drilling rigs, massively reducing the risks associated with the job. 

9. Nanobots

Nanobots, also called nanorobots or nanomachines, have been a science fiction staple for as long as one can remember. These microscopic machines, capable of performing complex tasks at a cellular or molecular level, have been imagined as tiny medical assistants, self-replicating repair machines, and deadly weapons. In real life, however, nanobot technology has always been something that belongs in the distant future, until recently. 

In the past few years, many teams working in the field around the world have made significant strides in a variety of applications. In 2018, researchers from Hong Kong were successfully able to develop bots that can work at a cellular level to kill tumors. These were essentially reprogrammed strands of DNA loaded with chemotherapy drugs, specifically designed to seek out and destroy tumors that may someday turn into cancer. 

In January, 2020, another group of researchers from Tufts University went a step further and developed the first living nanobots in history. Built with stem cells taken from frogs, these tiny machines – also called xenobots – can move, heal themselves, and even clump together to make new bots all on their own. 

8. Lethal Autonomous Robots

Lethal autonomous robots is an umbrella term for weapons that can operate without human intervention. Using technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced remote sensors, these weapons of the future could be programmed to make targeting decisions entirely on their own, completely bypassing the need for soldiers on the ground. 

Worryingly enough, weapons with autonomous abilities have already started showing up on battlefields around the world. Both Russia and Ukraine have deployed autonomous weapons in their ongoing war, and a UN report alleged that Turkey had used their autonomous Kargu-2 drones to hunt down Libya’s soldiers during the Libyan civil war. Currently, nearly every major military power is working on its own lethal autonomous capabilities, despite strong opposition from rights groups and scientists seeking to limit the technology. 

7. Thought-Controlled Prosthetics

Prosthetics that can be instinctively controlled with your brain have only been imagined in science fiction, though some breakthroughs in recent years might just make them a reality sooner than we think. 

Ongoing research at the University of Michigan is responsible for many of those breakthroughs. In 2020, researchers from the university developed a technique to amplify faint signals from the amputated nerves to control a robotic hand in real time, complete with intuitive, finger-level control of the prosthetic. The approach involves tiny muscle grafts, machine learning algorithms, and electrodes implanted in areas of the brain that control movement and process the sense of touch from a natural limb. Based on that study, another team from the same university developed something called the Regenerative Peripheral Nerve Interface (RPNI) – a small muscle grafted at the end of the severed nerve. 

6. Invisibility Cloak

True invisibility cloaks have been featured in all kinds of fictional settings, possibly because they provide an easy mechanic to advance the story in a particular direction. If invented, they’d render many types of weapons systems obsolete, especially the ones that rely on visual confirmation. 

In 2019, a Canadian company specializing in military camouflage called Hyperstealth Biotechnology unveiled their own attempt at the concept – a material they call Quantum Stealth. Unlike other early prototypes of invisibility cloaks attempted so far, the material bends light around itself to make the object seem invisible to the naked eye, and it even works on infrared and ultraviolet imagers. It’s primarily targeted for military use, as the material could be deployed as a cloaking measure for battlefield equipment, making it near impossible to be targeted from the air. 

5. Reading Dreams

Reading dreams isn’t the sort of thing you’d imagine scientists can do yet yet, at least not in the way most of us imagine. Of course, you’d be wrong, as there have already been some decisive breakthroughs in that field. As of now, it isn’t just possible to see and hear – with considerable accuracy – the contents of someone else’s dreams, but also to alter them towards a particular theme. 

In a breakthrough study from Japan published in the Science journal, they revealed a technique to use MRI scans to show images of the subject’s dream with 60% accuracy. In another study done by researchers at MIT, the scientists developed a device called Dormio, that could deliver specific audio signals just before you fall asleep and change the content of your dreams.

4. Seeing Through Walls

The Xaver 1000 is a portable scanner developed by Camero-Tech – a military-tech firm based in Israel. It’s actually an imaging device that uses AI and complex imaging techniques – like its own ‘Sense-Through-The-Wall’ technology – to detect people and animals behind obstructive surfaces, like walls. 

The scanner works in a wide variety of situations, especially in cases that involve hostages and require a thorough mapping of the scene before any action by law enforcement. The device has a lot of military uses, too, as it’s immensely useful in close-quarters terrains like urban areas and dense buildings. It could also prove to be useful to save lives during natural calamities or other disasters. 

3. Self-Healing Material

Self-healing materials are another major innovation that would revolutionize the field of prosthetics, though that’s not their only application. As the name suggests, researchers have made many breakthroughs in the field in the past few years, to the extent that we may be very close to developing a truly-self-healing material that can mimic organic materials like skin. 

In 2008, researchers at PSL university in France developed a synthetic kind of rubber that can maintain and recover its properties even after being broken repeatedly. Building on that concept, chemical engineers at Stanford University designed a polymer that could repair itself even after being completely separated with a scalpel, retaining 98% of its original property. The best part is that it can be healed again and again, which hasn’t been possible to create in the lab until now. 

2. Mind-Reading Tech

Reading dreams is one thing, but what about reading an active, waking brain? Mind-reading tech could lead to military applications like mind control, or it could even be used for targetted advertising by big corporations. On the other hand, being able to read the mind has many potential applications in medicine, especially in cases where the patient is unable to communicate due to injury or disease.

Surprisingly, it’s not too far in the future, as we already have many technologies that can – to an extent – digitally replicate the inner contents of your head. In an article published in Nature in 2022, researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands developed a technique to convert brainwaves into photographs. They took fMRI scans of the subjects and fed the results into an AI algorithm, which was then able to replicate it on a screen almost identically. 

1. Reverse Aging

Aging is a problem that has afflicted humanity for a pretty long time. Most people would agree that it’s an unnecessary feature that causes problems and ultimately death, though even our best scientists and doctors over the centuries haven’t been able to find a cure for it. 

As of now, we have no technology that could do that for humans, though it might be possible for rats. In a 13-year-long study conducted by Dr. David Sinclair – a professor at the Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School – researchers were able to reverse or accelerate the aging process among mice. In his studies, Sinclair had figured out that aging happens because of the loss of critical information in our cells’ genetic makeup, and not just due to accumulated damage over the years. 

His team demonstrated it in their experiments, where they successfully restored epigenetic information stored in the cells to either restore the mice to an earlier, younger state – complete with restored eyesight and younger muscles – or speed up their aging process prematurely.