Rupandeep Kaur, 20 weeks pregnant, arrived at a medical clinic looking fatigued and ready to collapse. After being asked her name and address, she was taken to see a physician who reviewed her medical history, asked several questions, and ordered a series of tests including blood and urine. These tests...

Apple just suffered an important legal defeat to Samsung in its battle over patents. This is good because Apple's claims were frivolous; its patents were questionable; and its use of litigation to hold back a competitor set another wrong precedent for the industry. Because of these patent...

Imagine if the government required you to have a combination lock on your door and to give it the key. It would create security and privacy risks for you and your family. This is what could happen if we required the technology industry to add back doors to its software...

There are very few issues that Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton all agree on. One of them is the growing problem of inequality in income and wealth. From the extreme left to the extreme right, everyone is angry about the one percent who have the majority...

"I don't care if you have to take drugs, you have to build it in six months," said my boss, Khurshed Birdie, when I told him that he was on drugs if he thought my team could create a software development toolset in less than three years. This was in...

Every 30 or 40 years, Americans become incredibly pessimistic. They begin to believe the nation is falling behind in competitiveness and innovation, that their children will not be as well off as they themselves have been, and that some other country will own the future. They fear that the United...

For the past century, the price and performance of computing has been on an exponential curve. And as futurist Ray Kurzweil observed, once any technology becomes an information technology, its development follows the same curve, so we are seeing exponential advances in technologies such as sensors, networks, artificial intelligence, and...

Mark Zuckerberg is taking intense fire in India over an initiative that his organization Internet.org launched, to provide limited Internet access to the masses. He seems genuine in his desire to bring digital equality to the world: in an op-ed for The Times of India, he defended...

Apple Pay was launched last year, with lots of fanfare and support by the credit card industry. Partnering with the banks that issue credit cards overcame the resistance that early entrants in mobile payments had faced. It also solved critical technology and infrastructure problems and offered the credit-card industry a...

It was not an auspicious beginning to the holiday season. On Black Friday, we learned that a hacker had broken into the servers of Chinese toymaker VTech and lifted the personal information of nearly five million parents and more than 200,000 children. The data haul

For a generation of CEOs, Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma was a guiding light on how to survive industry disruptions. His book educated business executives on where competition would emerge from and how to respond to the threats. Of late, however, journalists and academics...

Co-authored with Edward Alden

Pessimists believe that the United States has peaked as a superpower and is falling behind in education, research and development, and economic growth. They say the country's best days are behind it.

Fortunately, they are wrong. Not only is the United States leading a technology revolution...

The University of Virginia's provost, Tom Katsouleas, once told me that less than one percent, by his estimates, of basic research is commercialized and that there may be as few as one near-term commercialization for every $10 million invested in fundamental research. This is an awful waste, especially when America...

In the television series Star Trek, virtual reality-chambers called "holodecks" take humans into computer-generated worlds where they interact with avatars -- and with each other. Imagine being able to visit a distant planet or Tahiti during your lunch break. In Star Trek, holodecks come into existence in the 24th century...

Governments, businesses, and economists have all been caught off guard by the geopolitical shifts that happened with the crash of oil prices and the slowdown of China's economy. Most believe that the price of oil will recover and that China will continue its rise. They are mistaken. Instead of worrying...

In just two short decades or so, we'll enter a jobless future.

Thanks to highly disruptive advanced technologies, jobs -- even industries -- will soon vanish, becoming remnants of a distantly remembered past. Other positions will be more efficiently done by machines, eliminating the need for human employees. This has...

2015년 4월에 중국 과학자들의 인간 수정란 DNA 편집 시도에 대한 논문이 과학계를 뒤흔들고 치열한 논란을 불러 일으켰다. 학계를 주도하는 과학자들은 결과를 연구하지 않고 인간 생식 계열을 바꾸면 끔찍한 결과가 생길 수 있다고 경고했다. 유전학자의 의도는 좋다 해도 DNA 변형에서 실수가 생기면 위험한 돌연변이를 낳고 고통스러운 죽음을 초래할 수...

In April 2015, a paper by Chinese scientists about their attempts to edit the DNA of a human embryo rocked the scientific world and set off a furious debate. Leading scientists warned that altering the human germ line without studying the consequences could have horrific consequences. Geneticists with...

They have funny accents, wear strange outfits, eat really spicy food and some wear turbans. Indian-Americans constitute less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. Yet you will find them at the helm of great companies such as PepsiCo and MasterCard; as presidents and deans of America's most prestigious colleges;...

I don't know if I broke a law of computing or committed heresy. But I installed Windows 10 on my Macbook Pro. I had feared that this would condemn me to purgatory in the gates of computing hell. But it has been an incredibly positive experience: my favorite Microsoft Office...