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Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago; we meet him onstage.

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What is Artificial Intelligence Exactly?

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From smartphone apps that can do seemingly everything to driverless cars and eerily humanlike robots, the past decade has seen dramatic advances in science and technology. What amazing advances are we likely to see in the next 10 years?

To find out, HuffPost Science reached out to seven top futurists -- and they gave us some pretty surprising predictions. Keep reading to learn more.
Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and author of "The Future of the Mind:"
"In the next 10 years, we will see the gradual transition from an Internet to a brain-net, in which thoughts, emotions, feelings, and memories might be transmitted instantly across the planet.

Scientists can now hook the brain to a computer and begin to decode some of our memories and thoughts. This might eventually revolutionize communication and even entertainment. The movies of the future will be able to convey emotions and feelings, not just images on a silver screen. (Teenagers will go crazy on social media, sending memories and sensations from their senior prom, their first date, etc.). Historians and writers will be able to record events not just digitally, but also emotionally as well.

Perhaps even tensions between people will diminish, as people begin to feel and experience the pain of others."

Dr. Ray Kurzweil, inventor, pioneering computer scientist, and director of engineering at Google:

"By 2025, 3D printers will print clothing at very low cost. There will be many free open source designs, but people will still spend money to download clothing files from the latest hot designer just as people spend money today for eBooks, music and movies despite all of the free material available. 3D printers will print human organs using modified stem cells with the patient's own DNA providing an inexhaustible supply of organs and no rejection issues. We will be also able to repair damaged organs with reprogrammed stem cells, for example a heart damaged from a heart attack. 3D printers will print inexpensive modules to snap together a house or an office building, lego style.

We will spend considerable time in virtual and augmented realities allowing us to visit with each other even if hundreds of miles apart. We'll even be able to touch each other.

We will spend considerable time in virtual and augmented realities allowing us to visit with each other even if hundreds of miles apart. We'll even be able to touch each other. Some of the 'people' we visit with in these new realities will be avatars. They will be compelling but not quite human level by 2025 -- that will take to the 2030s. We will be able to reprogram human biology away from many diseases and aging processes, for example deactivating cancer stem cells that are the true source of cancer, or retard the progression of atherosclerosis, the cause of heart disease.

We will be able to create avatars of people who have passed away from all of the information they have left behind (their emails and other documents, images, videos, interviews with people who remember them). These will be compelling but not fully realistic, not until the mid 2030s, so some people will find this 'replicant' technology to be in the 'uncanny valley,' that is, disconcerting."
Dr. Anne Lise Kjaer, founder of London-based trend forecasting agency Kjaer Global:
"The World Health Organization predicts that chronic diseases will account for almost three-quarters of all deaths worldwide by 2020, so the evolution of M-Health (mobile diagnostics, bio-feedback and personal monitoring) is set to revolutionize treatment of conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Apps designed by medical professionals will provide efficient real-time feedback, tackle chronic conditions at a much earlier stage, and help to improve the lifestyles and life outcomes of communities in the developed and developing world.

This improvement to our physical well-being is exciting, but what excites me even more is the parallel development of apps that meet our under-served mental health needs."
Dr. James Canton, CEO of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures and author of "Future Smart: Managing the Game-Changing Trends that will Transform Your World:"
"Wearable mobile devices will blanket the world. By 2025, there will be a massive Internet of everyone and everything linking every nation, community, company and person to all of the world's knowledge. This will accelerate real-time access to education, health care, jobs, entertainment and commerce...

Humans and robots merge, digitally and physically, to treat patients who may be around the world. Robo-surgeons will operate remotely on patients. RoboDocs will deliver babies and treat you over the cellphone.

Artificial intelligence becomes both as smart as and smarter than humans. AI will be embedded in autos, robots, homes and hospitals will create the AI economy. Humans and robots merge, digitally and physically, to treat patients who may be around the world. Robo-surgeons will operate remotely on patients. RoboDocs will deliver babies and treat you over the cellphone.

Predictive medicine transforms health care. Early diagnosis of disease with medical devices that sniff our breath, and free DNA sequencing that predicts our future health will be common. Personalized genetic medicine will prevent disease, saving lives and billions in lost productivity... The next generation Bitcoin will replace traditional hard money, creating a new paradigm for digital commerce and business that will create a legitimate new economy."
Jason Silva, host of National Geographic Channel's "Brain Games:"
"The on-demand revolution will become the on-demand world, where biological software upgrades, personalized medicine, artificially intelligent assistants will increasingly transform healthcare and well-being. Additionally, increased automation will continue to make our day-to-day lives infinitely richer. Self-driving cars will be ubiquitous, transportation itself will be automatic, clean, and cheap. We will move into a world in which access trumps ownership and the world is at our fingertips."
Dr. Amy Zalman, CEO & president of the World Future Society:
"Researchers now have at their disposal increasingly acute ways of looking into our brains and bodies to understand our attitudes and behavior. A few years ago, Harvard researchers showed that leaders actually have less stress, not more, than non-leaders... At Ben-Gurion University, a study of judges showed that they handed out stricter judgements before lunch -- when they were hungriest.

I find the potential application of these kinds of insights awe-inspiring. A more accurate understanding of how we humans function -- how we trust, cooperate and learn but also fight and hate -- is a tool that public policy-makers and we citizens can use to build better governance and better futures."
Mark Stevenson, author of "An Optimist's Tour of the Future:"
"The technologies aren't the most important bit -- although they are super cool. It's what society does with them, and right now it's institutional change that's the sticking point.... What you really want to look at, in my opinion, is new ways of organizing ourselves. So, my next book covers, for instance, the renewables revolution in a small Austrian town, open source drug discovery in India, patient networks like PatientsLikeMe and schools that are throwing out the curriculum in order to get on with some actual learning."

BEFORE YOU GO

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7 Futurists On What To Expect In The Next Decade

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From smartphone apps that can do seemingly everything to driverless cars and eerily humanlike robots, the past decade has seen dramatic advances in science and technology. What amazing advances are we likely to see in the next 10 years? To find out, HuffPost Science reached out to seven top futurists -- and they gave us some pretty surprising predictions.

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When you were a kid and stole your friends' toys, your parent probably asked you this angry hypothetical: "How do you think that made them feel?" But what if you actually could feel what another person is feeling? This week, we travel to a future where humans have invented an empathy machine.

Before we dive into what that machine might do to our world, let's pause for a minute to think about what empathy actually is. There are two forms of empathy: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. So says Maia Szalavitz, a journalist and coauthor of the book Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential - and Endangered. She walks us through the differences between the two types.

Already, we're getting to one of the huge hurdles with this idea. Empathy is a nebulous concept, and the way each of us experiences it in the world is really different. So if we start thinking about how this empathy machine might actually work, we start to struggle with the uniqueness of each human's experiences. How might a machine like this operate? If it simply records a pattern of neurons firing in your brain, and copies it into my brain, it probably won't make me feel what you're feeling.

I also talked to Samantha Rich, who equates this issue with the age-old stoner question: Is the blue I see the same blue you see? In the case of emotion and memory: Do I experience fear or love or excitement the same way you do? Unfortunately, nobody can really answer that question. Rich is a science fiction writer who recently published a fascinating short story in an anthology called Accessing the Future. It's set in a future where people wear little screens on their chests that broadcast their neural activity. So everybody can see what's going on with everybody else all the time.

Rich's story raises some really interesting questions about how much information we should really know about each other, and how much insight one can truly get about a person from seeing things like biometric data. Just because you've got information about what a person is feeling, doesn't mean you can really understand that feeling.

But let's say that, in this future, we have some good way of actually exchanging full emotional experiences. That I can put on a helmet and really feel what you felt at a certain moment. Really understand it. Some think that that kind of device would be incredibly powerful. One of those people is Heather Schlegel, a social scientist and futurist who thinks a lot about how technology and intimacy interact.

A few years ago, Schlegel worked on a project called UME, an imagined future company that offered a service very similar to the one we described in the beginning of this podcast. "UME is the leading company in emotion extension technology. At UME, we connect how you feel with your loved ones," their website says. As part of this design future, Schlegel and her team came up with some theoretical news story topics describing the public's reaction to this kind of technology. They include things like this: athletes use the emotional connection with their coaches, to get better insight and feedback; surgeons and nurses connect with their patients to better understand their needs; a property developer creates a UME community where all individuals must have embedded empathy technology; a primary school rejects any students without an empathy connection; UME encounters religious pushback, seen as interfering with "higher connections" to God.

If you could get this kind of system to work, there would be all kinds of great applications. People could use it to become closer, to understand other people's emotions, to feel experiences they might never get the chance to have themselves. The justice system could use it as a punishment, forcing criminals to feel the pain their crime caused the victim and family. People with social anxiety could use it to better understand the interactions they're having.

But here again is where we need to pause. It seems like being able to experience other people's emotions and mental states would be a good thing, right? That it could even change people's minds about subjects, give them a better understanding of people whom they haven't met, and maybe even purge the prejudices that most people harbor inside them. But is that actually true? Does experiencing other people's emotions and memories actually make you more respectful of them as people?

Possibly, if done correctly, says Szalavitz. But we'd have to really be careful about how we use it. As Rich points out in her story, just having some pieces of information about a person's emotions can't really tell you everything. And it's still unclear whether it's possible to experience another person's feelings at all, without our own history and memories and biases mucking it all up.

Here's the thing. Humans, as a species, have a huge capacity for empathy. Much of our world and economy is built on trust, which requires some amount of empathy. And, in fact, we already kind of have an empathy box. It's called the Internet. The internet can carry stories of experiences you've never even dreamed of, ones you'll never have yourself, to you. And if we listen to those stories and try to understand what they're telling us, we can in fact do a lot of the work that this future technology might do for us. So while we wait for this magical box to come, we can turn to another magical box in front of us and do a lot of that work ourselves.

Besides, as Szalavitz points out, there's at least one invention we have right now that greatly increases empathy: books.

As usual, if you have thoughts about futures we should explore on the podcast, leave us a note in the comments, on Twitter, or email us at overthinkingit@gizmodo.com. We also have a Facebook page now! Check it out. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud or via whatever RSS reading app you chose.
Illustration by Sam Woolley

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Meanwhile in the Future: We've Invented an Empathy Machine

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When you were a kid and stole your friends' toys, your parent probably asked you this angry hypothetical: "How do you think that made them feel?" But what if you actually could feel what another person is feeling? This week, we travel to a future where humans have invented an empathy machine.

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Professor Richard Dawkins expresses his concern that gene editing and breeding could be used to circumvent evolution.