Elissa Strauss interviews Amy Tuteur, an OB who has taken a skeptical view of the natural childbirth movement. Tuteur discusses the origins of the movements for natural childbirth and attachment parenting ("It's so ironic that [they] are now considered feminist, because they were started by people who absolutely weren't feminist") and analyzes their psychological appeal ("Being a mother is really, really, really hard ... along came this system that told that you are automatically an awesome mother if you have an unmedicated birth and breast-feed and co-sleep. That's so seductive and can easily become a big part of one's identity.")

But the Echo's inadvertent intrusion into an intimate conversation is also a harbinger of a more fundamental shift in the relationship between human and machine. Alexa--and Siri and Cortana and all of the other virtual assistants that now populate our computers, phones, and living rooms--are just beginning to insinuate themselves, sometimes stealthily, sometimes overtly, and sometimes a tad creepily, into the rhythms of our daily lives. As they grow smarter and more capable, they will routinely surprise us by making our lives easier, and we'll steadily become more reliant on them. Even as many of us continue to treat these bots as toys and novelties, they are on their way to becoming our primary gateways to all sorts of goods, services, and information, both public and personal. When that happens, the Echo won't just be a cylinder in your kitchen that sometimes tells bad jokes.

Weaponization: A.I. promises to make the methods of war more precise, thereby reducing casualties and avoiding other catastrophes. But many worry that autonomous weapons could actually worsen conflicts. How much trouble will we get into if we give our weapons the power of thought?

Some, such as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute's Eliezer Yudkowsky, have proposed that we need to build A.I. that is friendly to humans. Thanks to the complexities of machine learning, computers can come at their tasks in unpredictable ways, potentially creating new problems thanks to their single-minded focus on finding novel solutions to existing ones. At MIRI, this is known as the "alignment problem"--the discrepancy between the ways machines complete tasks and what's actually good for the humans who assigned those tasks in the first place. Much as you'd want to understand some basic structural engineering principles before trying to build a bridge, MIRI holds that we need to pursue research into the mathematical underpinnings of alignment itself before we go about actually creating superintelligent systems.

As far as practical applications, SCAMP is designed for outdoor work in places like earthquake zones, where there's no usable flat surface on which a drone could land. It's not uncommon for walls to remain standing amid rubble in disaster areas, and an appropriately equipped SCAMP could perch on one to track seismic activity, for example, or to serve as a link in an emergency communications network. Its climbing capability would also allow it to get to an optimal location, rather than attempting to reposition itself through flying--which can be especially difficult in inclement weather.

And thanks to videographer Chad Aaronson--who captured breathtaking drone footage of the graveyard--we now have a unique view of this piece of eerie, forgotten New York. The slow creep of the camera reveals rusted ships littered with debris, in various states of sunkenness.

Policymakers in Washington could learn something from Lee's agile response to the evolving challenges posed by the artificial-intelligence revolution. Artificial intelligence is on its way to ubiquity, and we're not ready for it. Already it has entered the landscape of the physical world in delightful and dangerous new ways, with Google leading the charge in many different industries. Yet policymakers seem trapped in the regulatory frameworks of the 20th century. In two of the most prominent A.I.-linked industries, autonomous vehicles and drones, current legal regimes are already insufficient.