The next step in transformative technology is already here, and the United States runs the risk of getting left behind.

The amount of robotics inventions is steadily on the rise, and the U.S. military is already in on the action. A few years ago, Air Force drones surpassed 1 million combat hours. Hobbyists are using platforms like Arduino to build their own robots, and they’re building them by the thousands. Tesla recently announced its intention to develop and market driverless cars by 2018.

Yet for all its momentum, robotics is at a crossroads. The industry faces a choice — one that you see again and again with transformative technologies. Will this technology essentially be closed, or will it be open?

Closing Software, Stifling Innovation

What does it mean for robotics to be closed? Resembling any contemporary appliance, they are designed to perform a set task. They run proprietary software and are no more amenable to casual tinkering than a dishwasher. The popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and the first AIBO mechanical pet are closed in this sense.

Open robots are just the opposite. By definition, they invite contribution. It has no predetermined function, runs third-party or even open-source software, and can be physically altered and extended without compromising performance.

Consumer robotics started off closed, which helps to explain why it has moved so slowly.

Compare the early days of personal computing, as described by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet. Personal computers were designed to run any software, written by anyone. Indeed, many of the innovations or “killer apps” that popularized PCs came from amateur coders, not Apple or IBM.

The open model — best exemplified, for a time, by the Silicon Valley robotics incubator Willow Garage — is gaining momentum. Seven years ago, iRobot’s cofounder Colin Angle told The Economist that robots would be relatively dumb machines designed for a particular task. Robot vacuums will vacuum; robot pool cleaners will clean the pool.

Two years ago at the Consumer Electronics Show, the same company unveiled a robot called AVA designed to run third-party apps.

Enter the Lawyers

The trouble with open platforms is that they open the manufacturer to a universe of potential lawsuits. If a robot is built to do anything, it can do something bad. If it can run any software, it can run buggy or malicious software. The next killer app could, well, kill someone.

Liability in a closed world is fairly straightforward. A Roomba is supposed to do one thing and do it safely. Say a Roomba causes an injury in the course of vacuuming the floor. Then iRobot generally will be held liable as it built the hardware and wrote or licensed the software. If someone hacks the Roomba and uses it to reenact the video game Frogger on the streets of Austin, Texas (this really happened), or used the Roomba for a baby rodeo (it’s a thing), then iRobot can argue product misuse.

But what about in an open world? Open robots have no intended use. The hardware, the operating system and the individual software — any of which could be responsible for an accident — might each have a different author. Open-source software could have many authors. But plaintiffs will always sue the deep pockets. And courts could well place the burden on the defendants to sort it out.

But there is one, key difference between PCs and robots: The damage caused by home computers is intangible. The only casualties are bits. Courts were able to invoke doctrines such as economic loss, which provides that, in the absence of physical injury, a contracting party may recover no more than the value of the contract.

Open robots combine, arguably for the first time, the versatility, complexity and collaborative ecosystem of a PC with potential for physical damage or injury.

Key gaps in information play an increasingly important role in thwarting efforts at environmental protection — including the reduction of waste from electronic materials.

The creation of trade codes is necessary to track used electronics products according to a recent study concerning the waste from growing quantities of used electronics devices—including TVs, mobile phones. and computers.

The report re-iterated the need to create trade codes for used products to allow the precise tracking of such products, as well as the need to investigate specific trade codes used by exporters for used electronic material that comes in whole units.

Approximately 80 percent of used electronics, including mobile phones, television sets, and monitors end up in places with a significant middle class — whereas Africa receives a very small fraction of used electronics from the United States.

However, according to a spokesperson for Interpol quoted in The Guardian in spite of the fact that it is legal to export products that have been thrown out as long as they can still be refurbished and put to use in a different form, high levels of electronic waste are being sent to Africa and Asia under false pretenses. “Much is falsely classified as ‘used goods’ although in reality it is non-functional.

According to the European Environment Agency quoted in the same article, many of the countries confronted with the problem of e-waste are unaware of its magnitude due to lack of information. They have not kept track of the used electronics materials coming onto their shores and have thus not been able to protect themselves from it.

StEP estimates worldwide e-waste to increase by 33 percent from 50 million tons in 2012 to 65 million tons by 2017. China and the U.S. lead the world as top producers of e-waste, with China producing 12.2 million tons and the U.S. at 11 million tons. However, America produces about 65 pounds of e-waste per person every year, which is more than the 11 pounds per person China produces.

Does NeverWet work on electronics? The team over at Adafruit just had to find out — and to an extent, it does work!

But wait, what’s NeverWet? It’s Rust-Oleum’s miracle water-repelling coating which is super hydrophobic. It actually works, and we’re kind of surprised we haven’t seen it used in a hack yet! Anyway, let’s start this hack with a quick disclaimer. NeverWet is not designed for waterproofing electronics.

The experimenters chose a few electronic guinea pigs to test out NeverWet’s capabilities. An Arduino Micro, a FLORA LED broach, and a Raspberry Pi. Using the proper application method they coated the unlucky electronics with a few generous layers of the product.

The SCHAFT robot beat out five other teams in the Track A category to win the DARPA Robotics Challenge 2013 Trial held December 20 and 21, 2013. Google recently purchased SCHAFT as part of its secret robotics project.

Power conversion startup FINsix has announced the development of what it claims is the world’s smallest laptop power adapter. Packaged as a standard wall plug (see figure below), the 65-W unit is one fourth the size and one sixth the weight of traditional adapters, and is based on the company’s VHF power conversion technology that allows switching speeds of between 30 and 300 MHz. The adapter is expected to be shown at next month’s CES and to be commercially available sometime in mid 2014.

As images of holiday bonuses dance through our heads, we thought it was a good time to look at the compensation of a handful of the semiconductor industry’s CEOs. We found packages that ranged from less than $3 million to nearly $20 million.

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