SAN ANTONIO--In the warzones of the future, medics touching down amid heavy battlefield casualties will know who to treat first, how to approach every injury, and even who is most likely to live or die -- all before looking at a single wounded soldier. That's the vision of Col. (and Dr.) Jerome Buller, who leads the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research. Buller says biometric data gleaned from soldier-borne sensors, combined with in-depth medical and training data and augmented reality lenses, will help medics in combat evaluate the battlefield and everyone in it from a safe distance. They will make their most important decisions before even seeing their patients. "Imagine that [the hypothetical future] medic is able to scan the battlefield and instead of seeing rubble, he's seeing red or green dots, or amber dots, and he knows where to apply resources or not," Buller said during the Defense One and NextGov Genius Machines event here on Wednesday.

This past weekend, I drove a Tesla for the first time and man was it awesome. A powerful machine that makes no noise on the outside with the latest in software replacing a historically clunky user experience on the inside. It felt like an iPad on wheels and was a driving experience that painted my imagination as to what the future of the automobile is. Lately, and rather quickly, dialogue around self driving cars has moved from tech silos to mainstream media. Cars are a significantly underutilized asset (96% of the time they are parked), they take up a disproportionate amount of real estate (all the parking lots in the US are equivalent to the size of Connecticut!), humans are bad drivers (accident frequency is going up and to the right), and climate change is real (despite what Washington thinks these days). Beyond saving lives and protecting the environment (as if those issues weren't enough), the implications for existing business models will be transformative.

Amid all the buzz about vehicles that drive themselves, there are serious ethical questions facing regulators, manufacturers and the people who will ride in them. If faced with an unavoidable fatal crash, would the car be programmed to save its occupants at all costs or would it sacrifice its passengers for the greater good of saving a group of pedestrians? "There's this trade-off between the interests of the driver, or rather the passenger who buys the car, and the level of public acceptance versus public outrage," says Azim Shariff of the Culture and Morality Lab at the University of Oregon. Along with researchers from France and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shariff set out to test public attitudes on the cold, hard decisions computer programs will have to make when lives are on the line. Azim Shariff, researcher at the Culture and Morality Lab at the University of Oregon, says some ethical questions should be answered before driverless cars fill the streets.