When I contemplate the return of the crypto wars—attempts to block citizens’ use of encryption by officials who want unfettered spying powers—I look back with dread on the late Middle Ages. I wasn’t alive back then, but one feature of those times lingers in my consciousness. Starting around 1337 and all the way until 1453,…
Aspia Space is joining the ranks of companies and space agencies working on remote sensing, tracking the physical attributes of things on the ground by using sensors on satellites. The majority of Earth observation satellites, like NASA’s long-running Landsat program, use sensors for optical images—essentially, photos from space. But at any given time, the majority…
Hanson and I talked about the idea of adding real intelligence to these evocative machines. Ben Goertzel, a well-known AI researcher and the CEO of SingularityNET, leads an effort to apply advances in machine learning to the software inside Hanson’s robots that allows them to respond to human speech. The AI behind Sophia can sometimes…
The volume required can be huge. In the US, chip fabs use far less water than the agriculture and power generation industries, and semiconductors haven’t spurred political tensions over water resources at national scale, says Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of the recent book Chip War. Still, squeezes…
Now, generative AI is the potential kill shot, the one that could cause copyright owners to surrender their library of scripts, created over decades, in exchange for promised benefits that will never arrive. When it comes to generative AI and video, Silicon Valley only needs to hook one constituency— Hollywood executives. Once studios buy in,…
While the startup cofounders considered hoppy-tasting but hop-free beer potentially beneficial to brewers and the environment—as Denby said in a New York Times story after the paper was published—some hop farmers felt threatened. They feared engineered yeast could end a farming tradition and hollow out the soul of brewing, a dance of microorganisms, farmers, brewers,…
Many repair shops, especially those who opt in and pay to be part of those certified networks, say they have no trouble finding the information they need to fix cars, even before this week’s agreement. Michael Bradshaw, vice president of K & M Collision in Hickory, North Carolina, and vice chair of the Society of…
And it’s working. Aron Levitz, president of media and publishing platform Wattpad WEBTOON Studios, says access to that kind of data has empowered the platform’s writers and artists. “As a user, not only do you see how big the story is, how many subscribers it has, how many people have commented on it, how many…
Threads, Meta’s new Twitter competitor, still has that new-app smell as millions of users figure out what to post on the platform. Right now, Threads’ vibe is very “corporate afterparty hosted by Wendys,” and that’s perfectly fine! I’m not here to judge where you choose to share memes and scroll away your afternoon. Keep on…
The explosion of consumer-facing tools that offer generative AI has created plenty of debate: These tools promise to transform the ways in which we live and work while also raising fundamental questions about how we can adapt to a world in which they’re extensively used for just about anything. As with any new technology riding…