[ad_1] How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other FablesEdited by Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern and Joe Shaw Company towns should have died out with the paternalists who devised them in the 19th century but, since time is a flat circle, here we are again with Silicon Valley corporations seeking to supplant […]
Category: hitting the books
Hitting the Books: How police tech reinforces America’s racial segregation
[ad_1] Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matterby Charlton D. McIlwain Ring’s effort to cozy up with law enforcement agencies and launch a citizen-installed surveillance state is undoubtedly a danger to our civil liberties but the doorbell camera company is far from the first corporation willing to leverage […]
Hitting the Books: Humans are responsible for the antics of our AIs
[ad_1] How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Usby John Maeda When machines become as smart as the people who design them, where does responsibility fall when said machines make a mistake? We’re already beginning to see examples of this throughout society, from suspect facial recognition technology to suspect sentencing software. In […]
Hitting the Books: Did the advent of the first desktop computer lead to murder?
[ad_1] The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World’s First Desktop Computerby Meryle Secrest The world’s first desktop computer didn’t take shape in a Menlo Park garage or the bowels of a corporate production facility. It was created in a workshop in Northwest […]
Hitting the Books: Boomers not understanding tech is the circle of life
[ad_1] This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto For A More Generous Worldby Yancey Strickler It’s a tale as old as time. You parents — rational, intelligent, and well-adjusted as they are — can’t figure out how email attachments work but are somehow capable of turning on a 14-part HiFi surround sound stereo like they’re […]
How to sling a cat through interstellar space
[ad_1] Extraterrestrial Languagesby Daniel Oberhaus Whether it’s Alf or the Xenomorphs hanging out just past the heliopause, we’ll have to make first contact with them at some point. But, how? Seriously, how do you communicate with an extraterrestrial species with a taste for cats? We can’t even communicate with octopuses, and they’re quite possibly smarter […]
Nero, fiddling from orbit as Earth burns
[ad_1] Six Concepts for the End of the Worldby Steve Beard What happens when the lights go out, not just for one person, but all of humanity? Ragnarok, Armageddon, the Hour — humans have long grappled with the idea that the world might just up and end one day. Even in the 21st century, we’re […]
Teaching AI to sing slime mold serenades
[ad_1] The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativityby Arthur I. Miller Most of the time when we hear about AI, they’re taking our jobs or putting us in jail or inflicting some other autonomic horror upon humans. But there’s a second side to that AI coin. One in which machine learning algorithms […]
Searching for ancient cities from space
[ad_1] Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Pastby Sarah Parcak When the Soviets sent Sputnik into orbit, they weren’t just kicking off the Space Race but ushering in an entirely new era for humanity. Suddenly the stars were within reach and we were afforded the clearest view in history of our home planet. […]
Stop pranking your kids to impress Jimmy Kimmel
[ad_1] Sharenthood: Why We Should Think before We Talk about Our Kids Onlineby Leah A Plunkett Parents have been proudly posting pictures of their children’s development since the days of the derragotype, probably even before then if they could draw fast enough. But in the modern digital era — where Grandma and Grandpa are a […]