Author: The Conversation

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen penned a 5,000-word manifesto in 2023 that gave a full-throated call for unrestricted technological progress to boost markets, broaden energy production, improve education and strengthen liberal democracy. The billionaire, who made his fortune by co-founding Netscape – a 1990s-era company that made a pioneering web browser – espouses a concept known as “techno-optimism.” In summing it up, Andreessen writes, “We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.” The term techno-optimism isn’t new; it began to appear after World War II. Nor is it…

While we go about our daily lives on Earth, a nuclear-powered robot the size of a small car is trundling around Mars looking for fossils. Unlike its predecessor Curiosity, NASA’s Perseverance rover is explicitly intended to “search for potential evidence of past life”, according to the official mission objectives. Jezero Crater was chosen as the landing site largely because it contains the remnants of ancient mud and other sediments deposited where a river discharged into a lake more than 3 billion years ago. We don’t know if there was life in that lake, but if there was, Perseverance might find…

NASA recently announced that it is seeking new ways to complete the return to Earth of rock cores drilled by the Perseverance Rover in the Jezero Crater on Mars. This has led to some anxiety among space scientists, who view the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission as a cornerstone of plans to explore the Solar System. But when you consider what’s at stake, scientifically and politically, it seems highly likely that NASA will push ahead with the mission to make it a success. One key conclusion of the NASA review is that MSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedules. Now…

South Africa’s Karoo region is a vast semi-arid area that stretches across four of the country’s provinces. It is sparsely populated and renowned for its wide open spaces. In the heart of this landscape, near the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory operates a technological marvel that has transformed our understanding of the cosmos. The MeerKAT radio telescope has unlocked cosmic mysteries. It’s fostered scientific collaboration. It is also nurturing local talent. MeerKAT, which is among South Africa’s largest scientific infrastructure projects of the 30 year period since democracy, has emerged as a beacon of innovation and opportunity…

A chatbot turns hostile. A test version of a Roomba vacuum collects images of users in private situations. A Black woman is falsely identified as a suspect on the basis of facial recognition software, which tends to be less accurate at identifying women and people of colour. These incidents are not just glitches, but examples of more fundamental problems. As artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become more integrated into daily life, ethical considerations are growing, from privacy issues and race and gender biases in coding to the spread of misinformation. The general public depends on software engineers and computer scientists to ensure these technologies are created in a safe and…

Web and mobile services try to understand the desires and goals of users by analysing how they interact with their platforms. Smartphones, for instance, capture online data from users at a large scale and low cost. Policymakers have reacted by enforcing mechanisms to mitigate the risks inherent in tech companies storing and processing their citizens’ private information, such as health data. Wearable devices are now becoming a more significant element in this discussion due to their ability to collect continuous data, without the wearer necessarily being aware of it. Wearables such as smart watches gather an array of measurements on your wellbeing, such as…

Google recently made headlines globally because its chatbot Gemini generated images of people of color instead of white people in historical settings that featured white people. Adobe Firefly’s image creation tool saw similar issues. This led some commentators to complain that AI had gone “woke.” Others suggested these issues resulted from faulty efforts to fight AI bias and better serve a global audience. The discussions over AI’s political leanings and efforts to fight bias are important. Still, the conversation on AI ignores another crucial issue: What is the AI industry’s approach to free speech, and does it embrace international free speech standards? We are policy researchers…

There are lost cities all over the world. Some, like the remains of Mayan cities hidden beneath a thick canopy of rainforest in Mesoamerica, are found with the help of laser lights. Now the same technology which located those Mayan cities has been used to rediscover a southern African city that was occupied from the 15th century until about 200 years ago. This technology, called LiDAR, was used to “redraw” the remains of the city, along the lower western slopes of the Suikerbosrand hills near Johannesburg. It is one of several large settlements occupied by Tswana-speakers that dotted the northern parts of South…

Websites sometimes hide how widely they share our personal information, and can go to great lengths to pull the wool over our eyes. This deception is intended to prevent full disclosure to consumers, thus preventing informed choice and affecting privacy rights. Governments are responding to consumer concerns about privacy with legislation. These include the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The impact of this legislation is visible as websites request permission to track online user activity. However, many users remain unaware of the impact of these choices, or how the extent of sharing is deceptively hidden. Websites and…

Earlier this year, Neuralink implanted a chip inside the brain of 29-year-old US man Noland Arbaugh, who is paralysed from the shoulders down. The chip has enabled Arbaugh to move a mouse pointer on a screen just by imagining it moving. In May 2023, US researchers also announced a non-invasive way to “decode” the words someone is thinking from brain scans in combination with generative AI. A similar project sparked headlines about a “mind-reading AI hat”. Can neural implants and generative AI really “read minds”? Is the day coming when computers can spit out accurate real-time transcripts of our thoughts for anyone to read? Such technology…