The folks at the Georgia Robotics and InTelligent Systems (Grits) Lab at Georgia Tech have been hard at work for some time now researching swarm robots.
The 3DMark DirectX 11 tech demo brings this scene to life with intelligent tessellation and advanced volumetric lighting using real-time light scattering.
Harvesting asteroids, creating a radically transparent virtual world state and replacing workers with intelligent robots are all very well, but unless our big tech companies recognize their social responsibilities, I fear that our real future could be as disturbing as the science fictional one presented in Ridley Scott's blockbuster.