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With the advent of new discoveries in material sciences, it may be possible, in the future, to construct extremely small robots. Explores the idea of employing an excitable medium in the form of a molecular array of sensors and actuators to provide the controller for a nano‐robot by exploiting decentralised computation.

Natural collective phenomena, for example, the movement of crowds of pedestrians and the impressive nest formations of social insects, provide us with an existence proof that sophisticated constructions may be built by swarms of relatively simple artificial agents. The constructions often appear to have required impressive control and coordination – yet each agent in the collective does not appear to be provided with an internal world model or blue‐print for the complete construction. These macroscopic structures emerge as the consequence of interaction of agents, carrying out simple rules based upon the local state of the world, which includes the interaction between agents and the growing structure. In an attempt to understand the underpinning principles of structure formation in collectives of minimal mobile agents the paper focuses on an investigation of automata‐like agents in a two‐dimensional lattice. All agents start their evolution at the same site on the lattice. Every agent moves at random until it finds a neighbourhood it likes more than other neighbourhoods. The agents form a stationary structure of their immobile bodies. The paper focuses upon the parameterisation of the rule space and the mapping between parameter space and the resulting global structure formed by the agents.

While digital technologies have led to many important social and cultural advances worldwide, they also facilitate the perpetration of violence, abuse and harassment, known as technology-facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA). TFVA includes a spectrum of behaviors perpetrated online, offline, and through a range of technologies, including artificial intelligence, livestreaming, GPS tracking, and social media. This chapter provides an overview of TFVA, including a brief snapshot of existing quantitative and qualitative research relating to various forms of TFVA. It then discusses the aims and contributions of this book as a whole, before outlining five overarching themes arising from the contributions. The chapter concludes by mapping out the structure of the book.