Smartphones: The SUVs Of the Information Superhighway

Real Clear Markets We can “revitalize entire communities, and connect people to jobs,” said President Obama a week ago in a discordant speech on the economy at Northwestern University calling for more roads and bridges. During the same week, the president’s Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, was talking at a less-noted event about infrastructure too,…

The Invention of the War Machine

The New Atlantis, co-author M. Anthony Mills War has “always been the mother of invention,” wrote the historian A.J.P. Taylor. The First World War in particular is often taken to be a hinge in technological history — the war in which horses were widely used for the last time and weapons of mass destruction were deployed for…

A Four-Step Energy Strategy For Our Time

RealClearPolitics   It’s a sign of the times: The Islamic State is getting millions in oil revenues. According to one news organization, the terror group is even recruiting petroleum engineers. And farther north, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko secured a promise from the White House last week for the U.S. to join in a review of his…

The Data Are Clear: Robots Do Not Create Unemployment

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the first electronic thinking machine that displaced knowledge workers. In February 1944, Britain’s Colossus, the world’s first computer, started to ‘think’ and successfully automate human mental labor. By the summer of 1944 there were three such machines hard at work. The rest, as they say, is history.

A Marshall Plan for Energy

National Review Online Now is the time to think about the next Euro-Russian conflict. Europe is steaming toward a new Cold War with Russia and dragging America along in its geopolitical bow wake. The U.S. is also embroiled in Russia’s proxy activities in the Middle East, where we have seen an Arab Spring dwindle into…

Every Datum Tells a Story : The dawning of the age of meta-information

City Journal — w. co-author M. Anthony Mills —  Every generation has its defining technology, and every decade, it seems, needs a label. The sixties were the Space Age, the nineties the Internet Age. The seventies and eighties saw the computer revolution. The decade just passed may come to be known as the Facebook Decade…