The advent of the connected things paradigm within 5G wireless communications enabled various sophisticated applications, whose evolution paves the way for the notion of the connected intelligence of everything in 6G networks. Recent speculations for this upcoming new generation push the 5G performance indicators to unprecedented levels, envisioning THz frequency bands, devices with embedded sensing capabilities, and native AI. All these are expected to become a reality around 2030 and with a strong green footprint. In this talk, we will elaborate around the emerging technology of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) which is provisioned as the enabler of smart wireless environments, offering a highly scalable, low-cost, hardware-efficient, and almost energy-neutral solution for the dynamic control of the propagation of electromagnetic signals. We will discuss their evolution from programmable reflecting metamaterials to connected computational- and power-autonomous hybrid metasurfaces, emphasizing on the state-of-the-art approaches for RIS-empowered communications, localization, and sensing.