3 Science Fictions We Really Just Built

It combines a camera with a laser to shoot whatever is being recorded. If YouTube used that technology we'd improve the human race within a week. It's also why we put it on the mast of our ambassador robots -- it's way scarier than a Skull and Crossbones and kicks much more ass. If you think you can't have pirates on Mars because there was no water, Curiosity also found evidence that there was running water. We are right now driving an exoplanatery robot along the stream bed of one of the most exciting clues about life on another planet and the possible fate of our own. If you're into that kind of thing.

University College London has worked out how to destroy optimism with transcranial magnetic manipulation. Normally you have to annoy Ming the Merciless to hear a sentence like that. They target the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) of the brain. That's how smart these people are: They're drawing crosshairs on parts of your brain it didn't even know it had. By inducing currents in the participants' living brains, those brains became better at updating their expectations when faced with bad news. News like "the machines are now inducing currents in your living brain."

"I guess I like the Matrix movies, why do you ask?"

Zapping the left IFG made people more realistic, while blasting the right sent the brain from rose-tinted glasses to an entire romantic garden in a scuba mask. They point out how electromagnetically modifying this bias could avoid problems like the global financial meltdown, improve civilization's preparation for natural disasters, and end optimism. So if you've ever wondered what a megavillain's good intentions origin story looked like, this paper is it.

It can only track humans holding a touch-screen mobile device, but that just shows that the machines now understand our weaknesses. If survival means throwing away your smartphone, most modern people would choose to spend their last moments in the company of two machines instead. They've also designed a system more guaranteed to go rogue than a fighter jet in a lightning storm being asked about the meaning of love. The AlphaDog is designed to carry heavy loads, but the "handheld" control panel weighs over 4 kilograms. Normally the first dead-meat in a movie gives the robot autonomy out of greed or hatred -- the AlphaDog will gain access to its own controls through sheer human laziness.