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Category: Technology

Second Boeing 737 Max crash raises questions about airplane automation

Second Boeing 737 Max crash raises questions about airplane automation

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MIT Technology Review reports: The 737 Max has bigger engines than the original 737, which make it 14% more fuel efficient than the previous generation. As the trade publication Air Current explains, the position and shape of the new engines changed how the aircraft handles, giving the nose a tendency to tip upward in some situations, which could cause the plane to stall. The new “maneuvering characteristics augmentation system” was designed to counteract that tendency. Did these more efficient engines—and…

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A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be creative

A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be creative

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Sean Dorrance Kelly writes: Advances in artificial intelligence have led many to speculate that human beings will soon be replaced by machines in every domain, including that of creativity. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, predicts that by 2029 we will have produced an AI that can pass for an average educated human being. Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, is more circumspect. He does not give a date but suggests that philosophers and mathematicians defer work on fundamental questions to “superintelligent” successors,…

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Technological change is not an inexorable, impersonal force

Technological change is not an inexorable, impersonal force

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Steven Poole writes: When is the future no longer the future? Only a decade ago, air travel seemed to be moving ineluctably towards giant planes, or “superjumbos”. But last week Airbus announced it will cease manufacturing its A380, the world’s fattest passenger jet, as current trends favour smaller and more fuel-efficient craft. Progress changed course. A more vivid reminder of lost dreams will come in a few weeks: 2 March marks the 50th anniversary of the maiden flight of Concorde….

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AI that writes convincing prose risks mass-producing fake news

AI that writes convincing prose risks mass-producing fake news

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MIT Technology Review reports: Here’s some breaking fake news … Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally fired a missile in the air. Russia said it had “identified the missile’s trajectory and will take necessary measures to ensure the security of the Russian population and the country’s strategic nuclear forces.” The White House said it was “extremely concerned by the Russian violation” of a treaty banning intermediate-range ballistic missiles. The US and Russia have had…

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Screen time has stunted the development of generations of children

Screen time has stunted the development of generations of children

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The Guardian reports: A study has linked high levels of screen time with delayed development in children, reigniting the row over the extent to which parents should limit how long their offspring spend with electronic devices. Researchers in Canada say children who spent more time with screens at two years of age did worse on tests of development at age three than children who had spent little time with devices. A similar result was found when children’s screen time at…

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The age of surveillance capitalism

The age of surveillance capitalism

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John Naughton writes: We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495…

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Disruption for thee, but not for me

Disruption for thee, but not for me

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Cory Doctorow writes: The Silicon Valley gospel of “disruption” has descended into caricature, but, at its core, there are some sound tactics buried beneath the self-serving bullshit. A lot of our systems and institutions are corrupt, bloated, and infested with cream-skimming rentiers who add nothing and take so much. Take taxis: there is nothing good about the idea that cab drivers and cab passengers meet each other by random chance, with the drivers aimlessly circling traffic-clogged roads while passengers brave…

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Why China’s electric-car industry is leaving Detroit, Japan, and Germany in the dust

Why China’s electric-car industry is leaving Detroit, Japan, and Germany in the dust

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Jordyn Dahl writes: After the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s crippled China’s economy, the country began to open its markets to the outside world. The aim was to bring in technological know-how from abroad that domestic firms could then assimilate. By the early ’80s, foreign automakers were allowed in on the condition that they form a joint venture with a Chinese partner. These Chinese firms, by working with foreign companies, would eventually gain enough knowledge to function independently….

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Yuval Noah Harari sees a big-data threat to humanity

Yuval Noah Harari sees a big-data threat to humanity

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Steve Paulson interviews historian Yuval Noah Harari: What’s different about this moment in history? What’s different is the pace of technological change, especially the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. They make it possible to hack human beings and other organisms, and then re-engineer them and create new life forms. How far can this technology go in changing who we are? Very far. Beyond our imagination. It can change our imagination, too. If your imagination is too limited to…

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Wielding rocks and knives, Arizonans attack self-driving cars

Wielding rocks and knives, Arizonans attack self-driving cars

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The New York Times reports: The assailant slipped out of a park around noon one day in October, zeroing in on his target, which was idling at a nearby intersection — a self-driving van operated by Waymo, the driverless-car company spun out of Google. He carried out his attack with an unidentified sharp object, swiftly slashing one of the tires. The suspect, identified as a white man in his 20s, then melted into the neighborhood on foot. The slashing was…

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Chinese scientist who claimed to make genetically edited babies is kept under guard

Chinese scientist who claimed to make genetically edited babies is kept under guard

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The New York Times reports: The Chinese scientist who shocked the world by claiming that he had created the first genetically edited babies is sequestered in a small university guesthouse in the southern city of Shenzhen, where he remains under guard by a dozen unidentified men. The sighting of the scientist, He Jiankui, this week was the first since he appeared at a conference in Hong Kong in late November and defended his actions. For the past few weeks, rumors…

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Strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones, study finds

Strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones, study finds

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PsyPost reports: New research suggests that phones are altering fundamental aspects of social life. According to a study published in Computers in Human Behavior, strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones with them. “Smartphones provide easy access to so much fun and useful content, but we wondered if they may have subtle unanticipated costs for our social behavior in the nondigital world. Smiling is a fundamental human social behavior that serves as a signal of people’s…

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Let’s cultivate our material intelligence

Let’s cultivate our material intelligence

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Glenn Adamson writes: Are you sitting comfortably? If so, how much do you know about the chair that’s holding you off the ground – what it’s made from, and what its production process looked like? Where it was made, and by whom? Or go deeper: how were the materials used to make the chair extracted from the planet? Most people will find it difficult to answer these basic questions. The object cradling your body remains, in many ways, mysterious to…

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The technology industry is run by capitalists pretending to be idealists

The technology industry is run by capitalists pretending to be idealists

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Ian Bogost writes: Businesspeople are in business for the money, won directly through profits and indirectly through the forces of market speculation. And yet, for more than a decade now, the technology industry has persuaded the public, and the street, that the efforts of firms such as Facebook and Google are conducted first for reasons of social benefit. To “change the world,” as their leaders intone, even as it becomes clear that some of the changes in question are often…

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Is cyclical time the cure to technology’s ills?

Is cyclical time the cure to technology’s ills?

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Stephen E. Nash writes: The world changed dramatically on June 29, 2007. That’s the day when the iPhone first became available to the public. In the 11 years since, more than 8.5 billion smartphones of all makes and models have been sold worldwide. Smartphone technology has allowed billions of people to enter and participate in a new, cybernetic, and ever more complex and rapid relationship with the world. Humans have been tumbling headlong into this new digital frontier for a…

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