Fixing the Future

The Federal Communications Commission's very first cellular spectrum allocation was a messy affair. The U.S. was divided up into 120 cellular markets, with two licenses each, and in some cases, hundreds of bidders. By 1984, the FCC had switched over to a lottery system. Unsurprisingly, people gamed the system. The barriers to enter the lottery were low, and many of the 37,000 applications—yes, 37,...

In 1936, after polling its readers, the Literary Digest famously predicted a landslide victory for Alf Landon. On 2 November 1948, based on widespread polling that all pointed in one direction, the Chicago Tribune famously headlined its early edition, “ Dewey Defeats Truman .”   Polls have been making mistakes ever since, and it’s always, fundamentally, the same mistake. They’re based on a represe...

If any cars are mobile phones with wheels, it’s electric cars. And just as the switch from landline phones to mobile phones was quick, and from computers to smartphones was even quicker, the shift from engines to motors, from internal combustion cars to electric cars, is starting to gain momentum and when it reaches scale, it will happen quickly. How quickly? Pandemic aside, Tesla would be on trac...

A modern hospital operating room often has someone you never see on television: a medical device company representative. The device might be a special saw or probe or other tool for the surgeon to use. It might be an artificial hip or knee—or a mandible or a pacemaker.   The surgeon may be using the device and its toolkit for the first time. The medical device company representative often knows mo...

November is a big month for the millions of people who devote their time and money to computer games. Within a two-day period Sony will be releasing its fifth-generation Playstation, and its main competitor, Microsoft’s newest Xbox, comes out as well. So it’s a good month to look at the culture of gaming and how it reflects the broader culture; how it reinforces it; and how it could potentially be...

Engineers will tell you that for an orchestra to rehearse remotely, it would need at least 500 megabits per second to avoid throwing off the synchronicity of a concert performance. But that’s using high bandwidth as a proxy for latency. Why not work on reducing latency directly? Because it’s hard. Nonetheless, at the cutting edge of network engineering, researchers are working on it. And not for o...

In Get Out the Vote , co-authors Donald Green and Alan Gerber argue that political consultants and campaign managers have underappreciated boots-on-the-ground canvassing in person and on the phone, in favor of less personal, more easily-scaled methods—radio and TV advertising, robocalling, mass mailings, and the like. Unlike campaign professionals, they base their case with real data, based on exp...

In 2014, two Google engineers, writing in the pages of IEEE Spectrum , noted that “if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.” One alternative is to stuff carbon dioxide underground. People have been talking about this for well over a decade. But just look at Exxon-Mobil’s we...

In 2011, the former executive director of MoveOn gave a widely-viewed TED talk, “ Beware Online Filter Bubbles “ that became a 2012 book and a startup . In all the talk of fake news these days, many of us have forgotten the unseen power of filter bubbles in determining the ways in which we think about politics, culture, and society. That startup tried to get people to read news they might otherwis...

Despite what you think, fake news is a tiny fraction of our news diet, according to Jennifer Allen, a Ph. D. student at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and lead author of the research study, “Evaluating the Fake News Problem at the Scale of the Information Ecosystem."

Marchetti’s Constant , named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, is the average time people spend on their daily commute, which is approximately a half-hour each way, all around the world. The average U.S. commute is about 27 minutes, up 8 percent from a decade earlier. But that averages people who walk 10 minutes to work with people who drive an hour; it averages people who have a quick sub...

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed any number of weaknesses in our technologies, business models, medical systems, media, and more. Perhaps none is more exposed than what my guest today calls, “ The Hidden World of Legacy IT .” If you remember last April’s infamous call for volunteer COBOL programmers by the governor of New Jersey, when his state’s unemployment and disability benefits systems ne...

Electricity is the key to modern life as we know it, and yet, universal, reliable service remains an unsolved problem. By one estimate , a billion people still do without it. Even in a modern city like Mumbai, generators are commonplace, because of an uncertain electrical grid. This year, California once again saw rolling blackouts, and with our contemporary climate producing heat waves that can s...

We’re used to the idea of gold and silver being used as money, but in the in the 1600s, Sweden didn’t have a lot of gold and silver—not enough to sustain its economy. The Swedes had a lot of copper, though, so that’s what they used for their money. Copper isn’t really great for the job—it’s not nearly scarce enough—so Swedish coins were big—the largest denomination weighed forty‐three pounds and p...

You’re surely familiar—though you may not know it by name—with the Paradox of Choice; we’re surrounded by it: 175 salad dressing choices, 80,000 possible Starbucks beverages, 50 different mutual funds for your retirement account. “All of this choice,” psychologists say, “starts to be not only unproductive, but counterproductive—a source of pain, regret, worry about missed opportunities, and unreal...