We have now employed it to broadcast hateful rhetoric and divisive ideologies. We have now fine-tuned our machines to kill one another in ever higher numbers and with ever extra effectivity. It’s our know-how that took the carbon from out of the bottom and put it within the sky. Our know-how that poisoned the water and the air, that made deserts out of forests, and that wiped complete species off the planet.
Expertise is an engine for issues, for fixing them and for creating fully new ones—after which we perversely flip to even newer applied sciences to attempt to clear up these. On this situation, we step again from this cycle. We discover large questions and exhausting issues and ask: What function can—and may—know-how play going ahead?
Our cowl is impressed by Douglas Major’s terrifying story on plastics. There’s an adage that claims each piece of plastic ever made nonetheless exists. Whereas that isn’t fully true, as Major vividly describes, it’s fairly darn shut. We’re not lowering how a lot is made—exactly the other. Reuse is negligible. Recycling isn’t working. In the meantime, plastic is completely in every single place, and in completely all the pieces, together with our personal our bodies. What are we going to do about it?
AI epitomizes the typically fraught relationship we have now with know-how. It has the potential to massively profit society—and but it might trigger incalculable hurt if we get it fallacious. As its improvement races forward, Grace Huckins has written a strong, even poetic exploration of AI consciousness. What would it not take, and what would it not imply, for an AI to turn into aware? How would we all know? What would we owe it?
David W. Brown takes on the problem of spacecraft design and the wrestle to make smaller, cheaper missions that may nonetheless inform us significant new issues in regards to the photo voltaic system. If we’re going to benefit from the sources we dedicate to area exploration, we’ll should grapple with the exhausting limits of physics—and suppose exhausting about what we will, and need to, do.
A few of our hardest issues come right down to human nature, and our capability and typically outright need for battle. Social media and on-line communications are awful with trolling, disinformation, harassment, and hate speech. Katie Notopoulos argues that the answer for a lot of that is to finish our fixation with free providers and transfer to smaller, distributed platforms that put extra energy in customers’ arms.
One exhausting drawback most of us have probably confronted is the expertise of interacting with authorities providers on-line. A decade after the famously botched launch of Healthcare.gov, Tate Ryan-Mosley explores why it’s nonetheless so exhausting for the federal government to get tech proper. Her reporting takes us to New York Metropolis, which has had some method of success—partly by going with the bottom tech potential.
And at last, we requested a few of the smartest minds on the market what they contemplate the largest issues that aren’t getting sufficient consideration proper now. You’ll discover their responses, and lots of extra on-line at techreview.com/hardproblems.