Technology can be a powerful force for good. It can also be an enormous factory for harmful ideas. We tried to keep both of those things in mind when creating the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel (or maybe his ghostwriter) once said, " We were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters ." That quip originally appeared in a manifesto for Thiel's venture fund in 2011. All good investment firms have a manifesto, right?

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. This special bonus episode was recorded at the AI Anarchies conference in Berlin. We held a workshop exploring with participants what good technology means for them, and why thinking in terms of "good technology" actually limits us. Two amazing participants offered to be interviewed by us, Christina Lu, who at the time was a software engineer at DeepMind and is now a researcher on the Antikythera program and Grace Turtle, a designer, artist, and researcher that uses experimentation and play, like Table Top Games, LARPing, and simulation design to encourage us to transition to more just and sustainable futures. Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry Mackereth are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation.

Photo Tim Bounds used under CC BY-NC 2.0 licence Remember when there was much media coverage, analyst commentary and corporate angst around bring your own device (BYOD): employees wanting to use their own smartphones, laptops, notepads into the corporate IT environment? There was much debate about the pros, cons and risks of doing so, and widespread opposition. In September 2011 I reported "A new study today revealed most employers, in Australia and New Zealand, did not accept BYOD (bring-your-own-device) practices and still preferred to provide their employees with corporate's mobile devices when needed." Security was the big concern and a number of startups such as AirWatch, Good Technology, Zenprise and Sybase emerged to address a market that went under the umbrella term of mobile device management. Bring your own'thing' History has a habit of repeating itself and the concerns levelled at smartphones, laptops and notepads are now being levelled at devices that could be equally dangerous to corporate IT security: personal assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple.