Artificial intelligence has given us algorithms capable of recognizing faces, diagnosing disease, and, of course, crushing computer games. But even the smartest algorithms can sometimes behave in unexpected and unwanted ways, for example picking up gender bias from the text or images they are fed. A new framework for building AI programs suggests a way… Continue reading Researchers Want Guardrails to Help Prevent Bias in AI
Author: Wired Magazine
Feds Pin Uber Crash on Human Operator, Call for Better Rules
The Uber self-driving car crash that killed a pedestrian in March 2018 was the fault of the vehicle’s operator, who wasn’t paying attention at the time and was likely looking at her cell phone, the National Transportation Safety Board has determined. But the safety watchdog didn’t end the blame game there. At a board meeting… Continue reading Feds Pin Uber Crash on Human Operator, Call for Better Rules
How Ford Created the Mach-E, Its Fully Electric Mustang SUV
The Ford Mustang Mach-E—a fully electric SUV “inspired by” the famed two-seat coupe—debuted in Los Angeles Sunday night, kicking off what’s sure to be years of enthusiast debate about whether the high-riding four-door merits the name “Mustang,” in form or function. The character and performance won’t come to light until the car arrives next year.… Continue reading How Ford Created the Mach-E, Its Fully Electric Mustang SUV
Drawing With Drones Over the Salt Flats of Bolivia
Reuben Wu has photographed some of the world’s most remote and extreme places: Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Bisti Badlands of New Mexico, the Arctic tundra of Norway, Peru’s Pastoruri glacier. But few locations compare to the site of his latest project, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni. Stretching across more than 4,000 square miles of South America’s… Continue reading Drawing With Drones Over the Salt Flats of Bolivia
Hackers Discovered Only After Maxing Out Victim’s Cloud Storage
Move fast and break things was in full effect this week, as researchers revealed that Intel took a full year to release a fix for a chip flaw the company had been repeatedly warned about. Over in a different digital ecosystem, researchers from the security firm Kryptowire dropped 146 vulnerabilities found in handsets made by… Continue reading Hackers Discovered Only After Maxing Out Victim’s Cloud Storage
The Searing Colors of Santiago’s Revolution
Revolution is never quiet. The sound of it is not so much a sound as it is an action—a gathering tide, a firework just as it is about to mushroom with wild light, a tremor gaining force. It’s not what we hear but what we witness. In the theater of cruelty that is the modern… Continue reading The Searing Colors of Santiago’s Revolution
For Fantasy Author N. K. Jemisin, World-Building Is a Lesson in Oppression
The worlds of the fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin are as imaginative as they are intimate. In her Inheritance trilogy, the gods are real and walk the streets. Her Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth books feature a supercontinent called the Stillness that is anything but—the very land is a geologic time bomb, ravaged by earthquakes and… Continue reading For Fantasy Author N. K. Jemisin, World-Building Is a Lesson in Oppression
Google Is Slurping Up Health Data—and It Looks Totally Legal
Last week, when Google gobbled up Fitbit in a $2.1 billion acquisition, the talk was mostly about what the company would do with all that wrist-jingling and power-walking data. It’s no secret that Google’s parent Alphabet—along with fellow giants Apple and Facebook—is on an aggressive hunt for health data. But it turns out there’s a… Continue reading Google Is Slurping Up Health Data—and It Looks Totally Legal
The Uber CEO’s Mistaken Notion of What a Mistake Is
Dismissing Uber’s own self-driving errors as mere “mistakes” feels wrong, too (although on a different order of magnitude). Especially given the raft of documents released last week by the federal transportation safety watchdog the National Transportation Safety Board, which has spent the last 20 months investigating the context of the accident in which a car… Continue reading The Uber CEO’s Mistaken Notion of What a Mistake Is
Icelandic Walruses May Have Been Early Victims of Human-Driven Extinction
There are no walruses in Iceland, but, at one time, there were hundreds. The timing of the walruses’ disappearance suggests that the population’s loss may be one of the earliest known examples of humans driving a marine species to local extinction. The Ghost of Walruses Past Walruses used to be a major feature of life… Continue reading Icelandic Walruses May Have Been Early Victims of Human-Driven Extinction