Author: The Conversation

Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation on the Greek island of Crete, has neither. Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century. Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A…

Imagine overhearing on a bus that the city council plans to implement new restrictions under an urban planning program called “15-minute cities”. Curious, you search the term on Google. It’s likely that at the top of the results page, an AI-generated text summarising the search results will appear. This text synthesises content from various webpages that answer specific search queries. They are increasingly appearing not only in Google, but also in other search engines, and users are now likely to stop reading the search results page beyond this AI-generated text. But what if the AI-generated answer – the only search result users may…

South Africa’s coal-fired power stations are retiring. The country must replace a huge amount of electricity over the next two decades. Currently, coal still supplies 74% of the country’s power. But the government’s national energy plan has largely overlooked one technology South Africa is particularly suited to build: concentrating solar power. There are two main ways of generating electricity from the sun. Photovoltaic (rooftop) solar panels convert sunlight directly into electricity. Big concentrating solar power farms use mirrors to concentrate sunlight into heat. This heat is then used to produce steam that drives a turbine to generate electricity. Concentrating solar power works only with…

Scientists have crossed an important line in biological engineering. In a recent study, researchers used artificial intelligence to design complete sets of genetic instructions for bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. Some of those computer-generated designs produced working viruses when they were built and tested in the laboratory. These viruses were designed to infect bacteria rather than people. The researchers worked with bacteriophages that target E. coli, and one of the AI models they used, Evo 2, was developed with safety restrictions. Its developers excluded viruses that infect organisms such as animals, plants and humans from the data used to train it. Even so, the…

The 1960s were a time of great change in technology, culture and politics. Television was radically altering the media environment, and nobody was quite sure how to think about it. As the world struggles with the impact of another new high-tech medium – generative artificial intelligence (AI) – two thinkers from that era have acquired new relevance for understanding what is happening and where we’re heading. Investors are sinking billions of dollars into AI companies and data centres in the belief that AI will change the world. But how should we think about AI? Is it a powerful tool we…

For 30 years, the world wide web has run on a surprisingly profound social contract: most sites are free for search engines to access, but if you use their content, you give credit by linking to the source. Recently, that social contract has begun to collapse. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are crawling sites not to link to them, but to train models and generate answers (which may or may not be accurate). When you search for something, ChatGPT’s response or Google’s AI Overviews may still include links to sources, but they’re a kind of optional extra to the main answer. This has triggered…

The recent confirmation of an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet called LHS 1140b has created a wave of interest within the astronomy community. The planet orbits within the habitable zone around its parent star – a red dwarf located some 48 light-years from Earth. The habitable zone is the region around the star where temperatures are just right for water to remain liquid at a planet’s surface. Astronomers detected helium being lost from the upper atmosphere of LHS 1140b. But heavier chemical compounds, such as water, which is a key ingredient for life, could exist lower in its atmosphere. Observing distant exoplanets using…

NASA plans to soon launch a new space telescope that will survey a billion galaxies to trace how the universe evolved over time, all courtesy of America’s spy program and decades of research into detector technology. The telescope, known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, was first developed by the National Reconnaissance Office, before being transferred to NASA in 2012. The intelligence agency no longer needed the hardware for its future missions, so it sent the unused telescope to NASA. The space agency spent over a decade making modifications and aims to launch the telescope into space as early as Aug. 30, 2026. Once in position, the…

South Africa introduced a digital social assistance programme in 2020 to identify who was eligible for its Social Relief of Distress grant. The country’s High Court later found that the automated vetting system it relied on was unconstitutional and invalid. The case was brought by the Institute for Economic Justice, a South African think tank, and #PayTheGrants, a civil society movement that advocates for economic justice. The government appealed the decision and the case will be heard by the Supreme Court of Appeal. Legal scholar Mark Gaffley explains the significance of the ruling. How does the system work and why’s there a court case…

Amid all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI) both creating and destroying jobs, a troubling reality flies under the radar. The tasks machines can’t perform well are often offloaded onto marginalised global workers who are struggling in precarious labour markets. They do ostensibly “automated” work under exploitative conditions. Data work is an essential part of building and refining AI systems. Before AI models can “learn” anything, human data workers must categorise, label, test and moderate vast volumes of text, images, audio and video, to make the data usable for AI training. This labour is performed by an expanding global digital workforce that prepares the datasets not…