Almost Human [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ] nailed it for me, specifically the MX-43 droid cop. From what is shown, it's mostly a walking inference engine mixed with some kind of future Watson. No Strong AI whatsoever, just smart enough.

for some time i was using a Mindwave, the poor man's EPOC.
it measures at least two parameters (they call them 'attention' and 'meditation') or mindwave patterns, which you can get to control to some extent, depending on practice and... well, how your head works.
i think if it's possible to get a fine control of those two variables, it could be possible to develop some kind of brainwave controlled blinkboard, and spare your sister-in-law the effort of blinking again and again.
might be wort a shot.

yes, indeed, i'd risk to say that nowadays (except when very heavy calculus is required) 1970's tech works quite fine on the field nowadays.
in fact, the current mars rover runs quite fine on a couple rad-hard, PowerPC @ 110MHZ, and i guess that's as hostile as an environment can get. if i remember correctly, it gets far more harder with more modern processors.

can't wait to see what happens with a kernel module coded by a microsoft employee [1] when released in the wild.

[1] http://brandonlucia.com/ guy a the left in the picture.

if they build it, they will come. then they'll root it to hell and back. just like anything from any current vendor. easy guys. it's not like this is something we never saw before.

for those that still didn't get it:

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html

besides that, i think that, if actually implemented, it would not only surelly find it's own market niche, but also would become as cool as terrifying. not terrific, but terrifying. think google 'absorbing' not only a big chunk of email, but also another big chunk of snail mail - or the postal system if you want. add government mandated custom 'filtering', china style. cool, huh? :S