Future Tense is a partnership between New America, Arizona State University and Slate magazine to explore emerging technologies and their transformative effects on society and public policy. Central to the partnership is a series of events that take in-depth, provocative looks at issues that, while little-understood today, will dramatically reshape the policy debates of the coming decade.
And as the recent furor over Facebook and Apple’s proposal to offer to fund the freezing of their female employee’s eggs indicated, we’re far from settled about how emerging reproductive technologies will affect the way we live.
The Australian airline Qantas, in partnership with Samsung Electronics Australia, just announced that it will offer virtual-reality technology on some flights.
Despite our modern aversion to copying, the act of reproducing sculpture is nothing new. Museums have been created high-quality casts of their sculptural work for centuries, as Wenman pointed out.
At a Future Tense event in New York City last week, Jacobs, along with the author Maud Newton; Chris Whitten, the CEO of the collaborative family history site WikiTree; and genealogist Wilhelmina Rhodes Kelly discussed their experiences exploring their family histories, and their concerns about where the technology could take us.
Are our Internet providers putting sufficient effort into network resiliency in the face of climate change? Comcast could not comment and Verizon did not respond to my request, but Time Warner Cable told me: “We monitor the network closely at Time Warner Cable and keep a close eye on the redundancy and capacity in our systems to handle any situation that arises such as extreme climate change.
The Army has been exploring the use of airships in warzones for a number of years. But the Baltimore blimps’ 24/7 radar mean that they’re technically capable of watching for more than just missiles or hostile aircraft and drones.
The New America Foundation recently hosted a daylong conference, headlined by Neal Stephenson, that sought to re-focus science fiction on providing inspiration to today’s scientists and engineers.
Make Energy invites the DIY maker community to find creative ways to generate energy from clean and renewable sources. We want to see projects that conserve energy, store energy and harness the power of wind, sunlight and water.
A Future Tense podcast about whether machines will solve our problems, or make them worse.
A Future Tense podcast about whether machines will solve our problems, or make them worse.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is “a complete disaster,” and health agencies do not yet grasp its scope, the president of the relief group Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday.
A Future Tense podcast about whether machines will solve our problems, or make them worse.
Patient Zero in the Ebola outbreak, researchers suspect, was a 2-year-old boy who died on Dec. 6, just a few days after falling ill in a village in Guéckédou, in southeastern Guinea. Bordering Sierra Leone and Liberia, Guéckédou is at the intersection of three nations, where the disease found an easy entry point to the region.
A Future Tense podcast about whether machines will solve our problems, or make them worse.
As Washington awaits the release of the highly classified probe into the CIA's torture program, John Brennan's integrity is being questioned just when the agency needs it most.
A Future Tense podcast about whether machines will solve our problems, or make them worse.
Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.
After three years, Google finally got it. Google now admits it was wrong to require real names on Google Plus, and it’s apologized for taking so long, causing “unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users.” Too bad it had to learn the hard way, but better late than never.
A Future Tense podcast about whether machines will solve our problems, or make them worse.
