Drones have become an increasingly popular tool for industry and government. Electric utilities use them to inspect transmission lines. Oil companies fly them over pipelines. The Interior Department even deployed them to track lava flows at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano.

“When I was a boy, everyone knew robots were going to kill us,” Kris Hammond told attendees at Northwestern Political Union’s panel on the Ethics and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence. Hammond is a computer science professor at Northwestern specializing in AI research and who filled the role of moderator for the evening. “Now we know they’re going to kill us in interesting and new ways.”

Chris Hughes, who helped Mark Zuckerberg launch Facebook out of his Harvard dorm room in 2004, is calling for the social network’s breakup — but antitrust experts think the odds of that happening are as long as MySpace’s chances of once again becoming the world’s most popular networking site.

Hoover Institution fellow Richard Epstein discusses his Defining Ideas article "The FTC Unfriends Facebook."