Make Sense of the world
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Around 20 years into the new millennium, everything about our lives and surroundings is changing at an incredible pace. The ways we work, play, study, communicate, spend and earn are rapidly evolving to bear little resemblance to how we’ve lived through most of modern times, let alone history....
This is a list of straightforward ways to feel better in the age of smartphones. This list can serve as a companion to an earlier edition of Tech Turncoat Truths listing how screens damage the human nervous system, and also to a peer-reviewed article making the same case. Here's the gist of...
In April, Reuters reported that automakers are investing heavily in electric vehicles despite still-low demand. They are releasing “a flurry of new electric vehicle models” because governments are raising regulatory requirements for emissions around the world. Automakers are being pushed into...
Each year, the MIT Technology Review publishes a list of outstanding innovators under 35. They come from fields as diverse as biotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy, the web, transportation, communications, materials and computer hardware. Their innovations are...
Imagine that your government could identify you and track your movements digitally, solely based on your physical appearance and perceived ethnicity or race. This is not the stuff of dystopian science fiction, but is happening now due to the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools....
“Adam und Evelyn,” a bittersweet German love story in the summer of 1989, captures both the promise and the peril of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Adam and Evelyn are an East German couple. Evelyn yearns to flee to the West. Adam is happy behind the Iron Curtain as a dressmaker. She leaves and...
The world’s governments and peoples must decide how to address the increasing surveillance and data collection — and the resulting loss of privacy — that digital formats provide. In recent years, much of this attention has focused on the rapidly building surveillance and data aggregation in...
Almost all observers of economic transformation have recently focused on the feared (or cheered) future dominance of artificial intelligence and robotics. This week, Atul Singh, the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Fair Observer, reviews a fascinating book, “The Smartest Places on Earth,”...
In 2016, Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker published “The Smartest Places on Earth.” Van Agtmael, a personal friend and a donor to Fair Observer, asked me to review the book. Unfortunately, day-to-day writing, editorial and administrative tasks in a crazy year ensured that this fell off the...
Here are 10 interlocking reasons why using screens damages the human nervous system. The reasons are derived from basic mathematical principles of how matter and energy move in space and time. The gist is that the human nervous system, seen as a sensitive instrument, needs to calibrate itself using...
Facebook seems largely undaunted by its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that will oblige it to fork out the modest sum of $5 billion as a civil penalty as punishment for sharing users’ personal information. Caitlin Kelly and Fred Vogelstein, writing on this settlement for...
