In 2007, Gary Rivlin wrote a New York Times feature profile of highly successful people in Silicon Valley. One of them, Hal Steger, lived with his wife in a million-dollar house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Their net worth was about $3.5 million. Assuming […]
THERE’S AN ARMS race afoot over who can store cryptocurrency safest. Perhaps you’d like your bitcoin buried in a vault under a mountain in the Swiss Alps? Xapo has offered that as a service to wealthy investors, for free. Coinbase, best known for […]
FIVE YEARS AGO, the coders at DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company, watched excitedly as an AI taught itself to play a classic arcade game. They’d used the hot technique of the day, deep learning, on a seemingly whimsical task: […]
Huge contributions from tech titans, a STEM-packed curriculum, gadgets everywhere: Willie Brown Middle School was supposed to set the bar. Then it opened. ON THE WINDY afternoon of March 17, 2017, I opened my mailbox and saw a white envelope from […]
Arthur and Kathleen Breitman thought they held the secret to building a new decentralized utopia. On the way, they plunged into a new kind of hell. A crypto-tragedy in three acts. ONE DAY IN the spring of 2010, Kathleen McCaffrey, […]
Elon Musk is tweeting up a storm, and he’s loving every minute of it. With 21 million followers, Musk has emerged as one of the defining Twitter voices of 2018, someone who will happily and democratically engage with anybody who […]
When a chemist raised concerns about the blood testing machines’ high error rates, she was ignored. So she resigned. ALAN BEAM WAS sitting in his office reviewing lab reports when Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes poked her head in and […]
WALKING THE ENORMOUS exhibition halls at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco, you could have easily gotten the impression that digital defense was a solved problem. Amidst branded t-shirts and water bottles, each booth hawked software and hardware that […]
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN ONCE imagined that everyone had a box with something in it called a “beetle.” Denying the possibility of private language, the philosopher wrote, “No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by […]
Liberals and conservatives alike love—and fear—the idea of giving free money to everyone. But we have to try it anyway. ON DECEMBER 15, 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, issued adamning report […]
