Progress watch 2012: Smart phones, jobs returning to America, and war crimes trials

Not all of this year's good news comes on the heels of tragedy. In Nigeria, Egypt, and India, mobile technology is expanding entrepreneurship so quickly that small, mobile-tech-heavy businesses make up 38 percent of the gross domestic product, according to a study released earlier this year by global consultancy Booz Allen.

Americans are seeing their own mobile revolution – more than half of all Americans today use their cellphones to access the Internet, up from a third three years ago, according to the Pew Research Center. That puts the United States on the brink of a breakthrough: "Within a few years, [smart phone use] is going to be ubiquitous, and when you get that many people using smart phones, it transforms the economy, society, and politics," says Darrell West, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Indeed, technology drives much of the change seen in America, even just this year. Sales of nonpolluting electric cars are surpassing expectations. And self-driving cars are now legal in California. Google conducted the first test of its self-driving car with a passenger who was chauffeured to the dry cleaner and Taco Bell. Even this flashy moment has been slower to brew than it may seem. "This has always been one of the more popular predictions about the future people were talking about in the '60s and '70s, back when they were discussing all the other sort of wide-eyed, post-cold-war futures," says Patrick Tucker, the director of communications at the World Future Society. Beyond being wide-eyed, self-driven automobiles might make passengers safer – computers are likely eventually to be better drivers than humans, Mr. Tucker says – and transform cities. Summoning one's car from even a mile away "removes the need for designing cities on the basis of the availability of on-site parking," he says. Ordering up an automobile also makes car sharing easier, which can reduce carbon emissions, he adds.

Even traditional travel by land, sea, and air has gotten safer this year. The accidental death rate for children in the US plunged 30 percent in the past decade, led by auto safety improvements such as increased use of seat belts and booster seats and safer vehicle design, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Piracy and armed robbery at sea dropped to the lowest levels since 2009, when Somali piracy spiked, reports the International Chamber of Commerce International Maritime Bureau, which attributes the decline to improved policing by international navies and onboard security measures. And in the air, there were no major commercial airline crashes in the US in 2012, the 11th year in a row, says Todd Curtis, director of the AirSafe.com Foundation.

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