Author: The Conversation

In less than 24 hours the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will update the Doomsday Clock. It’s currently at 100 seconds from midnight – the metaphorical time when the human race could destroy the world with technologies of its own making. The hands have never before been this close to midnight. There is scant hope of it winding back on what will be its 75th anniversary. Join us for the 75th anniversary Doomsday Clock announcement on Thursday, Jan. 20 at 10:00 a.m. EST Details: https://t.co/UgE8wtUvND pic.twitter.com/RyWu91AnfP — Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (@BulletinAtomic) January 9, 2022 The clock was originally devised…

While waiting to board a plane on a recent trip out of town, an airline staff member asked me to momentarily take off my face mask to allow the facial recognition technology to check me in to expedite my boarding process. I was taken aback by the bluntness of the request — I did not want to take my mask off in such a crowded space and I had not given permission to have my face scanned. While this encounter felt like an invasion of my privacy, it also got me thinking about other biometric recognition devices which, for better…

People interact with machines in countless ways every day. In some cases, they actively control a device, like driving a car or using an app on a smartphone. Sometimes people passively interact with a device, like being imaged by an MRI machine. And sometimes they interact with machines without consent or even knowing about the interaction, like being scanned by a law enforcement facial recognition system. Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) is an umbrella term that describes the ways people interact with machines. HMI is a key aspect of researching, designing and building new technologies, and also studying how people use and…

Most research into the ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerns its use for weaponry, transport or profiling. Although the dangers presented by an autonomous, racist tank cannot be understated, there is another aspect to all this. What about our responsibilities to the AIs we create? Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (such as World of Warcraft) are pocket realities populated chiefly by non-player characters. At the moment, these characters are not particularly smart, but give it 50 years and they will be. Sorry? 50 years won’t be enough? Take 500. Take 5,000,000. We have the rest of eternity to achieve this. You want planet-sized computers? You can…

On December 19 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the Apollo 17 lunar mission. They were the last people to travel beyond low-Earth orbit – typically defined as less than 1,000km above the Earth’s surface. Some 49 years later, we are approaching the launch of Nasa’s Artemis 1 lunar mission. Artemis is the latest in a long series of projects over many decades to attempt a human return to the Moon. It’s by far the closest one to being realised, with the earliest launch attempts currently scheduled for March 2022. Artemis 1 will not carry astronauts,…

Have you had the experience of looking at some product online and then seeing ads for it all over your social media feed? Far from coincidence, these instances of eerily accurate advertising provide glimpses into the behind-the-scenes mechanisms that feed an item you search for on Google, “like” on social media or come across while browsing into custom advertising on social media. Those mechanisms are increasingly being used for more nefarious purposes than aggressive advertising. The threat is in how this targeted advertising interacts with today’s extremely divisive political landscape. As a social media researcher, I see how people seeking to…

Astronomers are increasingly drawing back the curtains on black holes. In the past few years, we have finally captured actual photos of these fearsome creatures and measured the gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime – that they create when colliding. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about black holes. One of the biggest enigmas is exactly how they form in the first place. My colleagues and I now believe we have observed this process, providing some of the best indications yet of exactly what happens when a black hole forms. Our results are published in two papers in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers…

5G stands for fifth-generation cellular network technology. It’s the technology that enables wireless communication – for example, from your cellular phone to a cell tower, which channels it to the internet. 5G is a network service provided by telecommunications carriers and is not the same thing as the 5 GHz band on your Wi-Fi router. 5G offers an order of magnitude – 10 times – more bandwidth than its predecessor, 4G. The greater bandwidth is possible because over and above low and medium frequency radio waves, 5G uses additional higher-frequency waves to encode and carry information. Bandwidth is analogous to…

Don’t look now – but we are currently experiencing a rash of stories about a forthcoming global catastrophe. But in a change from reports of pandemics and climate change, this global catastrophe is produced by the impact of a giant asteroid. Or comet. Or both. This may feel extra ominous given the events in the recent Netflix film “Don’t Look Up”, in which the Earth is threatened by a “planet killer” asteroid. But how worried should we really be – and what would happen if such a body actually hit us? It has been my experience that killer asteroids tend to…

The metaverse is coming. Like all technological innovation, it brings new opportunities and new risks. The metaverse is an immersive virtual reality version of the internet where people can interact with digital objects and digital representations of themselves and others, and can move more or less freely from one virtual environment to another. It can also involve augmented reality, a blending of virtual and physical realities, both by representing people and objects from the physical world in the virtual and conversely by bringing the virtual into people’s perceptions of physical spaces. By donning virtual reality headsets or augmented reality glasses, people will…