My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where to turn has...
The real origins of the iPhone’s power stem from the pioneering efforts of communication innovators that preceded the AT&T engineers of the 1920s.
Since people invented writing, communications technology has become steadily more high-bandwidth, pervasive and persuasive, taking a commensurate toll on human attention and cognition. In that bandwidth war between machines and humans, the machines’ latest weapon is a class of statistical...
Past the glow of the Shanghai evening, a single red beam threads its way into the silent stratosphere. It is a laser originating from a laboratory whose machinery few can operate or explain. The laser is meant to bounce off a distant satellite before returning for the purpose of encrypting an...
René Descartes famously wrote in Latin, “cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” He believed that the way we think implies an awareness of the act of thinking. In contrast to other living species, this endows us with a sense of “self,” an identity. In other words, what we call...
The battle over the installation of the next generation of telecommunications equipment around the world can sometimes seem almost as intense as the Cold War that followed World War II and for a good reason — the stakes are high because 5G technology is likely to change life and business...
Science and technology will become the lifeblood of the Chinese economy in this decade and will remain its lifeblood in the future. That is, in part, because China has become sufficiently advanced to be able to effectively compete with the US and other technological leaders in the West. It is also...
You know how certain technologies can be dangerous together? Texting and cars. Cigarettes and filling stations. Blood thinners and surgery. It turns out that data science and neuroscience are like that. Those barely-overlapping disciplines each understand complementary things about human...
