Transcript Eliza Strickland: Paralysis used to be thought of as a permanent condition, but over the past two decades, engineers have begun to find workarounds. They’re building on a new understanding of the electric code used by the nervous system. I’m Eliza Strickland, a guest host for IEEE Spectrum’s Fixing the Future podcast. Today I’m […]
Transcript Eliza Strickland: Technology to combat climate change got a big boost this year when the US Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorized more than 390 billion for spending on clean energy and climate change. One of the big winners was a technology called carbon capture and storage. I’m Eliza Strickland, a guest […]
New technologies often are introduced through spectacle: Think of the historic demonstrations carried out by Faraday, Edison, Morse, and Bell, or, more recently, by Steve Jobs onstage in his black turtleneck at Macworld 2007, holding the first iPhone. Indeed, hyped-up product announcements at industry events like the Consumer Electronics Show (now CES) and the Game […]
A rocket carrying CubeSats launched into Earth orbit two years ago, on 22 March 2021. Two of those CubeSats represented competing approaches to bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to space. One, operated by Lacuna Space, uses a protocol called LoRaWAN, a long-range, low-power protocol owned by Semtech. The other, owned by Sateliot, uses the […]
Richard Costanzo stands beside a mannequin head sporting spectacles decked with electronics and holds a vial of blue liquid up to a tiny sensor. An LED glows blue, and Costanzo’s phone displays the word “Windex.” Then he waves a vial of purple liquid and gets a purple light along with the message “Listerine.” “There won’t […]
As the automotive industry navigates a new era of self-driving cars, every second matters. The information obtained from sensors and electronics must be given to the main CPU as precisely and quickly as possible. To ensure optimal safety and performance, it’s imperative that no data is lost in transmission. To achieve this, we’re increasingly relying […]
Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, doesn’t lose sight of his far-off goal, even when talking about concrete steps in the here-and-now. “We want to build intelligent machines that learn like animals and humans,” LeCun tells IEEE Spectrum in an interview. Today’s concrete step is a series of papers from Meta, the company formerly known […]
Enormous efforts have been made in the past two decades to create a car that can use sensors and artificial intelligence to model its environment and plot a safe driving path. Yet even today the technology works well only in areas like campuses, which have limited roads to map and minimal traffic to master. It […]
On 18 September 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. It was a difficult time in global politics, and much of his speech focused on the war in Vietnam, disputes in the Middle East, and strategic arms control. Toward the end, though, the speech took a curious and hopeful […]
There’s a movement afoot to counter the dystopian and apocalyptic narratives of artificial intelligence. Some people in the field are concerned that the frequent talk of AI as an existential risk to humanity is poisoning the public against the technology and are deliberately setting out more hopeful narratives. One such effort is a book that […]