For getting things done, we've got Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana--your mileage may vary as to just how useful and/or responsive any of them are. But what about an A.I. companion designed to support you spiritually by helping you strengthen mindfulness? A couple of ex-Google employees have recently released Maslo, a "voice journal with personality and smarts" that "interacts with empathy and playfulness." "We encourage personal curiosity and believe in growing into identities that are bigger versions of who we are now," say the developers, Ross Ingram and Cristina Poindexter. Could Maslo become your digital bestie?

When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of illuminating the present, Jules Verne got some things right in his time, Aldous Huxley got others, and George Orwell got still others. In our time--in this terror-haunted interlude (we hope) of background-hum dread and well-founded paranoia--no literary divinator gets it righter than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick, author of "Clans of the Alphane Moon" and dozens of other books, and inspirer of some of Hollywood's spookiest dystopias, including "Blade Runner," "Total Recall," and "Minority Report." And this is odd, given that he has been dead for twenty years. It would be interesting to get his take on the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. The Information Awareness Office plays it so weird that one can't help suspecting that somebody on its staff might be putting us on.

Immediately after 9/11, politicians and pundits slammed the Bush administration for failing to "connect the dots" foreshadowing the attack. For two years now, left- and right-wing advocates have shot down nearly every proposal to use intelligence more effectively--to connect the dots--as an assault on "privacy." Though their facts are often wrong and their arguments specious, they have come to dominate the national security debate virtually without challenge. The consequence has been devastating: just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction. "No one in the research and development community is putting together tools to make us safer," says Lee Zeichner of Zeichner Risk Analytics, a risk consultancy firm, "because they're afraid" of getting caught up in a privacy scandal. The chilling effect has been even stronger in government. "Many perfectly legal things that could be done ...