Our technological preference for perfection can only lead us so far: as traditional transistor-based electronics rapidly approach the atomic scale, small amounts of disorder begin to have outsized negative effects. Surprisingly, one of the most promising pathways out of this conundrum may emerge from recent efforts to embrace defects and construct 'quantum machines' to enable new information technologies based on the quantum nature of the electron. Recently, individual defects in diamond and other materials have attracted interest as they possess an electronic spin state that can be employed as a solid state quantum bit at and above room temperature. Research at the frontiers of this field includes creating and manipulating these unusual states in a new generation of nanometer-scale structures. These developments have launched technological efforts aimed at developing applications ranging from secure data encryption to radical improvements in computation speed and complexity. This lecture will describe recent advances towards these goals, including the surprising ability to control atomic-scale spins for communication and computation within materials surrounding us for generations.