For all of historical past we’ve turned to know-how, repeatedly, to assist us clear up our hardest issues. It has made nearly all of human data accessible to us immediately on demand. And we will communicate to one another in fully totally different languages and be understood utilizing nothing greater than a slim slab of glass and metals in our pocket.
Generally know-how can appear to be a miracle. However, in fact, it’s nothing greater than human achievement. But like all issues human, our creations may be deeply flawed. Because of this, we now have additionally used tech to unleash horrors on ourselves, deliberately and by chance.
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.
In our newest print situation of MIT Expertise Evaluate, we step again from this cycle. We discover huge questions and onerous issues and ask: What position can—and may—know-how play going ahead?
Right here’s simply among the nice tales you’ll be able to learn within the new situation:
+ Assume that your plastic is being recycled? This incisive, fascinating function by Douglas Primary will make you suppose once more.
+ The web feels fairly damaged nowadays. However there are actual steps we will take in the direction of fixing it, as Katie Notopoulos explains in her piece for us.
+ Meet Gábor Domokos, the Hungarian mathematician making sense of nature’s complexity by describing its kinds within the easiest doable geometry.
+ AI consciousness isn’t only a devilishly tough mental puzzle; it’s a morally weighty downside, writes Grace Huckins.
+ Why captchas are getting tougher to unravel—and what comes subsequent.