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Projections of the size of the personal robot market in 2015 and 2020.

It's hard to think of a more attention-grabbing title than Robots, Men, and Sex Tourism - especially in the academic world. Written by researchers from New Zealand's University of Wellington and published recently in the journal Futures, the paper predicts that in the decades to come, humans will patronise robot-staffed brothels, freeing them from the guilt associated with visiting a flesh-and-blood prostitute.

Thought leaders in the field - including Bruce Sterling, Jamais Cascio, Bill McKibben, Witold Rybczynski and Jay Oglivy - will kick-start the launch by blogging about what "prevailing" means to them. Readers will be encouraged to become authors and help direct the discussion in groups devoted to everything from "Creating Stronger, Faster Communities" and "Human Enhancement" to "Revolutionizing Learning" and "Foresight - How Can We Think Critically About the Future?" "Prevailproject.org will be a place for everybody from my mother to technologists inventing the future to grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time: How are the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions changing human nature, and how can we shape our own futures, toward our own ends, rather than being the pawns of these explosively powerful technologies?" said Joel Garreau, the Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, and director of The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures.

"Bertolt Meyer is used to being viewed as not fully human. Born with a stump where his left hand should have been, he spent his childhood wearing a hook connected to an elaborate pulley and harness. "To open the hook and grasp things I had to flex my shoulders like this," he says, striking a he-man pose. "The harness was very uncomfortable. To stop it chafing my skin, I had to wear a shirt underneath it at all times. I was always sweating.""

"The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity."

Are you ready for designer biohazards, an end to Middle Eastern dominance of the oil business, and a United Nations with a lot more countries sitting at the grown-ups' table? What about a robot chauffeur, Iranian smart bombs, or a United States desperate to encourage immigrants from south of the border, not keep them out? Welcome to Foreign Policy's first-ever predictions issue. We asked some of the world's most bleeding-edge thinkers to look at the planet in the year 2025-and those are just a few of their remarkable, and at times startling, projections. Most of all, what they told us is that The Future Is Now; the big trends and inescapable developments dictating our next few decades have already been set in motion, and though of course we can't begin to predict the unknowable, we actually already know an awful lot about how the world will look in the coming years.

"There's more to tomorrow than robots, flying cars, and a faster internet. 22C+ is all about Deep Futures, futures that matter. Welcome to futures fantastic, unexpected, profound, but most of all deeply meaningful... "