Silicon Valley, or the Greater Bay Area, is the 18th largest economy in the world, more than half the size of Canada's economy and bigger than Switzerland, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. This is because the region has become the world leader in research and development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, software and virtual reality. "Software is eating the world," said Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen famously in 2011. It was controversial but prescient. Five years later, software-driven machines and drones perform surgery, write news stories, compose music, translate, analyze, wage war, guard, listen, speak and entertain.

A special task force has been set up to try and stop the drones from dropping off contraband to prisoners.

The Abe administration is stepping up efforts to improve the safety of drones as it tries to develop a delivery service using the unmanned vehicles in depopulated areas, such as remote islands, by 2018, a government source said. The cost of developing the new private-sector service is expected to be incorporated in the budget request for the fiscal year starting next April, the source said Monday. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to draw up necessary measures for the drone delivery program within the next three years. The administration sees drone-related services as a pillar to support elderly people and to deliver relief goods in disaster areas. The government is also aiming to help private-sector companies so they can start a drone home delivery service in urban areas by 2020, when Tokyo will host the Olympics, the source said.

Aptonomy Inc. has developed drone technology that could make prison breaks, robberies or malicious intrusions of any kind impossible for mere mortals. Dubbing it a kind of "flying security guard," the company has built its systems on top of a drone often used by movie-makers, the DJI S-1000, a camera-carrying octocopter. To that skeleton, Aptonomy adds a new flight controller, and second computer to power day- and night-vision cameras, bright lights, and loudspeakers, among other things. And more importantly than the hardware features, Aptonomy has developed artificial intelligence and navigational systems that allow its drones to fly low and fast, avoiding obstacles in structure-dense environments, and detecting human activity or faces in the area, autonomously. A user can open up a browser, get onto the Aptonomy interface, click on a point on a map to send out a drone to a particular location, then watch that flight in real time, or review a recording of it later.

The London-based big data startup Flock is building a platform for performing real-time quantified risk analysis of drone flights, including by applying AI (artificial intelligence) to tracking data sourced from urban environments. According to TechCrunch, the company is licensing data pertaining to the position of buildings, people and cars in urban environments, as well as weather conditions, and feeding that into its risk assessment platform. Idea being for its software to analyze a planned drone flight in real-time and perform a "cost/benefit" analysis -- to help insurers set premiums or drone operators decide whether or not to undertake a given flight. In the future the company intneds to apply machine learning algorithms to the urban data it's getting in order to generate "real-time risk reduction" for drone operators via predictive assessments for drone flight scheduling -- which it reckons could be used to power fully autonomous drone flights zipping along risk-minimized routes. "The idea is to have a robust trend analysis built in to the system so we can analyze historic data, and then build up a really good understanding of how cities move generally, how cities breathe, and how populations and traffic conditions change over time," says Ed Leon Klinger, CEO.

Healthcare is a field that is always at the edge of technology, where there is a push to make strides to help better diagnosis and patient care. There are small changes where new technologies can be adapted relatively cheaply and easily, and larger advances that can take a couple of years to find a foothold in the marketplace. When you think of technology and healthcare, you might think about your general doctor picking up more efficient and hygienic thermometers over the years. From oral thermometers to ear thermometers to the forehead wand, hygiene and ease of use has always been the new factor for each of these tools. But one like it is coming. Since the mid-1980s, robots have been steadily incorporated into surgeries to help add precision, comfort, and alleviate pressure off the surgeon.

Festo's chief pilot gives us a private demo of its eMotionButterfly, AirJelly, and AirPenguin At the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C., Festo, a German industrial automation company, brought along some of its incredible robotic animals for a rare public display. We stopped by the Festo booth to check them out. In an abandoned ballroom upstairs, Festo's chief pilot Markus Schäffer showed off three of the company's spectacular flying robots: eMotionButterfly, AirJelly, and AirPenguin. Festo uses robots like these to explore creative ways in which nature can be used as an inspiration for improvements in technology. In addition to these three robots, Festo engineers have also developed flying seagulls, hopping kangaroos, robotic ants that cooperate, a soft manipulator based on an elephant's trunk, and a gripper inspired by the tongue of a chameleon.

The release of President Barack Obama's 2013 drone warfare playbook and the July 1 signing of an executive order on minimising civilian casualties has security analysts looking back at previous strikes and wondering what impact the executive order might have on future ones. Obama's 2013 policy guidance, released on July 31, after the American Civil Liberties Union sued for its release, had set "near certainty" that a "terrorist target is present" and that "non-combatants will not be injured or killed" as criteria for a strike. Q: So you don't know where you targeted him? I mean, how could you fire something out of the sky and blow something up and kill people and not know what country it's in? TONER: [laughing] I understand what - your question, Brad.

Users arriving at, say, an airport would book a seat on a so-called zenHop "CityAirbus" drone, then proceed to a "zenHub" helipad, according to the concept. They'd be flown to their destination for about the same cost as a taxi, since the ride would be shared by several passengers. Luggage would be delivered by another service (zenLuggage, of course), and the whole thing would be safeguarded from hackers by (wait for it) zenCyber. The company said that the CityAirbus multi-rotor, electric aircraft design has been "kept under wraps," though it did supply an artist's impression (above). The Airbus Helicopter subsidiary has been working on the drone-like design for two years, and it "could soon become reality without having to wait for too many regulatory changes," according to the press release. Airbus is also working on a drone delivery service (below) and plans to start testing it at a Singapore university by mid-2017.