Mike Elgan

The mind-blowing 2002 Steven Spielberg sci-fi thriller Minority Report, which starred Tom Cruise and was based on the book by Philip K. Dick, thrilled general audiences with its central premise—that sedated clairvoyant siblings connected to a recording device could predict murders before they happened, enabling “pre-crime” police to arrest perpetrators before they committed their crimes. […]

Virtual reality headsets are about to become part of your arsenal of gadgets. No, really! A year ago, pretty much nobody had what are generally referred to as VR goggles or headsets. But a year from now, I predict that pretty much all serious tech fans, gamers, media consumers and social media users will own […]

I carry an iPhone in my pocket all the time. And on that phone I have enabled two intelligent personal assistants (IPAs): Apple’s Siri and Google Now. Each has advantages. Siri is quicker to get to, as it’s better integrated into the iPhone. A long press on the phone’s home button or center button on […]

Research projects dating back to the 1950s have attempted to apply artificial intelligence to create machines that think—or at least behave as if they can. The quest to build computers that think like humans has necessarily focused on words. The famous Turing Test, for example, is designed to prove a machine’s ability to act intelligently […]

Ken Okuyama is an automobile visionary and he fears that Apple and Google might take over the car industry. I think his fears are well-founded. Okuyama is a Japanese industrial designer. One of his specialties is designing cars. He designed the Ferrari F60 Enzo and the Porsche Boxster, and redesigned the Chevrolet Camaro and Corvette. […]

City planning visionaries have tried again and again to create futuristic cities—gleaming, high-tech hubs where urban problems are solved with advanced systems, materials and technologies. Think Brasilia, Brazil; Valencia, Spain; Masdar City, United Arab Emirates; or Singapore. And, for that matter, Disney’s EPCOT was supposed to be the Mother of All Futuristic Cities, and it […]

It’s easy for critics to mock Apple for the iPad Pro tablet. After all, Apple’s tablet business is on the ropes—one of the embarrassing problems the company has to admit on each quarterly earnings call. And the most visible attributes of the product are optional accessories—a keyboard cover that looks like a copy of Microsoft’s […]

If it seems like major services have been crashing a lot lately and for extended periods, you’re not imagining things. A cluster of crashes has plagued users of a wide variety of high-profile cloud services in the past month. If this is a glimpse of what our future holds then let’s examine the occurrences, learn […]

The conventional wisdom is that Microsoft and Google are completely different in how they approach the market. Microsoft these days is thought by many as a stodgy “has-been” company with an obsolete business that renders it incapable of overcoming its own internal politics to leverage innovations from the lab and transform them into actual shipping […]

Silicon Valley has a diversity problem. The problem is that women and minorities are underrepresented and not by a little—by a lot—especially in technology and leadership roles. A casual glance at the data might lead someone to conclude that women and minorities just aren’t interested in tech and therefore don’t seek employment in that sector […]