For all of historical past we’ve turned to expertise, time and again, to assist us clear up our hardest issues. It has made just about all of human data obtainable to us immediately on demand. And we are able to converse to one another in totally totally different languages and be understood utilizing nothing greater than a slim slab of glass and metals in our pocket.
Sometimes expertise can seem to be a miracle. But, after all, it’s nothing greater than human achievement. Yet like all issues human, our creations might be deeply flawed. As a outcome, we have now additionally used tech to unleash horrors on ourselves, deliberately and accidentally.
Technology is an engine for issues, for fixing them and for creating totally new ones—after which we perversely flip to even newer applied sciences to attempt to clear up these.
In our newest print concern of MIT Technology Review, we step again from this cycle. We discover massive questions and exhausting issues and ask: What function can—and will—expertise play going ahead?
Here’s simply a number of the nice tales you possibly can learn within the new concern:
+ Think that your plastic is being recycled? This incisive, fascinating characteristic by Douglas Main will make you assume once more.
+ The web feels fairly damaged today. But there are actual steps we are able to 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 varieties within the easiest potential geometry.
+ AI consciousness isn’t only a devilishly tough mental puzzle; it’s a morally weighty downside, writes Grace Huckins.
+ Why captchas are getting more durable to resolve—and what comes subsequent.