by Mary L. Cummings | Mar 24, 2010 | Features
By Mary L. Cummings – As the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Humans and Automation Laboratory, I was asked to comment from a technologist’s perspective at the recent symposium Drone Warfare: New Robotics & Targeted Killings on the...
by Brett H. McGurk | Mar 11, 2010 | Features
By Brett H. McGurk – Killer mechanical robots the size of flies, giant predator drones piloted from an iPhone, together with a new mode of warfare embraced by the U.S. military and both political parties in Washington. That is the upshot of the recent symposium...
by Jeffrey Kahn | Jan 27, 2010 | Features
By Jeffrey Kahn – When your favorite tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. After the near-catastrophe on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, it is not surprising that many hammer away with the tools they know best: data-mining and...
by Nathan A. Sales | Jan 26, 2010 | Features
By Nathan A. Sales – It didn’t take long after 9/11 for the conventional wisdom to crystallize. The devastating terrorist attacks were almost immediately, and almost universally, chalked up to the intelligence community’s failure to share information. Yet if...
by Paul Rosenzweig | Jan 25, 2010 | Features
By Paul Rosenzweig – “We slipped up.” That’s what Patrick F. Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Management, said at a Senate hearing last week about the Christmas day bomb plot and the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He has a gift for...