Harry Goldstein

2 min read Harry Goldstein is Editor in Chief of IEEE Spectrum. Just before this special issue on invention went to press, I got a message from IEEE senior member and patent attorney George Macdonald. Nearly two decades after I first reported on Corliss Orville “Cob” Burandt’s struggle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the 77-year-old inventor’s patent case was being revived. From 1981 to 1990, Burandt had received a dozen U.S. patents for

2 min read Harry Goldstein is Editor in Chief of IEEE Spectrum. This MQ-9 Sea Guardian uncrewed surveillance aircraft flew over the Pacific Ocean during the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Unmanned Systems Integrated Battle Problem in 2021. The majority of the world’s advanced logic chips are made in Taiwan, and most of those are made by one company: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). While it seems risky for companies like Nvidia, Apple, and Google to depend

3 min read Harry Goldstein is Editor in Chief of IEEE Spectrum. Carl De Torres is a longtime contributor to Spectrum and consultant to IBM. Winston Struye It pays to have friends in fascinating places. You need look no further than the cover of this issue and the article “IBM’s Big Bet on the Quantum-Centric Supercomputer” for evidence. The article by Ryan Mandelbaum, Antonio D. Córcoles, and Jay Gambetta came to us courtesy of the

3 min read Harry Goldstein is Editor in Chief of IEEE Spectrum. SERGIO ALBIAC; Gluekit When Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry started in this magazine’s New York office in 1979, she was issued the standard tools of the trade: notebooks, purple-colored pencils for making edits and corrections on page proofs, a push-button telephone wired into a WATS line for unlimited long distance calling, and an IBM Selectric typewriter, “the latest and greatest technology, from my

2 min read Isaac Asimov’s short story “Reason,” which featured a robotically controlled space-based solar “Converter,” was published in this issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Street & Smith Publications/Public Domain The scene: A space-based solar power station called the Converter being commissioned some time in the Future. The characters: Two astronauts, Powell and Donovan, and a robot named QT-1 (“Cutie” to its human friends). The plot: The astronauts are training Cutie to take over the

3 min read Coffee that tastes like raspberry jam, courtesy of Cafés Muda and roaster Dajo Aertssen; connections made possible by Perplexity AI, the Internet, and IEEE Medal of Honor recipient Bob Kahn. Dawn Messerly “How did you find me?” specialty coffee roaster Dajo Aertssen asked. He’d just handed me a bag of single-origin cascara, the dried flesh of coffee cherries, in his shop, Cafés Muda in Lille, France. “The AI sent us,” I replied.

3 min read Daniel Zender You can’t see, hear, taste, feel, or smell it, but software is everywhere around us. It underpins modern civilization even while consuming more energy, wealth, and time than it needs to and burping out a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The software industry and the code it ships need to be much more efficient in order to minimize the emissions attributable to programs running in data centers