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In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?”… read more

It’s hard to imagine a worse way to be awoken on a Saturday morning in paradise than with a blaring Klaxon accompanying a government alert about an inbound ballistic-missile attack. But that’s exactly what happened to more than 1.5 million people in Hawaii this morning. “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII,” the emergency alert read, in all caps, on smartphones.… read more

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, opens a bag of Cheetos with his teeth, dumps them onto a hipster food-court lunch bowl, and slathers it in Sriracha sauce. He snaps a pic for social media. It’s a scene from a video, “Seven Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality,” shot by the conservative… read more

It’s 6 p.m. in Tempe, Arizona and pitch-black outside. I’m standing in the middle of a five-lane thoroughfare, among a group of people too numerous for the narrow median. We got trapped here after a brigade of left-turning cars preempted our passage—that’s a thing that happens in cities like this one, designed for automobiles over pedestrians. An SUV pulls up… read more

When the commercial web was new, its acolytes were eager to show it off. The scientific-research and literary communities, where the web originated, envisioned it as a nonlinear platform for authorship and publishing. But the dot-coms and the advertisers and the interactive agencies saw the web as a new kind of billboard or video screen. To them, it was the… read more

All over town, the parking meters are disappearing. Drivers now pay at a central machine, or with an app. It’s so convenient I sometimes forget to pay entirely—and then suffer the much higher price of a parking ticket. The last time that happened, I wondered: Why can’t my car pay for its own parking automatically? It’s technically possible. Both my… read more

Dominic Tarr is a computer programmer who grew up on a remote farm in New Zealand. Down in the antipodes, isolation is even more isolating. Getting goods, people, and information to and from Australasia for families like Tarr’s has always been difficult. Bad, unreliable internet service is a particular challenge. Australia and New Zealand are first-world countries with third-world latency.… read more

Imagine this: What if scientists had a tool that allowed them to edit genes directly, altering their underlying DNA? The science-fictional applications, like designer babies or Frankensteined organisms, would be obvious—although ethical and legal rules in science and medicine might prevent such uses. Immediate applications would be more mundane, but also more significant: understanding and treating disease, manufacturing new types… read more

In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans’ relationship to conscious machines. Whether it’s Terminators or Cylons or servants like the “Star Trek” computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient—or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise. What to… read more