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“A library of the future might also be, at its best, a sanctuary where we are encouraged to spend entire hours looking at just one thing.” —Michael Agresta, “What Will Become of the Library?” Slate (2014) The library of the future is more or less the same. That is, the branch is an actual and metaphoric Faraday cage. You enter, a node and a target, streamed at and pushed and yanked, penetrated by and extruding information, sloppy with it.

Masdar City, a squeaky-clean planned city under development outside Abu Dhabi, grew from the sand with a single vision: help the United Arab Emirates wean itself off its own vast oil reserves. The 10-year-old micro-metropolis serves as an incubator for clean-technology companies. It incorporates the latest design and construction strategies to minimize its energy consumption. It runs solely on renewable energy.

“Roughly half of Americans would feel better about the concept of a robot caregiver if there was a human operator who could remotely monitor its actions at all times.” —“Automation in Everyday Life,” Pew Research Center (2017) The thing is beeping at Brad. > Begin EOL protocol. OK? > Beep. > OK to begin? All he needs to do is accept. Click it and the action cascade will download to his tablet, setting into motion the procedure. End of Life. > Beep.

Online shoppers, media consumers, and app lovers are increasingly sucked into the world of recurring payments. On the bright side, subscription services offer convenience. They also establish a relationship between the company making a product and the person buying it; if you’re on the buying side, it means paying only as long as something is valuable to you. Plus, subscriptions often come bundled with perks. (Like, for example, this publication.

Hanging on the wall of Postmates' stealth R&D laboratory, there's a framed photo of an iconic scene from Star Wars, Luke Skywalker bent down beside R2D2. Except someone has used Photoshop to replace Luke's face with Ali Kashani, Postmates' VP of Robotics. Nevermind that Kashani has never seen Star Wars (he considers this a point of pride). Kashani recognizes the symbolism of his face in a world where robots roll around next to people, where bots act almost like friends.

No, self-driving cars aren’t here yet. But they are roaming a few select sections of American road. Waymo just launched a limited service in metro Phoenix (albeit with a safety driver behind the wheel); General Motors’ Cruise is testing in San Francisco; Ford is noodling around Florida; Aurora and Argo (which is closely aligned with Ford) swing through the hills of Pittsburgh.