Category: Societal Impact

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. By Walter Isaacson. Simon and Schuster,…  Read More

By Jonathan Coopersmith, Johns Hopkins University Press. 320 pages, 2015 Reviewed by Erik L. Stayton   I have never had…  Read More

The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game. By Andrew Hodges. Updated Edition. Princeton Univ. Press, 2014. Reviewed by…  Read More

I’m preparing a course for this Fall on the future, and pursuing a number of related books that will no…  Read More

United Airlines has been having it’s problems since recently ejecting a passenger to facilitate crew members getting to their next…  Read More

Presumably we will reach a tipping point when Intelligent Devices surpass humans in many key areas, quite possibly without our…  Read More

London haptic researchers have developed a device to add to a cell phone that will allow remote persons kiss, as…  Read More

by Marc Canellas and Rachel Haga Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are already here. Although some of the colloquial names for…  Read More

The ability to kill a target from a “position of safety” is essentially the basic design criteria for many weapon systems.

Should children have toys that can combine speech recognition with a Wi-Fi connection to capture and respond to them, and that potentially are able to record their conversations as well as feed them “messages”?  Welcome to the world of Hello Barbie.

Various states in the U.S. are using big data tools, such as the Lexus-Nexus database, to identify people who are…  Read More

Cyber attacks are increasing. What might be done about this, by technologists, by citizens, or by nation states?

Please join us at 4PM EDT on March 17 for a discussion on cryptocurrencies with John Villasenor, a non-resident senior fellow…  Read More

Like everyone, I listened to the news about the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday afternoon with horror. I’m not from…  Read More

My boyfriend just gave me a sous vide machine. So of course, I spent hours today reading not just about…  Read More

Several years ago, a relative of mine needed a liver transplant. While she did ultimately receive one, she was one…  Read More

I saw this on PBS and was reminded with a shock that there are still Americans (and lots of people…  Read More

A good friend of mine is a pretty active hobbyist 3-D printer. He has two of the things – and…  Read More