It’s dark. Vegetal decay hangs thick in the air, trapped beneath the rotting innards of a felled beech tree. You wedge the hard shell of your exoskeleton through softening pulp, legs clicking in rhythm with each other. Chemosensors on your antennae and mouthparts ping with a steady stream of information, and you toodle your little […]
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It’s time to rethink the legal treatment of robots
A pandemic is raging with devastating consequences, and long-standing problems with racial bias and political polarization are coming to a head. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help us deal with these challenges. However, AI’s risks have become increasingly apparent. Scholarship has illustrated cases of AI opacity and lack of explainability, design choices that […]
Don’t worry, the earth is doomed
Catastrophic risks are events that threaten human livelihood on a, well, catastrophic scale. Most are interconnected, meaning that one event—such as a nuclear detonation—is likely to trigger others, like water and food crises, economic depression, and world war. The intricate interdependence of our physical, social, and political systems has left humans vulnerable, something that covid-19 […]
How to Watch the Final 2020 Presidential Debate
Joe Biden and Donald Trump square off for the second and last time on a debate stage Thursday night in Nashville. Powered by WPeMatico
How to Watch the Final 2020 Presidential Debate
Joe Biden and Donald Trump square off for the second and last time on a debate stage Thursday night in Nashville. Powered by WPeMatico
The Left and the Right Speak Different Languages—Literally
A study analyzing patterns in online comments found that liberals and conservatives use different words to express similar ideas. Powered by WPeMatico
AOC’s Among Us livestream hints at Twitch’s political power
Just before 9 p.m. on October 20, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitch to play the hottest game in America: Among Us. “Hi, everyone! This is crazy!” she began, urging viewers to make a plan for how they will vote with I Will Vote, an outreach program funded by the Democratic National Committee. After a few […]
How the ‘Diabolical’ Beetle Survives Being Run Over by a Car
The puny insect can withstand forces 39,000 times its body weight. Scientists just discovered its super-strength secret—which could inspire new materials. Powered by WPeMatico
OSIRIS-REx survived its touchdown on asteroid Bennu—now we wait to see if it got a sample
At 6:08 p.m. US Eastern Time on Tuesday, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finished a four-and-a-half-hour descent to the surface of asteroid Bennu, 200 million miles from Earth. Once there, it briefly made contact with the ground in an attempt to collect some rocky pebbles and dust before safely flying away. We won’t know if the sample […]
The true dangers of AI are closer than we think
As long as humans have built machines, we’ve feared the day they could destroy us. Stephen Hawking famously warned that AI could spell an end to civilization. But to many AI researchers, these conversations feel unmoored. It’s not that they don’t fear AI running amok—it’s that they see it already happening, just not in the […]