A luxury bicycle computer forecasts a welcome future of humble, embedded systems.
The joy I used to feel when using computers has turned largely to anguish. These machines once provided a unique and compelling way to do things, from writing to shopping to communication to entertainment. But today, devices and services strive to replace every activity with computer use itself. Now I think about escaping the computer as much as using it.… read more
Futurists predict a rapture of machines, but reality beat them to it by turning computing into a way of life.
Suddenly, everything is a computer. Phones, of course, and televisions. Also toasters and door locks, baby monitors and juicers, doorbells and gas grills. Even faucets. Even garden hoses. Even fidget spinners. Supposedly “smart” gadgets are everywhere, spreading the gospel of computation to everyday objects. It’s enough to make the mundane seem new—for a time anyway. But quickly, doubts arise. Nobody… read more
The company’s new iPhone and retail “town centers” presage a future of Apple as global infrastructure—one that may already have arrived.
For two decades now, Apple has been fighting a battle between attention and disregard. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned as interim CEO, the company was a struggling maker of personal computers with limited market share. Then came the iMac, a Mac computer people finally wanted to own again. Then the iPod, which transformed the company into a maker of… read more
With over half of the entire U.S. adult population potentially exposed, what’s left to do but shrug and sigh?
Consumer data breaches have become so frequent, the anger and worry once associated with them has turned to apathy. So when Equifax revealed late Thursday that a breach exposed personal data, including social-security numbers, for 143 million Americans, public shock was diluted by resignation. There are reasons for the increased prevalence and severity of these breaches. More data is being… read more
It’s not because the water comes in. It’s because it is forced to leave again.
Floods cause greater property damage and more deaths than tornadoes or hurricanes. And Houston’s flood is truly a disaster of biblical proportions: The sky unloaded 9 trillion gallons of water on the city within two days, and much more might fall before Harvey dissipates, producing as much as 60 inches of rain. Pictures of Harvey’s runoff are harrowing, with interstates… read more
Office culture is only part of the problem.
An anonymous Google software engineer’s 10-page fulmination against workplace diversity was leaked from internal company communications systems, including an internal version of Google+, the company’s social network, and another service that Gizmodo, which published the full memo, called an “internal meme network.” “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due… read more
It looks like the two tech titans are arguing about AI’s impact on humanity. Really they’re protecting their personal brands.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are having a spat about whether or not artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. Musk, the chief of Tesla and SpaceX who has longstanding worries about the potentially apocalyptic future of AI, recently returned to that soapbox, making an appeal for proactive regulations on AI. “I keep sounding the alarm bell,” he told… read more
The “A Bit More” button doesn’t reinvent the appliance’s form. It finds its soul instead.
Last year I fell in love with a toaster. It looks like most others. A brushed, stainless-steel housing. Four slots, to accommodate the whole family’s bread-provisioning needs. It is alluring but modest, perched atop the counter on proud haunches. But at a time when industry promises disruptive innovation, Breville, the Australian manufacturer of my toaster, offers something truly new and… read more
Ten years later, smartphones have been fully domesticated.
There’s a paradox in technology. For something new to become widespread, familiar, and mass-market, it must create enough novelty and curiosity to draw people’s attention. But novelty alone is not enough to reach saturation. To permeate life, a technology must elicit more than novelty and curiosity in its users. It must become ordinary. It must recede into the background, where… read more
The limits of the search giant's philosophy
When I saw that Google had introduced a “Classic Papers” section of Google Scholar, its search tool for academic journals, I couldn’t help but stroke my chin professorially. What would make a paper a classic, especially for the search giant? In a blog post introducing the feature, Google software engineer Sean Henderson explains the company’s rationale. While some articles gain… read more