CategoryTECHNOLOGY

An imposing six foot by six foot steel box in mid-century medical gray with two projectors on either end and a pair of binoculars in the middle, the Hinman Collator looks more like something used by neurologists to diagnose brain tumors than a machine for analyzing Renaissance literary texts. The eponymous invention was fashioned by Charlton Hinman, a former Second-World-War-cryptologist-turned...

Featured image: Francesco Mocellin via Wikimedia Commons Nestling alongside strange lunar plains, bright red lakes, mountains of salt and fuming volcanoes, the Salar de Atacama is a place of rare, discomforting beauty. On its fringes are flamingos, guanacos and vicuñas, the wild cousins of the llama and alpaca. But as you journey inwards, towards what scientists call its nucleus, life begins to...

Christopher Payne was en route through Brooklyn on his way to the MTA Overhaul Shop in Coney Island, where they rebuild and maintain subway cars. As he passed storefronts, bodegas, and restaurants, he commented, STEAKS, CHOPS, SEAFOODyou dont see that on the signs for diners anymore. Payne is renowned for his photographs documenting industry in America. When he creates images of things being...

I sensed an opening. Research papers could reach academics and industry practitioners focused on AI, but I needed something more to reach everyday people. I also needed to reach decision-makers like elected officials who might be seduced by the promises of AI to bring increased efficiency without being aware of racial, gender, and other types of bias. Did the government officials in India...

By now, weve seen the ChatGPT parlor tricks. Were past the novelty of a cake recipe in the style of Walt Whitman or a weather report by painter Bob Ross. For the one-hundredth time, we understand the current incarnation of large language models make mistakes. Weve done our best to strike a studied balance between doomersand evangelists. And, weve become less skeptical of emergent flashes of...

Years ago I came across a children’s book called You Will Go to the Moon. It was first published in 1959 by Mae and Ira Freeman, ten years before the first moon landing. The book predicts a future where space travel is a leisure pursuit for a baby boomer and his parents. It shows the rocket they will use to get to the moon, the gated compounds they will live in, and the golf buggies they will use...

Although proponents of secret science like to focus on examples in which it has benefited society, insiders from the very beginning of the Cold War worried that the best minds would not be drawn to work that they could not even talk about. Secrecy protected those involved from embarrassment or criminal prosecution, but it also made it much harder to vet experimental protocols, validate the...

The popular Oscar-winning film Roma quickly became a sensation after its release in 2018, to critical acclaim. This film puts front and center the life of two indigenous domestic workers in Mexico City, to provide a deeper and more multi-dimensional representation of a group of largely invisible workers, as we follow one of the protagonists as she seeks to have an abortion. This film was produced...

From 1949 until 1987, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed it, the Fairness Doctrine had dictated that all news outlets that used the public airwaves must give equal time to opposing viewpoints. This forestalled the possibility of completely partisan editorializing and guaranteed at least some balance in broadcasting, probably in part by keeping extremist shows off the air...

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the worlds leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. Andrew talks to the award winning Turkish writer and political commentator Ece Temelkuran about social media’s failure to change the world. Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit...