Artist Ariel Aberg-Riger is author of America Redux: Visual Stories From Our Dynamic History.
An autonomous drone carrying water to help extinguish a wildfire in the Sierra Nevada might encounter swirling Santa Ana winds that threaten to push it off course. Rapidly adapting to these unknown disturbances inflight presents an enormous challenge for the drone’s flight control system. To help such a drone stay on target, MIT researchers developed a…
Major catastrophes can transform industries and cultures. The Johnstown Flood, the sinking of the Titanic, the explosion of the Hindenburg, the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina–each had a lasting impact. Even when catastrophes don’t kill large numbers of people, they often change how we think and behave. The financial collapse of 2008 led to tighter…
Large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are massive neural networks that can generate human-like text, from poetry to programming code. Trained using troves of internet data, these machine-learning models take a small bit of input text and then predict the text that is likely to come next. But that’s not all these models can do….
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. My social media feeds this week have been dominated by two hot topics: OpenAI’s latest chatbot, ChatGPT, and the viral AI avatar app Lensa. I love playing around with new technology, so…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. What would it take to convince you that the era of truth decay we were long warned about—where AI content dupes us, shapes our beliefs even when we catch the lie, and…
The phrase “practice makes perfect” is usually reserved for humans, but it’s also a great maxim for robots newly deployed in unfamiliar environments. Picture a robot arriving in a warehouse. It comes packaged with the skills it was trained on, like placing an object, and now it needs to pick items from a shelf it’s…