Contributors

Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a staff editor for reason, where she covers issues related to reproductive rights, free speech, food policy, and more. Prior to that, she was an editor and blogger with Defy Media and AARP publications. In "Sex, Love, and Robots" (page 26), Brown, 32, explores the future-and present-of intimate human-android relations. When not covering sex, politics, or the politics of sexy robots, she says, "I love reading and writing about nutrition, psychiatry, and neuroscience."

"How to Survive a Robot Uprising" (page 60) is the George Mason economist Robin Hanson's review of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic), a book by Martin Ford. Hanson, 55, who worked for nearly a decade as an artificial intelligence researcher, is skeptical of the book's claim that robots will soon take over all, or even most, of the work human beings currently do. Asked why he decided to make the jump from hard science to economics, he says, "When you spend a lot of time looking for technology solutions to problems, you realize that they are often really social problems that need social solutions."

Jim Pagels, 23, is reason's spring 2015 Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern and the lucky young man tasked with transcribing our interview with MIT economist Andrew McAfee (page 36). A Dallas native, Pagels graduated from Columbia University in 2013 with a bachelor's degree in American studies and English. He has been published at Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and FiveThirtyEight. He hopes to carve a niche for himself at the intersection of sports and public policy, and he says he's "excited to use data analysis to highlight liberty-minded concepts" during his time with reason.