(FORTUNE Magazine) – Here in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, technology has utterly lost the limelight. That's no surprise, considering that dot-com fever is a distant memory and that the leaders gathered here from business, government, nongovernmental organizations, religion, and other fields have terrorism, impending war, crumbling economies, epidemics, and other urgent matters to worry about.

I'm finding that the tech eclipse isn't entirely a bad thing. The gurus are still here, and so are the industry heavyweights--people like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, and Google co-founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Instead of talking about money and market share, the technologists have turned back into dreamers, creating new devices and thinking about things the rest of the world derides as fantasy. I had the privilege of moderating a session meant to update attendees on tech developments in the coming year and beyond. What we got were visions of a world most of us would scarcely recognize.

If you're prone to paranoia, forget fears of globalization; the picture this panel painted was closer to an alien invasion. Robots are already here, fighting our wars and cleaning our floors; the clones are coming; humans are developing an exoskeleton of iPods and Palms. The panelists were David Baltimore, president of Caltech and a Nobel laureate in biology; Rodney Brooks, who directs the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT; Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal (he says it's like being poet laureate, but for astronomers); and Yossi Vardi, a longtime Israeli technology investor whose biggest hit was ICQ, the instant-messaging pioneer he sold to AOL.

Brooks is Mr. Robotics. He not only does research but also co-founded a company called iRobot that is selling the Roomba, a $200 Frisbee-sized vacuum that guides itself around your living room. People are finally growing comfortable with the idea of robots, Brooks said. That's an important shift, because up to now the field has been hobbled by people's reluctance to accept all the things robots can do. For instance, Brooks says iRobot had to take most of the intelligence out of a janitor robot for office buildings. It was able to vacuum, mop, and polish on its own, but cleaning companies preferred a dumbed-down version that needed a person to guide it.

Longer term, Brooks sees assistive robots catching on as baby-boomers age--to carry groceries to and from the car, for instance, or to help us out of bed. Simple versions of such products will be on the market within five years, he predicts.

He also talked about robots and war. In Afghanistan robots are frequently passengers on helicopters flying out of Bagram air base; they help soldiers explore caves. Said Brooks: "The successes in Afghanistan are starting to convince the military that robots can actually do something." He sees a vast market developing by 2015 for robots that replace people on the battlefield. It's probably only a matter of time before America's foes develop their own, and robots battle each other.

Baltimore worries about congressional interference in biotech research, under the pressure of "religious fundamentalists." He cited restrictions on research using human stem cells. The research will still get done, he says, just not in the U.S. Baltimore nonetheless praises the government's huge surge in spending on biomedical research--$27 billion this year, if the budget passes.

His view of human cloning is surprisingly mellow. Baltimore is quite certain that, so far, nobody has achieved it, despite the claims of the Raelians. He says he isn't sure why there is such resistance to human cloning, though, noting that people have no ethical objection to the existence of twins. Even if an exact clone of Albert Einstein were to be created, there's no reason to think he would be anything like Einstein. "He'd probably be a hacker," Baltimore joked. The only problem with cloning, he says, is that it's unsafe, because "we don't yet know how to totally program a cell nucleus to ensure we get a healthy human being." That knowledge probably isn't far off.

Vardi, a resolutely consumer-focused technologist, called 2002 the year of wide connectivity--the broad emergence of Wi-Fi wireless networking created a new kind of digital ecosystem. He sees young people walking around enveloped in a "digital aura" as they carry a variety of devices: PDAs, digital cameras, and iPods. His comment made me feel young again, because in my bag I had all three. New devices that enhance the digital aura will probably take off quickly and lead to large new industries, he said. He cited the videogame business, which has grown in only a few years to surpass the movie industry.

Finally, Sir Martin talked about what he calls the "yuck factor" in modern science and technology. "We can do things we're not sure we want to do," he says. Sounding a lot like Sun's Bill Joy (who was among the many eminent technologists and scientists in the audience), Sir Martin said, "I'm very scared about how, with things like biotech and robotics, we may be empowering individuals in dangerous ways and exposing the human race to grave new risks." He fears that in 20 to 25 years, technology will enable individuals to wield awesome power--comparable with that of nuclear-armed states. And society is not prepared to deal with that challenge. He elaborates in a truly scary book due in March called Our Final Hour: The Threat to Humanity's Survival.

We ended up talking more about science than about technology, but nobody seemed to mind. Scary as some of the visions seemed, they were a welcome break from the financial gloom back home.