[ad_1] Who’s Afraid of AI?: Fear and Promise in the Age of Thinking Machinesby Thomas Ramge Our modern world wouldn’t exist if not for machine learning. From telecommunications to transportation, medicine to aerospace, the accelerating advancement of artificial intelligence has proven a boon for humanity and the public good. However the same ability that allows […]
Category: hitting the books
How legendary hackers wound up working for the CIA
[ad_1] Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the Worldby Joseph Menn The internet as we know it today would not exist but for the Cult of the Dead Cow. The cDc is among America’s oldest and most venerated hacking collectives. They invented hackivism, helped develop Tor, forced Microsoft […]
Modern surveillance and ‘the science of happiness’
[ad_1] The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the Westby Payal Arora Even as cities across the US grapple with the spectre of omnipresent, automated government surveillance, and the existential threat to civil liberties that the technology holds, a number of nations around the globe have adopted these tools to monitor the lowest, and coincidentally […]
Gravity’s mystery may prove our multiverse exists
[ad_1] The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feetby Richard Panek Even today, right now, in the year 2019, humanity still doesn’t know what gravity is. Sure, we know what it does and how it influences everything from the characteristics of other fundamental forces to the movements of every bit of matter in […]
We won’t colonize space without a Weyland-Yutani
[ad_1] Space 2.0: How Private Spaceflight, a Resurgent NASA, and International Partners are Creating a New Space Ageby Rod Pyle It’s been nearly six decades since Yuri Gagarin made humanity’s first foray into space. In that time, we’ve landed on the moon, set rovers loose on Mars and flung probes to the edge of the […]
The slow death of the strategy guide
[ad_1] The Walkthrough: Insider Tales From a Life in Strategy Guidesby Doug Walsh Players had it tough in the pre-internet days of gaming. If you got stuck on a particular portion of a game, there were no YouTube tutorials or IGN walkthroughs to help you. No, you had to head down to the Electronics Boutique […]
An army of temps put a man on the moon
[ad_1] Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclassby Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri Our celebrated “titans of technology” — the Zuckerbergs, Dorseys, Pages and Brins — achieved their lofty positions with the help of countless contract workers. The internet wouldn’t, simply couldn’t, function as it does today without […]
Ever wonder how audio sampling works?
[ad_1] The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digitalby Ken Steiglitz We’re living the audiophile dream! Our phones can hold a year’s worth of music and stream more songs than anyone could listen to in a lifetime. But none of that would be possible without the efforts of one Harry Nyquist, an […]
When better living through technology isn’t enough
[ad_1] Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontentsby Joseph M. Reagle, Jr. Modern tech culture has long been enamored with the mythos of the lone genius achieving superhuman status (a la The Matrix). Whether it’s Jack Dorsey’s self flagellating dietary restrictions, Peter Thiel’s obsession with “young blood” transfusions, or Tim Ferris’ outright maniacal 4-hour self […]