They’re just beyond the edge of your personal event horizon – edge trends – the ones that sneak up on you.

It can be overwhelming, leading to something more than Toffler’s Future Shock: "Future Trauma," spawning reactive trends like neo-Ludditism, or the Simplicity Movement, which advocates a lifestyle of increasing simplicity or minimalization.

That’s a natural reaction when speed itself is a sometimes maddening trend – ever faster computers, trains flying on electromagnetic cushions, multimedia coming at you in a blizzard of imagery and with ever heavier freight of information. Innovation spawns innovation – how do you manage all this?

At first, they plan simply to apply the latest digital and electronic advances to gather information on the transportation infrastructure of highways, railways, streets and bridges. Next, they plan to control, literally micromanage, the individual cars, trucks, trains and buses moving over those structures.

It works via the Intelligent Vehicle Highway Society of America and the U.S. Government, which are designing intelligent transportation systems, including automated highways. Looking toward an overpopulated America they anticipate a time when we’ll need existing highway routes to accommodate a far larger number of vehicles.

The National Automated Highway System Consortium has engineered cars that can be steered and aligned with respect to other vehicles on an automated highway.

Automated highways can make fine adjustments taking the entire flow of traffic into account, as if a single omniscient Driver God were driving thousands of cars at once, "miraculously" reducing congestion and increasing safety.

Planners hope to start with a "dedicated-lane system," reserving certain lanes for automated vehicles. Once in the lane, a preset computer does the driving.

I can almost hear the grumbling now: "Think they’re so cool, sitting back in their automated cars whizzing by the rest of us…watching TV, playing games on their laptops – just wait’ll they get a virus. Wham, a 3,000-car pileup!"

Automated highways were successfully tested in California in 1997. Paranoidals and various sages will inevitably object that such systems make it possible for "big brother" to monitor our movements. And the use of police control of automatic systems is both a chilling and an intriguing prospect.

"Our goal is complete coverage of the Earth’s surface…Individuals can buy images of areas as small as a single square mile," they say.

And getting smaller. How long before you use a service like this to stalk a movie star or check up on that lout hanging around your sister or daughter?

You could combine it with the "future of space telescopes and surveillance satellites – Sandia’s new thin film ultralight piezoelectric material – a "smart" material that changes shape when struck by electrons to "correct the shape of the film mirror to its desired form to within 10-millionths of an inch."

Sandia researcher Tammy Henson examines a new thin-film, ultralight piezoelectric material that may be the future of space telescopes and surveillance satellites.

The large, flexible mirror will be exquisitely acute in its accuracy – whether homing in on a star cluster or getting a read on your pattern baldness from orbit.

Intelligence makes things go faster on every level, including the microscopic.

The journal Nature reports that scientists were able to use these self-assembling inks to write patterns that "possess external form and internal function" – 3-D ink, that becomes functioning, self-assembling nanoscopic material. Its pores behave as little sensors or valves, machines so small that next to them a grain of sand would be a skyscraper. They have, they claim, fabricated a substance that "organizes itself."

Miniaturization at Sandia has also led to something like the little hand-held scanners envisioned in Star Trek – a ‘micro-chem-lab’ small enough to fit inside a snow-pea pod.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed raised, hemispherical canals ranging from 8 to 100 microns in diameter, which could be used to develop "microlabs on a chip." A human hair is about 100 microns across.

It uses an acoustic wave sensor array, a pre-concentrator that collects chemical vapors for gas-phase analysis and a miniature gas chromatograph column.

Built-in lasers and photodiodes are fabricated in a semiconductor that "would fit easily into a pencil eraser". Could it be used to surreptitiously check for the release of "I’m ready to mate" hormones in your date?: "What, Chris? Oh that? I was just playing with my…fountain pen. No, really. It’s a fountain pen…intelligent ink in it. Another glass of wine, Chris?"

Obviously miniaturization is being applied to robotics – and mini-robotics. Bug-sized robots are being tested by Sandia that can, for example, be deployed over an avalanche area to search for buried skiers. They would use a group-search technique called "swarming" in which each robot continually informs others of its position and the strength of the signal from the searched-for object at that position.

Suppose you combine the Sandia chem-scanners with the Sandia bugs? The bugs could use the scanners to search for traces of human breath and sweat, for example.

Search bugs could also be used by the military to find a dug-in enemy. A multidisciplinary team out of Michigan State University’s College of Engineering has a juicy grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to design and build re-configurable micro-robots for use in law enforcement, intelligence gathering, as well as search and rescue.

The 2-inch (5-centimeter) robots are to be equipped with cameras, thermal and infrared sensors and microphones.

"Possibly," says project coordinator Lal Tummala, "the robots could be dropped by helicopter or shot like bullets into a building. From there they could go about their business, gathering information without notice."

As if designed for only moderate creepiness, the bugs will be bipedal caterpillar-like structures that could slink along floors and rugged terrain as well as climb on suction-cup feet.

And suppose someone combines a roving micro-robot with a compressed explosive – or a pellet of toxin? It flies in, creeps across the floor, crawls up your clothes, leaps into your mouth and…

But for our future war scenarios, those of us raised on psychotronic science-fiction prefer ray guns.

At first lasers and particle beams seemed to be too energy thirsty to serve as practical ray guns. But new developments in lattice-like photonic crystals could not only be used to accelerate computation to the speed of light by manipulating photons the way semiconductors do electrons, they could also be used to bend light with such efficiency that less power would be required for more laser-light output.

Combine that breakthrough with "quantum dots," along with the process that uses quantum-dot repulsion to create assemblages of dots -- each only a few thousand atoms in size – and "the world’s most effective solid-state lasers" might not be far behind.

My space-opera-damaged childhood leaps at these developments as evidence that a real "ray gun" is possible. My more adult side chides me that the technologies would be better applied industrially, in astronomy and in computation.

But – if you’re stalking me with online-acquired orbital surveillance, so you can use micro-robots against me – I just might need that laser gun to defend myself. And it won’t be set on stun either, pal.