If you want to capture something wolflike, it’s best to embark before dawn. So on a morning this January, with the eastern horizon still pink-hued, I drove with two young scientists into a blanket of fog. Forty miles to the west, the industrial sprawl of Houston spawned a golden glow. Tanner Broussard’s old Toyota Tacoma…
Tech workers in China are being instructed by their bosses to train AI agents to replace them—and it’s prompting a wave of soul-searching among otherwise enthusiastic early adopters. Earlier this month a GitHub project called Colleague Skill, which claimed workers could use it to “distill” their colleagues’ skills and personality traits and replicate them with…
Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba. The real ambition for many of these researchers was the robot of science fiction—one…
The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.” One of Brand’s several biographers described him as a mainstay of both counterculture and cyberculture, and with Maintenance, Brand wants us…
The availability of artificial intelligence for use in warfare is at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon. This debate has become urgent, with AI playing a bigger role than ever before in the current conflict with Iran. AI is no longer just helping humans analyze intelligence. It is now an…
Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell. The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-handedly purchased something like 80% of all contracted carbon removal. If you’re looking for someone to pay you to suck carbon dioxide out of the…
As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so—we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to Indigenous burning practices to prevent wildfires. Biologists are realizing that flower-dotted meadows were…
When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people sheltered at home and shifted to remote work. Air travel collapsed. Cities—normally filled with the honking, screeching, engine-gunning riot of transportation—became as silent as…
From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone. The app asks him to upload a photo associated with the account, so he clicks on a picture of a 30-something Asian man. Next, the app requests to open the camera for a video “liveness” check. The…
For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a compelling contender: making “mirror” bacteria. Should they come to be,…