#Future

If you’ve tried to rent or buy a home in the last few years, you may have noticed there’s a severe housing shortage in the US and around the world. Millions of people need homes, and there aren’t nearly enough of them to go around. Plenty of creative, low-cost solutions have been proposed, from

If you want to see what’s next in AI, just follow the data. ChatGPT and DALL-E trained on troves of internet data. Generative AI is making inroads in biotechnology and robotics thanks to existing or newly assembled datasets. One way to glance ahead, then, is to ask: What colossal datasets are still

In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she discovers various clues, different nations around the

The European Space Agency has given the go-ahead for initial work on a mission to visit an asteroid called Apophis. If approved at a key meeting next year, the robotic spacecraft, known as the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses), will rendezvous with the asteroid in February 2029.

In 2014, the British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a book about the future of artificial intelligence with the ominous title Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. It proved highly influential in promoting the idea that advanced AI systems—“superintelligences” more capable than