Tackling our biggest problems | MIT Technology Review

We have now employed it to broadcast hateful rhetoric and divisive ideologies. We have now fine-tuned our machines to kill one another in ever better 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 total species off the planet. 

Know-how 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 remedy these. On this challenge, we step again from this cycle. We discover huge questions and exhausting issues and ask: What position can—and will—expertise play going ahead?

Our cowl is impressed by Douglas Main’s terrifying story on plastics. There’s an adage that claims each piece of plastic ever made nonetheless exists. Whereas that isn’t totally 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 completely all over the place, and in completely every part, together with our personal our bodies. What are we going to do about it? 

AI epitomizes the typically fraught relationship we’ve with expertise. It has the potential to massively profit society—and but it may trigger incalculable hurt if we get it flawed. As its growth races forward, Grace Huckins has written a powerful, even poetic exploration of AI consciousness. What would it not take, and what would it not imply, for an AI to change into aware? How would we all know? What would we owe it? 

David W. Brown takes on the challenge 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 take advantage of the sources we commit to house exploration, we’ll should grapple with the exhausting limits of physics—and suppose exhausting about what we will, and wish to, do.

A few of our hardest issues come all the way 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 solution for much of this is to end our fixation with free services and transfer to smaller, distributed platforms that put extra energy in customers’ palms. 

One exhausting downside most of us have doubtless 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 is still so hard for the government to get tech right. Her reporting takes us to New York Metropolis, which has had some method of success—partly by going with the bottom tech doable. 

And eventually, we requested a number of the smartest minds on the market what they think about the most important issues that aren’t getting sufficient consideration proper now. You’ll discover their responses, and lots of extra on-line at techreview.com/hardproblems.