With robots now poised to emerge from their industrial cages and to move into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from harming people.
The Economist covers the new generation of tracking devices that combine GPS technology with mobile-telephone chips.
The authors argue that while genetics may yet threaten privacy, kill autonomy, make society homogeneous and gut the concept of human nature, "neuroscience could do all of these things first."
The Economist warns that society should pay as much attention to the dangers of neuroscience as it is paying to genetics and human cloning.
The Economist argues that despite the increased availability of high resolution imagery from private satellites a "new era of transparency has yet to dawn" because of the financial and institutional advantage that governments and militaries still have.
The Economist covers the controversy over the 'strange matter' risk, the risk that a supercollider could cause a chain-reaction that could engulf the world.
The Economist surveys the growing number of for-profit 'distributed computing' projects. These efforts take supercomputer-sized tasks and distribute them to networks of computers over the internet.