Enjoy this week’s stories!
COMPUTING: A Graphene Discoverer Speculates on the Future of Computing
Katia Moskvitch | Scientific American
“I call it ‘materials on demand’ because, depending on your application and what you want to achieve, you can design this stack according to your needs. We’ve never had this opportunity before—we’re usually stuck with one material—but here we can design new multifunctional materials from scratch.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Artificial-Intelligence Experts to Explore Turing Test Triathlon
Lee Gomes | IEEE Spectrum
“To the people actually designing such machines, the idea of imminent super AI is absurd, because today’s systems routinely fail at the most trivial tasks.”
TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS: A fault in our design
Colin Dickey | AEON
“Robots and autopilots might correct for human error, but they cannot compensate for their own designers. Perhaps a brighter technological future lies less in the latest gadgets, and rather in learning to understand ourselves better, particularly our capacity to forget what we’ve already learned.”
FUTURE OF CITIES: Mapping America’s Futures
Urban Institute
“With the tool, people can explore several possible ‘what-if’ scenarios—possible futures—and see how they’ll play out across the country.”
CRYPTOCURRENCY: Bitcoin and the Digital-Currency Revolution
Michael Casey & Paul Vigna | The Wall Street Journal
“No digital currency will soon dislodge the dollar, but bitcoin is much more than a currency. It is a radically new, decentralized system for managing the way societies exchange value. It is, quite simply, one of the most powerful innovations in finance in 500 years.”
GRAND CHALLENGES: What targets will improve the lives of children across the world?
Nicholas Alipui | UNICEF
“We need move from reducing to eradicating extreme poverty – especially for children who are disproportionately affected — so that no child in left behind by the march of progress. We must also move beyond measures that only look at income.”
[Image credit: Joseph Amditis/Flickr]
