2054, Part III: The Singularity
Lily didn’t want to approach B.T. She thought that might seem too aggressive; instead, she wanted him to notice her. At the roulette table, he had placed his chips on …
book excerpt
2054, Part II: Next Big Thing
A bloody Sunday followed. In Tucson, a Border Patrol officer fired a rubber bullet that struck a Truther protester in the eye, killing her. When the news broke, the Homeland …
2054, Part I: Death of a President
“But do you understand what you did wrong?” She struggled to look him directly in the eye. Her gaze instead fell over his shoulder, where the news was streaming live …
How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
When Meiklejohn started college at Brown in 2004, she discovered cryptography. This branch of computer science appealed directly to her puzzle addiction—what was an encryption system, after all, but another …
Why Aren’t Disabled Astronauts Exploring Space?
Today, young people are becoming disabled in record numbers with all the various impacts of long Covid, which is estimated to affect between 8 and 25 percent of people who …
How a ‘Digital Peeping Tom’ Unmasked Porn Actors
Over 15 years on Facebook, he had befriended hundreds of women. The first person he got a hit for was a near stranger he had met one time at a …
Marie Kondo and the Manhattan Project
Stan Ulam knew he was moving to New Mexico, but he didn’t know exactly why. Ulam was a Polish-born mathematician—and later, physicist—who first came to the United States in the …
AI Can Be An Extraordinary Force For Good—if It’s Contained
In a quaint Regency-era office overlooking London’s Russell Square, I cofounded a company called DeepMind with two friends, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, in the summer of 2010. Our goal, …
The Aftermath of a ‘Miracle Cure’ for a Rare Cancer
Gleevec was approved just as the Human Genome Project was wrapping up, and it served as Exhibit A for those who were looking for evidence that the era of gene-guided …