Frontiers of Computing

When Dario Amodei gets excited about AI—which is nearly always—he moves. The cofounder and CEO springs from a seat in a conference room and darts over to a whiteboard. He scrawls charts with swooping hockey-stick curves that show how…

On the library’s side, some people thought Ginsparg was too hands-on. Others said he wasn’t patient enough. A “good lower-level manager,” according to someone long involved with arXiv, “but his sense of management didn’t scale.” For most of…

The Santa Ana winds were already blowing hard when I ran the first worm simulation. I’m no hacker, but it was easy enough: Open a Terminal shell, paste some commands from GitHub, watch characters cascade down the screen. Just like in the…

Coding in Forth reminded me of the lawless dystopia in Mad Max. You make your own rules, subject to the limits of the context. You can redefine the IF statement if you so please. You can rewrite machine code instructions for a Word. You can…

Yes. We’ve been here before. A second war of the architectures.In Hackers, a group of RISC- obsessed teens must stop a goateed villain from capsizing a fleet of oil tankers with a computer virus. Pictured here, from left: Lord Nikon, Dade,…

Guillaume Verdon stands before me with a new kind of computer chip in his hand—a piece of hardware he believes is so important to the future of humanity that he’s asked me not to reveal our exact location, for fear that his headquarters…

This is the year of quantum science and technology. Literally: The United Nations said so. But no amount of pomp and hype can make something true. The fact is, it’s been the year of quantum nearly every year for many, many years now. It’s…

One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world’s secrets. Your secrets.Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day—the day someone…

Will AI Fully Eat Programming Jobs One Day?Almost every coder we surveyed had strong opinions on the matter. Here’s ChatGPT’s summary of the responses (with its boldface emphasis preserved):“The coders have spoken—and they’re not packing up…

The internet is massive. But does it have … actual mass? Big server farms and miles of fiber-optic cables do, of course, but we don’t mean the infrastructure of the internet. We mean the internet itself. The information. The data. The…