Wired (Bruce Sterling): “Augmented Reality, coming soon to a government near you.” Quoting the Gov2expo Web site: “Potential Government Applications of AR Large geo-spatial projects, such as Everyblock.com, have shown that context is critical for much of the data currently provided by state and local governments. By incorporating this information into a format that augments a user’s current context, this information is at once more accessible and more relevant to the user.”

RFID Journal: “Rise of RFID Robots.”. “Terminator Salvation may be a hit at movie theaters this summer, but a recent breakthrough in robotic development by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology is bound to have a more lasting impact. Sure, Hollywood’s Terminators are more powerful (albeit malicious), but the Georgia robots are real. And what makes them so interesting—even fascinating—is that they are capable of perception. They have the ability to find objects among a random group of similar-looking things and reach out and grab them, no matter which way they’re facing.”

Mother Jones: “Robots in Our Future.” “Gregory Clark says that although unskilled laborers have done relatively well for the past two centuries, that’s about to change…. Of course, this is roughly the argument people made in the 19th century too: if machines can spin cotton and mine coal and harvest crops, what’s left for unskilled laborers to do? The answer, of course, turned out to be: something else. Productivity increased so dramatically during the Industrial Revolution, and with it the quantity of goods produced, that everyone stayed employed even though population increased and the labor content of most commodities went down. The nature of the work changed, but 10% of a thousand, it turned out, kept as many people employed as 50% of two hundred.”

Financial Times: “First Steps into the Robotics Boom.” “The strategy is spelt out in a science and technology white paper published by the government this year. ‘By 2025, over 30 per cent of Japan’s population is expected to be over 65 . . . At the same time, the number of children will continue to fall, leading to shortages in labour to care for elderly and disabled people, and an increased burden on each care worker’, the white paper says. It concludes: ‘In this environment, robots that support people’s independence and cars that are easy to use . . . will be essential’.”