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As robots become more prevalent, particularly in complex public and domestic settings, they will be increasingly challenged by dynamic situations that could result in performance errors. Such errors can have a harmful impact on a user's trust and confidence in the technology, potentially reducing use and preventing full realisation of its benefits. A potential countermeasure, based on social psychological concepts of trust, is for robots to demonstrate self-awareness and ownership of their mistakes to mitigate the impact of errors and increase users' affinity towards the robot. We describe an experiment examining 326 people's perceptions of a mobile guide robot that employs synthetic social behaviours to elicit trust in its use after error. We find that a robot that identifies its mistake, and communicates its intention to rectify the situation, is considered by observers to be more capable than one that simply apologises for its mistake. However, the latter is considered more likeable and, uniquely, increases people's intention to use the robot. These outcomes highlight that the complex and multifaceted nature of trust in human-robot interaction may extend beyond established approaches considering robots' capability in performance and indicate that social cognitive models are valuable in developing trustworthy synthetic social agents.

Following the birth in 2018 of two babies from embryos altered using CRISPR-Cas9, human germline gene editing (GGE) moved from abstract concern to reality. He Jiankui, the scientist responsible, has been roundly condemned by most scientific, legal and ethical commentators. However, opinions remain divided on whether GGE could be acceptably used in the future, and how, or if it should be prohibited entirely. The many reviews, summits, positions statements and high-level meetings that have accompanied the emergence of CRISPR technology acknowledge this, calling for greater public engagement to help reach a consensus on how to proceed. These calls are laudable but far from unproblematic. Consensus is not only hugely challenging to reach, but difficult to measure and to know when it might be achieved. Engagement is clearly desirable, but engagement strategies need to avoid the limitations of previous encounters between publics and biotechnology. Here we set CRISPR in the context of the biotechnology and fertility industries to illustrate the lessons to be learned. In particular we demonstrate the importance of avoiding a 'deficit mode' in which resistance is attributed to a lack of public understanding of science, addressing the separation of technical safety criteria from ethical and social matters, and ensuring the scope of the debate includes the political-economic context in which science is conducted and new products and services are brought to market. Through this history, we draw on Mary Douglas' classic anthropological notion of 'matter out of place' to explain why biotechnologies evoke feelings of unease and anxiety, and recommend this as a model for rehabilitating lay apprehension about novel biological technologies as legitimate matters of concern in future engagement exercises about GGE.

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W e are currently witnessing the fourth industrial revolution 1 . Technological innovations have altered the way in which economies operate and how people interact with built, social and natural environments. One area of transformation is the emergence of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS), defined as technologies that can sense, analyse, interact with and manipulate their physical environment 2 . RAS include unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), self-driving cars, robots able to repair infrastructure, and wireless sensor networks used for monitoring. RAS therefore have a large range of potential applications, such as autonomous transport, waste collection, infrastructure maintenance and repair, policing 2,3 and precision agriculture 4 (Fig. 1). RAS have already revolutionized how environmental data are collected 5 and how species populations are monitored for conservation 6 and/or control 7 . Globally, the RAS market is projected to grow from $6.2 billion in 2018 to $17.7 billion in 2026 8 .Concurrent with this technological revolution, urbanization continues at an unprecedented rate. By 2030, an additional 1.2 million km 2 of the planet's surface will be covered by towns and cities, with ~90% of this development happening in Africa and