Will this year mark the first drone delivery, or the first time you encounter a robot at work or in your home? We saw significant advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence in 2015 (see "What Robots and AI Learned in 2015"). The world's largest economy has embarked on an audacious effort to fill its factories with advanced manufacturing robots. The government of China hopes this will help the country retain its vast manufacturing industry as workers' wages rise, and manufacturing becomes more efficient and technologically advanced around the world (see "China Wants to Replace Millions of Workers with Robots"). The project will require robots that are significantly more advanced and cost-efficient, and the economic and technological ripples could be felt around the world.

An open letter calling for a ban on lethal weapons controlled by artificially intelligent machines was signed last week by thousands of scientists and technologists, reflecting growing concern that swift progress in artificial intelligence could be harnessed to make killing machines more efficient, and less accountable, both on the battlefield and off. But experts are more divided on the issue of robot killing machines than you might expect. The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by many leading AI researchers as well as prominent scientists and entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak. "Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is--practically if not legally--feasible within years not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms." Rapid advances have indeed been made in artificial intelligence in recent years, especially within the field of machine learning, which involves teaching computers to recognize often complex or subtle patterns in large quantities of data.

Few people ever need to deal with a stricken nuclear reactor, but that skill could turn out to be important for the evolution of smarter robots. In Pomona, California, this week, 25 of the world's most advanced humanoid robots will take part in a contest inspired by the challenge of stabilizing a nuclear reactor that's leaking dangerous radioactive material. Teams from universities across the U.S., as well as Japan, China, and Europe, are bringing robots that will try to walk across piles of rubble, climb ladders, operate power tools, and drive buggies, among other chores. Each challenge is inspired by something that might have helped stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan after it was damaged by an earthquake in 2011. Considerable academic kudos will go to whichever team completes the most tasks within the allotted time by the end of the contest.

Former Enron executive Vincent Kaminski is a modest, semi-retired business school professor from Houston who recently wrote a 960-page book explaining the fundamentals of energy markets. His most lasting legacy, however, may involve thousands of e-mails he wrote more than a decade ago at the energy-services company. Kaminski, a former managing director for research who warned repeatedly about concerning practices he saw at Enron, is among more than 150 senior executives whose e-mail boxes were dumped onto the Internet by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on March 26, 2003. In the name of serving the public's interest during its investigation of Enron, the federal agency made the controversial decision to post online more than 1.6 million e-mails that Enron executives sent and received from 2000 through 2002. FERC eventually culled the trove to remove the most sensitive and personal data, after receiving complaints (see PDF).

In a small, dark, room off a long hallway within a sprawling complex of buildings in Silicon Valley, an array of massive flat-panel displays and video cameras track Grit Denker's every move. Denker, a senior computer scientist at the nonprofit R&D institute SRI, is showing off Bright, an intelligent assistant that could someday know what information you need before you even ask. Initially, Bright is meant to cut down on the cognitive overload faced by workers in high-stress, data-intensive jobs like emergency response and network security. Bright may, for instance, aid network administrators in trying to stop the spread of a fast-moving virus by quickly providing crucial infection information, or help 911 operators send the right kind of assistance to the scene of an accident. But like many other technologies developed at SRI, such as the digital personal assistant Siri (now owned by Apple), Bright could eventually trickle down to laptops and smartphones.

Sentry duty is a tough assignment. Most of the time there's nothing to see, and when a threat does pop up, it can be hard to spot. In some military studies, humans are shown to detect only 47 percent of visible dangers. A project run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) suggests that combining the abilities of human sentries with those of machine-vision systems could be a better way to identify danger. It also uses electroencephalography to identify spikes in brain activity that can correspond to subconscious recognition of an object.

One night in 1982, John Mumford was working on an avalanche patrol on an icy Colorado mountain pass when the van carrying him and two other men slid off the road and plunged over a cliff. The other guys were able to walk away, but Mumford had broken his neck. The lower half of his body was paralyzed, and though he could bend his arms at the elbows, he could no longer grasp things in his hands. Fifteen years later, however, he received a technological wonder that reactivated his left hand. It was known as the Freehand System. A surgeon placed a sensor on Mumford's right shoulder, implanted a pacemaker-size device known as a stimulator just below the skin on his upper chest, and threaded wires into the muscles of his left arm.

Overcoming language barriers can be a matter of life or death in Iraq. Soldiers, medical personnel, and Iraqi citizens struggle to convey crucial information on a daily basis. While human translators are used in many situations, there simply aren't enough who are willing to assist in every important conversation. Last month, Menlo Park-based SRI International announced that it had deployed 32 Windows XP laptops loaded with advanced translation software for military evaluation in Iraq. The software, called IraqComm, facilitates an English-Arabic conversation by recording a person's spoken words, translating them, and playing the translation in a matter of seconds.

The benefits of any truly transformative technology are at first exaggerated, but their long-term effects surprise everyone. At the moment, mesh networks are experiencing such misvaluation. Their promoters (and they are many) now describe them with hyperbolic enthusiasm; but in the end they will be the mechanism by which machine intelligence becomes like electricity – that is, invisible and ubiquitous. Mesh networks are not so very new: their conceptual lineage dates back to packet radio, a kind of digital data transmission used by amateur radio hackers in the 1970s. But investments in more reliable and intelligent networks made during the 1990s by the U.S. Department of Defense renewed interest in meshes; and within the last five years, academic institutions like MIT's Media Lab and startups like Aeria, BelAir Networks, Ember, MeshNetworks (now owned by Motorola), and Tropos Networks have rapidly advanced the technology.

Sebastian Thrun knows that true innovation demands risk: the winner of DARPA's 2005 Grand Challenge took more than a few technological gambles to create an SUV that could drive itself across the Mojave Desert. He spoke to us about his love of that uncertainty–and of creating robots that might save lives.