All we wanted was flying cars and machines that clean up after us, and all we’ve gotten is a nightmare of dystopian privacy-shattering technology set against a hellscape of irreversible climate change. Welcome to the future! Humanoid robots can run and do backflips, you can’t tell the difference between an android and a human on the phone, video evidence can no longer be trusted, cops can find you among millions using facial recognition or DNA, and soon your employers might be able to read your thoughts. Wheee, this is fun!

Google’s AI Assistant Sounds Exactly Like a Human

‘Duplex’ is a highly unassuming name for a rather horrifying new piece of technology from Google. The experimental voice-based digital assistant service debuted at the company’s I/O conference last week, and at first, its roster of functions seemed ordinary enough. It can write emails automatically? Cool. It can make appointments for you? Great, who likes talking on the phone these days? But then the demonstration started. The assistant dialed up a hair salon and chatted with the receptionist in such a natural way, it’s almost impossible to tell it’s not human. The effect was so shocking and produced such an uproar on the internet, Google had to immediately release a statement that its AI voice would always identify itself to humans. Sure. If you say so.

Boston Dynamics Robots Can Now Run, Jump & Do Backflips

Hey, remember when we used to laugh about how all the weird faceless robots made by Boston Dynamics could barely remain in an upright position? Well, here’s an update. Some things have changed since the days of robots falling over all the time. For example, “the world’s most dynamic humanoid” Atlas can now run, jump and do backflips, feats impressive (and terrifying) enough to put the likes of Elon Musk on edge. One of the uses envisioned for Atlas in the future is on the front lines of war. Considering the rapid militarization of police forces in the United States, it’s not that far of a jump to imagine a RoboCop scenario spinning out of that.

This is nothing. In a few years, that bot will move so fast you’ll need a strobe light to see it. Sweet dreams… https://t.co/0MYNixQXMw

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 26, 2017

Meanwhile, the company’s dog-like Spot Mini is now capable of taking itself on walks, and it’s set to go on sale to the public in 2019. Why? It’s kind of unclear. The company doesn’t offer very many practical reasons to own a robot dog, which is not particularly cuddly, but it’s not hard to see how it would be a great way to get people more comfortable with this kind of tech, and allow more of it into our homes and lives.

Advances in Facial Recognition Technology

China’s police force is ahead of the game when it comes to propelling us all toward the dystopian future we fear. They’ve got some of the most advanced facial recognition surveillance in the world, with more than 170 million cameras installed around the country, and they use it for ‘crimes’ as minor as jaywalking. In a recent demonstration, a BBC reporter’s headshot was uploaded into the system to show just how quickly the cops could find him in a city of 4.3 million. It took seven minutes. Just a few weeks ago, a suspect wanted for ‘economic crimes’ was found by cameras at a concert surrounded by 60,000 people. But it’s not just the po-po that want to put this technology to use. Among lots of other insidious invasions, like embeddable implants, it’s being touted as a convenient way to avoid carrying paper or even phones. Ticketmaster is working with a facial recognition company called Blink Identity to associate facial data with tickets for seamless concert entry, drink purchases, VIP area entry and more. There’s definitely no way that can go wrong.

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Welcome To The Future 6 Creepy Advances In Potentially Dystopian Technology

Plastic pollution is worse than ever, with scientists recently announcing horrific levels of micro plastics found in Arctic sea ice, but innovative new ways of cleaning it up may give us a sliver of hope in this fight. A familiar googly-eyed sight in Baltimore for years now, floating plastic-cleaning devices known as ‘Mr. Trash Wheel’ and ‘Professor Trash Wheel’ are set to spread to new cities. Meanwhile, an environmental startup called Urban Rivers is gamifying pollution cleanup with a remote trashbot anyone can control from the internet.

Created by John Kellet, Mr. Trash Wheel and Professor Trash Wheel are a pair of solar- and hydro-powered water wheels based in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, collectively pulling millions of pounds of trash out of the water since they were first installed in 2014. Both designs feature ribbed white canopies that make them look like gigantic shellfish, an effect magnified by the addition of painted eyes. They’re operated as part of the Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative, and they’re so successful, people around the world are taking notice.

Each is capable of collecting up to 38,000 pounds of debris in a single day, sucking waste from the notoriously polluted harbor up a conveyer belt that leads to a dumpster barge. The collected material is then hauled away and separated by volunteers, with some of it incinerated to help produce electricity for the city of Baltimore. When the current isn’t strong enough to power them, the water wheels run on backup solar panel arrays.

If you’re wondering whether the trash wheels have ever picked up unintended objects, the answer is yes – once it caught a python, and another time, it drew a kayaker into its current.

On a much smaller scale, but still pretty cool, Urban Rivers’ Trash Robot encourages mass participation in trash cleanup, even from your couch. Spend just a couple minutes piloting the bot from your computer, anywhere in the world, and you’ll be adding to a collective effort while having some fun. Players navigate the bot toward floating trash and get points for snagging as much litter as possible within a set time period.

According to its creators, the biggest challenge in maintaining this project is preventing vandalism and theft of the bots, which they attempt to control with GPS trackers. The Chicago-based nonprofit demonstrated the project in June 2017 and continues to raise funds for future expansions.

You know how China stopped taking our plastic recycling waste because Americans can’t seem to figure out how which items are actually recyclable and which ones clog up the machines and contaminate the resulting materials? Now that China’s ban on imported plastics has gone into effect, we have a whole lot of unwanted stuff to contend with. At this point, it’s clear that robots are very likely the future of recycling, helping to sort through refuse and remove non-recyclable items so people don’t have to. But they could be useful in the interim, too, as proven by the ‘Trashpresso’ mobile solar-powered recycling plant.

Every day, more than 100 million plastic bottles are thrown away, says Miniwiz, creator of the Trashpresso – which turns plastic waste into surprisingly beautiful tiles. Each Trashpresso machine is housed on a 40-foot container platform that can be moved anywhere on a tractor trailer. It needs a lot of solar panels to operate, so they’re kept on a separate 20-foot container platform.

The Trashpresso is capable of up cycling up to 50kg of waste per hour by shredding, washing, air drying, dehumidifying and baking the plastics. An air and water filter keeps the machine from spewing any toxic byproducts of the process into the surrounding environment. It takes about the same amount of energy to transform 800 plastic bottles into 160 tiles as it does to run four washing machines for six hours. The process has a zero water footprint, since water is looped back through the process after filtration.

It takes about five #1 PET plastic bottles to create a single tile, while 5 caps and ringlets can be turned into about 1/20th of a tile. Durable, versatile and water-resistant, the hexagonal tiles can be used for both practical and decorative purposes. Since they’re so compact, they’re a lot easier to transport than bundles of unrecycled plastic waste, and they can be upcycled themselves one time after they’re created.

As a matter of fact, the Trashpresso brings to mind one of the future jobs predicted at the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting: a robotic landfill recycler that sorts through the trash we’ve thrown away to find usable items and bundle them up for recycling.

Guests at a Japanese inn in Hakone were shocked when they removed their hotel-provided slippers only to watch them roll away and self-park in a neat row. Later, taking a seat at the traditional low tables known as chabudai, floor cushions wheel themselves into place automatically to the surprise and delight of onlookers. It’s all part of ‘ProPILOT Park Ryokan,’ a temporary experience engineered for the hotel by Nissan to promote its self-parking vehicle technology.

Obviously, there’s a big difference between a wooden slipper on a lobby floor and a full-scale vehicle, but Nissan says it uses essentially the same sensors and algorithms for both. Do we really need our slippers to scoot into a perfect line? Are we not capable of putting them there ourselves, and parking our own vehicles, too? Sure. But you have to admit, this is way more fun (and imagine how many bad parking jobs it could avoid.)

The self-parking feature is available in the latest version of Nissan’s all-electric Leaf vehicle, which uses both sensors and a rear camera to ease itself into a spot without driver input at the push of a button. The idea, according to the carmaker, is to “liberate drivers from one of the most tedious, and at times the most challenging, tasks of driving” so you can “park perfectly.” It’s all part of a three-stage ramp up to get us all accustomed to autonomous driving, with fully driverless vehicles expected in 2020.

Of course, the slippers bring to mind existing household technology like robot vacuums, too. Doesn’t it make you wonder whether we’re in for a future in which all of our possessions know where they belong, and automatically revert to them when not in use?

If you watched HBO’s ‘Westworld’ earlier this year, you probably remember the scenes where the nascent humanoid robots were strung up on circular frames like Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man,’ with machines printing white muscle fibers onto their skeletons. While the process of constructing androids doesn’t quite resemble this sci-fi vision just yet, it’s surprisingly close, especially with a new breakthrough in synthetic muscle tissue announced by researchers at Columbia Engineering. Their tests show a bundle of white muscle held in the palm of a researcher’s hand, moving and expanding in response to low power sent through a thin resistive wire.

This self-contained ’soft actuator’ is three times as strong as natural muscle, so yes, it’s true: Skynet is going to kill us all. The creators took inspiration from living organisms, using a silicone rubber matrix with ethanol distributed through micro-bubbles to simulate muscle tissue. It’s capable of expanding up to 900% when electrically heated to 80 degrees celsius, and can perform all sorts of motion tasks when controlled by computers.

“We’ve been making great strides toward making robots minds, but robot bodies are still primitive,” says Hod Lipson, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia and leader of the project. “This is a big piece of the puzzle, and, like biology, the new actuator can be shaped and reshaped a thousand ways. We’ve overcome one of the final barriers to making lifelike robots.”

“Our soft functional material may serve as robust soft muscle, possibly revolutionizing the way that soft robotic solutions are engineered today,” adds Aslan Miriyev, a postdoctoral researcher in the Creative Machines lab and lead author of the study ‘Soft Material for Soft Actuators,’ published by Nature Communications. “It can push, pull, bend, twist and lift weight. It’s the closest artificial material equivalent we have to a natural muscle.”