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EVERY ENGINEER HAS STORIES OF BUGS that they discovered through clever detective work. But such exploits are seldom of interest to other engineers, let alone the general public. Nonetheless, a recent book authored by Eric Haseltine, titled The Spy in Moscow Station (Macmillan, 2019), is a true story of bug hunting that should be of interest to all. It recounts a lengthy struggle by Charles Gandy, an electrical engineer at the United States' National Security Agency, to uncover an elaborate and ingenious scheme by Soviet engineers to intercept communications in the American embassy in Moscow. (I should say that, by coincidence, both Haseltine and Gandy are friends of mine.) • This was during the Cold War in the late 1970s. American spies were being arrested, and how they were being identified was a matter of great concern to U.S. intelligence. The first break came with the accidental discovery of a false chimney cavity at the Moscow embassy. Inside the chimney was an unusual Yagi-style antenna that could be raised and lowered with pulleys. The antenna had three active elements, each tuned to a different wavelength. What was the purpose of this antenna, and what transmitters was it listening to? • Gandy pursued these questions for years, not only baffled by the technology, but buffeted by interagency disputes and hampered by the Soviet KGB. At one point he was issued a "cease and desist" letter by the CIA, which, along with the State Department, had authority over security at the embassy. These agencies were not persuaded that there were any transmitters to be found: Regular scans for emissions from bugs showed nothing. • It was only when Gandy got a letter authorizing his investigation from President Ronald Reagan that he was able to take decisive action. All of the electronics at the embassy-some 10 tons of equipment-was securely shipped back to the United States. Every piece was disassembled and X-rayed.

Why are we engineers so bad at making predictions? ¶ In countless panel discussions on the future of technology, I'm not sure I ever got anything right. As I look back on technological progress, I experience first retrospective surprise, then surprise that I'm surprised, because it all crept up on me when I wasn't looking. How can something like Google feel so inevitable and yet be impossible to predict? ¶ I'm filled with wonder at all that we engineers have accomplished, and I take great communal pride in how we've changed the world in so many ways. Decades ago I never dreamed we would have satellite navigation, computers in our pockets, the Internet, cellphones, or robots that would explore Mars. How did all this happen, and what are we doing for our next trick? ¶ The software pioneer Alan Kay has said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, and that's what we've been busy doing. The public understands that we're creating the future, but they think that we know what we're doing and that there's a master plan in there somewhere. However, the world evolves haphazardly, bumbling along in unforeseen directions. Some seemingly great inventions just don't take hold, while overlooked innovations proliferate, and still others are used in unpredicted ways. ¶ When I joined Bell Labs, so many years ago, there were two great development projects under way that together were to shape the future—the Picturephone and the millimeter waveguide. The waveguide was an empty pipe, about 5 centimeters in diameter, that would carry across the country the 6-megahertz analog signals from those ubiquitous Picturephones. ¶ Needless to say, this was an alternative future that never happened. Our technological landscape is littered with such failed bets. For decades engineers would say that the future of communications was video telephony. Now that we can have it for free, not many people even want it.

FROM TIME TO TIME I HAVE SEEN Internet videos of seemingly impossible gymnastic performances. Sometimes the links to these videos have been accompanied by a comment by the poster to the effect of "I could do this if I wanted, but I choose not to." This brings a little smile to my face, but I've been thinking lately that I've been telling myself something similar when I see some of today's technical literature.

Summary form only given. I've been hearing about the impending end of Moore's Law for so many years that I've become skeptical of all the claims of doom. Like the Little Engine That Could, Moore's Law keeps chugging along. Nonetheless, it has definitely reached the humng and pulling stage. . I was considering upgrading my desktop with a new CPU and motherboard, but new, comparably priced CPUs have about the same clock speed as my 4-year-old model. The newer ones do have more transistors and better architectures, so technical benchmarks show about a 50 percent improvement. Nonetheless, when it comes to everyday applications, the newer models might not exhibit noticeably better performance. I'm disappointed because I feel compelled to have the latest stulf at all times. . While transistors are continuing to shrink, it's at a slower pace. The technology road map calls for 5-nanometer fabrication by about 2020, but since we can't run those transistors faster-mostly because of heat dissipation problems-we will need to find elfective ways of using more transistors in lieu of increasing clock speed. And because of increasing fabrication costs, these designs will have to be produced at high volume. . No one knows what electronics will be like in the future. It's hard to think beyond Moore's Law. Since the time of the vacuum tube, there has been a century of exponential improvement. When I was a child, I thought that all future designs would simply be dilferent arrangements of tubes, resistors, and capacitors. How little I knew! I'm sure that today's budding engineers will feel the same way in the future.

Twenty-five years ago the telecommunications industry had its vision of the future. There were three dreams that, given the right technology, they could achieve: (1) the Dick Tracy wristwatch phone; (2) the Picturephone; and (3) the set-top box for the home television which could access an information store maintained by the telephone company. None of these dreams turned out as planned, but it is interesting to compare the original concepts with what has actually transpired in the last quarter-century. Today, having achieved some form of each of these three dreams, it seems as if, looking ahead to tomorrow’s technology, the industry has no similar vision.

LET'S ENVISION A DISCUSSION among engineers. We won't have to stretch our imaginations far: One engineer has proposed a new idea, and the others, typically, are finding faults with it. The engineer with the idea has rebuffed all the criticisms, until one of the critics plays her last card. "Yes-but does it scale?" she asks. There is an ensuing silence. . Systems are usually complex, nonlinear, and adaptive. And as they change in size, their behavior, as well as their economics, can change disproportionately. Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, has recently published a book, titled Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (Penguin Random House). This book engagingly describes West's search for an underlying general mathematical description of why systems scale the way they do. He asks a number of fascinating questions along the way. For example, why do we keep eating, but stop growing? Why do almost all companies live for only a few years, while cities continue to grow and thrive? Why does the rate of innovation have to accelerate to sustain socioeconomic life?

I can’t help it. My attention span has shrunk alarmingly, and I’m easily distracted. Worse, I seem to look for and welcome distractions. I should be focusing my attention on the task at hand, which is writing this small essay. Instead I keep checking the Internet with my smartphone. I look around me at this coffee shop and everyone seems to be staring at their cellphones. I don’t think we used to be like this, and I wonder: Has technology done this to us, and if so, is this bad or good?

Until recently, the word data didn't require a modifier. But we passed a watershed moment when we started referring to big data. Apparently, that wasn't a sufficient description for some chunks of data, because people grasped for bolder terms, such as humongous data. Sadly, now, it appears that we have run out of appropriate adjectives. And yet data keeps getting bigger and bigger. . So instead of mentioning data, people have begun waving their hands and talking vaguely about the "cloud." This seems to be the perfect metaphor-a mystical vapor hanging over Earth, occasionally raining information on the parched recipients below. It is both unknowable and all-knowing. It answers all questions, if only we know how to interpret those answers.

There is an eternal quality to how technology evolves. As existing areas get overworked, new frontiers open up at the fringes. Then innovators rush in to occupy the new territory before it, in turn, becomes overworked. There is an example of such a frontier today in wireless communications. IEEE's 5G wireless initiative has the goal of serving many more users with much higher transmission speeds. But with the existing cellular bands tightly packed, where does all the required additional network capacity come from?

I enjoyed Samuel Arbesman’s first book, The Half-Life of Facts, which was a discussion of the exponential pace of change, as exemplified by Moore’s Law, among other things. When I saw the title of his new book, Overcomplicated, I assumed that it would be a warning that we technologists had gone too far in creating complex systems. It would advocate moving to simpler systems, just as a doctor might advise an overweight person to go on a diet. I was prepared to argue against such a conclusion, but as I discovered upon reading the book, Arbesman does not say that complexity is necessarily bad or that we should seek simplicity. Instead, he maintains that systems are now unknowably complex, that they will become even more so, and we should…just get over it.

I was at a large hardware store, holding a power cord that I thought would fit my new home generator, when another shopper pointed to the cord in my hand and said that I had chosen the wrong connector. When I looked hesitant, he added, "I'm an electrical engineer, so I know things like that." Needless to say, I quietly changed my choice. But I started thinking: What are those things that all EEs know? What is the commonality of training and experience that holds us together as a profession, and how is it changing? What will it mean to be an EE in the future?

In this month's essay, Robert Lucky examines the central sociological impacts that communications technologies have had on the way science is done as well as the critical influences science has had in the evolution of communications technology. He traces the evolution of today's infrastructure for research and collaboration in science via the Internet and the World Wide Web back to the invention of the telegraph, which first freed the flow of information from its reliance on the physical means of transportation and allowed communication to occur in real time. According to Lucky, the remaining technical hurdles in providing unlimited bandwidth are relatively simple to overcome compared with the sociotechnical engineering required to improve the three dimensions of communications--human to information, human to human, and human to computer.

Many novels have portrayed alternative versions of history, such as Robert Harris’s Fatherland: A Novel (originally published by Hutchison, 1992) or Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (first published by Putnam, 1962). In both books the Axis powers are victorious in World War II, and the world today is dramatically different. However, in spite of technology's role in shaping history, there appear to be few books in which history is altered by imagined changes in technological innovation. An exception is the 1991 novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (first edition by Bantam Books), in which Charles Babbage perfects a steam-driven analytical engine and the information age arrives a century earlier.

Recently I was listening to a talk-ostensibly about the future-in which the smartphone was pictured as an evolutionary end point that would last indefinitely. I thought, Nothing is forever, and forever comes very quickly in technology. I started to worry about what would come after the smartphone, and what the end of the smartphone’s dominance would mean to the electronics industry. • The smartphone has been an incredible success, both in technological and business terms. I often think of it as the pinnacle of engineering brilliance. There is an entire ecosystem of parts, systems, software, even design philosophy, that has built up around it. Anything that can be made from smartphone technology can be made quickly, easily, and inexpensively. It has been the most successful electronics product ever.

Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman have recently published a book titled Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (Springer, 2015), in which they claim that setting objectives for a project can be self-defeating. • They have been motivated to reach this conclusion through experience with an image-morphing website, Picbreeder.org, where users can “breed” new images by successive selection from mutations of earlier images. By this selective process, users starting with random blobs have produced a number of images that strikingly resemble real objects or faces. However, these images are never generated by setting out with the objective of producing a particular image. For example, someone discovers an image that looks very much like a car, but that image doesn’t come about by starting with the most “carlike” image possible. Instead, it might be found by further breeding of another user’s image that happens to look a little like a car, even though the user who generated that image had something else in mind entirely.

This part contains sections titled: Boring Talks Banquet Speeches Engineers and Vugraphs Better Technical Talks? Technical Papers

"Lucky's book...makes me laugh again and again..." --Bill Moyers, Public Affairs Television, Inc. Bob Lucky, author of the widely acclaimed "Reflections" column in Spectrum magazine, provides a humorous, nostalgic collection of ten years worth of his own reflections on typical situations engineers encounter during their careers. Spiced with 20% new anecdotes and personal experiences, LUCKY STRIKES...AGAIN takes good-natured gibes at corporate bureaucrats while offering some not-so-subtle advice on ways to circumvent the bureaucracy and gives the bureaucrats some hints on when to look the other way.

This part contains sections titled: Computers Dialogs Talking Computers Intelligence-Artificial and Otherwise Friendly Computers Technology for the Nation's Problems Ideal Communications, Realism, and Fantasy ]]>

This part contains sections titled: Shrinking Components The Blurring of Reality The Demise of Heathkit Living on the Fringe The Rise of Complexity Hardware Isn't Easy Either Networks