The Cyber Age Demands a New Understanding of War—but We’d Better Hurry

Is It Too Late to Resist the Techno-Gods That Steal Data and Topple Skyscrapers?

It seems highly reckless to prod into flight Hegel’s Owl of Minerva—the goddess of wisdom and war—for an assessment of war in a cyber age that is barely 30 years old.

You will not find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, but “cyberwar” made its first inauspicious appearance in 1987 when an anonymous editor from Omni—Bob Guccione’s other magazine—attached the neologism as a title for an article by Owen Davies, an Omni editor. Although he never used the word or developed the idea of cyberwar, Davies pretty much nailed the coming …

In California, Big Data Is Getting the Wrong People Arrested

Blame the Software—and a Lack of Incentives to Check for Errors

Managing information is central to the criminal justice system, and so it’s inevitable that mistakes happen. Names get confused, files lost. When these errors occur, the police can mistakenly arrest …

Just Because the RNC Says It Wasn’t Hacked Doesn’t Change Reality

When a Party Leader Implausibly Denies a Data Breach, We All Lose

Cybersecurity professionals are fond of saying that there are two kinds of companies: those that have been hacked and those that don’t yet know they’ve been hacked. Right now, the …

Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Replace CEOs

An MBA’s Instinct Is Increasingly Vital in the Age of Information Overload

Peter Drucker was prescient about most things, but the computer wasn’t one of them. “The computer … is a moron,” the management guru asserted in a McKinsey Quarterly article in …

Crowdsourcing in the Name of Science

Citizen Scientists Are Great for Data Collection and So Much More

The earthquake near Washington, D.C., five years ago in August 2011—the one that damaged the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral but had little other noticeable impact—caught me by surprise. …

How Big Data Replaced Don Draper

New Analytical Tools Are Making Ads More Effective—and Invasive—Than Ever

In the 1970s, I took a careful look at Oreos. Not the cookies themselves, mind you, but the way they were sold; I was an econometrics student at the University …