This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through December 2)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself?
Cliff Kuang | New York Times
“Kosinski’s results suggested something stranger: that artificial intelligences often excel by developing whole new ways of seeing, or even thinking, that are inscrutable to us. It’s a more profound version of what’s often called the ‘black box’ problem—the inability to discern exactly what machines are doing when they’re teaching themselves novel skills—and it has become a central concern in artificial-intelligence research.”

BIOTECH

Semi-Synthetic Life Form Now Fully Armed and Operational
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“By this year, the team had devised a more stable bacterium. But it wasn’t enough to endow the germ with a partly alien code—it needed to use that code to make a partly alien protein. That’s what Romesberg’s team, reporting today in the journal Nature, says it has done.”

COMPUTING

4 Strange New Ways to Compute
Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
“With Moore’s Law slowing, engineers have been taking a cold hard look at what will keep computing going when it’s gone…What follows includes a taste of both the strange and the potentially impactful.”