We’ve got employed it to broadcast hateful rhetoric and divisive ideologies. We’ve got fine-tuned our machines to kill one another in ever larger numbers and with ever extra effectivity. It’s our expertise that took the carbon from out of the bottom and put it within the sky. Our expertise that poisoned the water and the air, that made deserts out of forests, and that wiped complete species off the planet.
Know-how is an engine for issues, for fixing them and for creating completely new ones—after which we perversely flip to even newer applied sciences to attempt to clear up these. On this concern, we step again from this cycle. We discover large questions and laborious issues and ask: What function can—and will—expertise play going ahead?
Our cowl is impressed by Douglas Major’s terrifying story on plastics. There’s an adage that claims every bit of plastic ever made nonetheless exists. Whereas that isn’t completely true, as Major vividly describes, it’s fairly darn shut. We’re not lowering how a lot is made—exactly the alternative. Reuse is negligible. Recycling isn’t working. In the meantime, plastic is totally in every single place, and in completely every little thing, together with our personal our bodies. What are we going to do about it?
AI epitomizes the typically fraught relationship we have now with expertise. It has the potential to massively profit society—and but it may trigger incalculable hurt if we get it fallacious. As its improvement races forward, Grace Huckins has written a robust, even poetic exploration of AI consciousness. What wouldn’t it take, and what wouldn’t it imply, for an AI to turn out to be 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 concerning the photo voltaic system. If we’re going to profit from the sources we dedicate to house exploration, we’ll must grapple with the laborious limits of physics—and suppose laborious about what we are able to, and need to, do.
A few of our hardest issues come right down to human nature, and our capability and typically outright want 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 companies and transfer to smaller, distributed platforms that put extra energy in customers’ fingers.
One laborious downside most of us have probably confronted is the expertise of interacting with authorities companies on-line. A decade after the famously botched launch of Healthcare.gov, Tate Ryan-Mosley explores why it’s nonetheless so laborious for the federal government to get tech proper. Her reporting takes us to New York Metropolis, which has had some method of success—partially by going with the bottom tech attainable.
And at last, we requested among the smartest minds on the market what they take into account the most important issues that aren’t getting sufficient consideration proper now. You’ll discover their responses, and plenty of extra on-line at techreview.com/hardproblems.