The Download: introducing the Hard Problems issue

For all of historical past we’ve turned to expertise, many times, to assist us remedy our hardest issues. It has made nearly all of human information accessible to us immediately on demand. And we are able to converse to one another in completely totally different languages and be understood utilizing nothing greater than a slim slab of glass and metals in our pocket.

Typically expertise can appear to be a miracle. However, in fact, it’s nothing greater than human achievement. But like all issues human, our creations may be deeply flawed. Because of this, now we have additionally used tech to unleash horrors on ourselves, deliberately and by chance. 

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 remedy these.

In our latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, we step again from this cycle. We discover large questions and laborious issues and ask: What function can—and will—expertise play going ahead?

Right here’s simply a few of the nice tales you possibly can learn within the new challenge:

+ Suppose that your plastic is being recycled? This incisive, fascinating function by Douglas Most important will make you think again.

+ The web feels fairly damaged as of late. However there are actual steps we are able to take in the direction of fixing it, as Katie Notopoulos explains in her piece for us. 

+ Meet Gábor Domokos, the Hungarian mathematician making sense of nature’s complexity by describing its types within the easiest attainable geometry.

+ AI consciousness isn’t only a devilishly tough mental puzzle; it’s a morally weighty drawback, writes Grace Huckins.

+ Why captchas are getting tougher to resolve—and what comes subsequent.