AI’s Penicillin and X-Ray Moment
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“When the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, he designated funds to reward those that ‘have conferred the best profit to humankind.’ The resulting Nobel Prizes have since been awarded to the discoverers of penicillin, X-rays, and the structure of DNA—and, as of today, to 2 scientists who, many years ago, laid the foundations for contemporary artificial intelligence.”
‘I Applied to 2,843 Roles’: The Rise of AI-Powered Job Application Bots
Jason Koebler | 404 Media
“Before I put my laptop aside on the restaurant I’m working at, I open a terminal window, enter a single command, and hit enter. The server gives me my breakfast and I push my laptop away because the bot springs to life, opening a Chrome window and navigating to LinkedIn. It starts scrolling through job listings, and opens just a few of them.”
They Were Made Without Eggs or Sperm. Are They Human?
Kristen V. Brown | The Atlantic
“Lately, Hanna and other scientists have made remarkable progress in cultivating pluripotent stem cells to mimic the structure and performance of an actual, growing embryo. But as researchers solve technical problems, they’re still left with moral ones. When is a replica so good that it’s such as the actual thing? And more to the purpose, when should the lab experiment be treated—legally and ethically—as human?”
Ian Brooke Desires to Revolutionize Flight as We Know It
Ross Pomeroy | Big Think
“The 34-year-old Brooke is CEO of Astro Mechanica, a Y Combinator-backed startup that has invented a brand new type of jet engine. It’s radically more efficient and versatile than anything that has come before. …Astro Mechanica claims the Turboelectric Adaptive Engine will unlock massive efficiency gains across an entire range of speeds, but especially at supersonic speeds between Mach 1.8 to Mach 3.4.”
The World’s First Industrial Space Station Looks Like a Luxury Hotel Inside
Carlton Reid | Wired
“Aluminum for spacecraft interiors is passé; what space-farers apparently want is wood. That’s the bet from Vast, the makers of Haven-1, the world’s first business space station set to be placed in low-Earth orbit by the SpaceX Falcon rocket next 12 months. First paying customers might be getting on board in 2026, and judging by the ultimate designs just released of the station’s cozy interior, they’ll feel right at home.”
The Kevin Kelly Interview: The Power of ‘Radical Optimism’
Eric Markowitz | Big Think
“Kelly—creator, philosopher, and co-founder of Wired magazine—insists that to really play the long game and rebuild society for the higher, we must embrace one easy yet profound mindset: optimism. ‘Optimism,’ he has written, ‘enables us to succeed in good and great things beyond the potential of a single generation.’ He also believes that in business, embracing optimism—and a long-term perspective—can result in compounding benefits.”
The ‘Beautiful Confusion’ of the First Billion Years Comes Into View
Rebecca Boyle | Quanta
“The galaxies were never speculated to be so vibrant. They were never speculated to be so big. And yet there they’re—oddly large, luminous objects that keep appearing in images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Kevin Hainline(opens a brand new tab) is an element of a team that uses the JWST to seek out these galaxies, whose brightness, apparent mass, and sheer existence a virtual eyeblink after the Big Bang are amongst the largest surprises from the three-year-old mission.”
TECH
The O.G. of Tech Startups Says AI Changes Every thing
Julianne Pepitone | IEEE Spectrum
“Now [Steve] Blank, who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University, is occupied with how artificial intelligence tools are poised to rework his lean startup method—by supercharging the means of testing hypotheses, developing novel products, and creating businesses with a speed that humans could never match.”
