Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2023 från Popular Science

THIS IS THE REAL ANNIE COLBERT writing to you, not an AI trained on thousands of random tweets, hours of Zoom calls, and a deep dive into half-finished Google Doc drafts. I did, however, ask PopSci’s design director to give my headshot a little sizzle with help from Photoshop’s generative AI fill feature. The results were…well, see for yourself: My adventures with two-headed cats and off-brand Muppets will thankfully not be the issue’s only dip into AI. We dedicated all seven Ask Us Anything stories in our fall “Fake” issue to answering pressing questions about the real-life impacts of artificial intelligence—everything from “Could an AI influence an election?” to “Can AI chatbots give good medical advice?” If you read those questions and thought Absolutely not, but or Well, maybe, then…

As chatbots, machine learning, and other automated technologies flood the world, here’s a deep look at what life in the age of AI will be like. IF A PATIENT KNEW their doctor was going to give them bad information during an upcoming appointment, they’d cancel immediately. Generative artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT, however, frequently “hallucinate”—tech industry lingo for making stuff up. So why would anyone want to use an AI for medical purposes? Here’s the optimistic scenario: AI tools get trained on vetted medical literature, as some models in development already do, but they also scan patient records and smartwatch data. Then, like other generative AI, they produce text, photos, and even video—personalized to each user and accurate enough to be helpful. The dystopian version: Governments, insurance companies, and…

As chatbots, machine learning, and other automated technologies flood the world, here’s a deep look at what life in the age of AI will be like. HANDMADE ART can be an enchanting expression of the world, whether it’s displayed above a roaring fireplace, hung inside a chic gallery, or seen by millions in a museum. But new works don’t always require a human touch. Computer-generated art has been around since British painter Harold Cohen engineered a system, named AARON, to automatically sketch freehand-like drawings in the early 1970s. But in the past 50 years, and especially in the past decade, artificial intelligence programs have used neural networks and machine learning to accomplish much more than pencil lines. Here are some of the numbers behind the automated art boom. Six-figure bid…

IN ONE OF HUMANITY’S many possible futures, the fearless explorers tasked with climbing cloud-splitting mountains in oxygen-poor atmospheres or charting the low, darkened craters of various alien landscapes would never perish from injuries during perilous scouting expeditions. Nor would they fall ill or sustain genetic damage, thanks to supercharged hypersleep chambers that would heal otherwise fatal wounds. As it is today, astronauts don’t have the luxury of being unprepared—instead they must be equipped to deal with all sorts of medical mishaps, especially as they experiment with long-term spaceflight beyond the far side of the moon. Current human-rated spacecraft come stocked with emergency supplies to assist the crew, mostly everyday things like Band-Aids and aspirin, but also more specialized items like hydromorphone injections and those all-too-famous space blankets. While astronauts on…

NORMALLY, creating a universe isn’t the job of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Most of the back-breaking science—singling out and tracking Higgs bosons, for example—from the world’s largest particle accelerator happens when it launches humble protons at nearly the speed of light. But for around a month near the end of each year, LHC switches its ammunition from protons to bullets that are about 208 times heavier: lead ions. When the LHC crashes those ions into each other, scientists can—if they have worked everything out properly—glimpse a fleeting droplet of a universe like the one that ceased to exist a few millionths of a second after the big bang. This is the story of quark-gluon plasma. Take an atom, any atom. Peel away its whirling electron clouds to reveal its…

As chatbots, machine learning, and other automated technologies flood the world, here’s a deep look at what life in the age of AI will be like. IN THE SUMMER of 1956, a small group of computer science pioneers convened at Dartmouth College to discuss a new concept: artificial intelligence. The vision, in the meeting’s proposal, was that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” Ultimately, they presented just one operational program, stored on computer punch cards: the Logic Theorist. Many have called the Logic Theorist the first AI program, though that description was debated then—and still is today. The Logic Theorist was designed to mimic human skills, but there’s disagreement about…

As chatbots, machine learning, and other automated technologies flood the world, here’s a deep look at what life in the age of AI will be like. THE FIRST TIME Joy Buolamwini ran into the problem of racial bias in facial recognition technology, she was an undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology trying to teach a robot to play peekaboo. The artificial intelligence system couldn’t recognize Buolamwini’s dark-skinned face, so she borrowed her white roommate to complete the project. She didn’t stress too much about it—after all, in the early 2010s, AI was a fast-developing field, and that type of problem was sure to be fixed soon. It wasn’t. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015, Buolamwini encountered a similar issue. Facial recognition technology once…

As chatbots, machine learning, and other automated technologies flood the world, here’s a deep look at what life in the age of AI will be like. A DYSTOPIAN WORLD fills the frame of the 32-second video. China’s armed forces invade Taiwan. The action cuts to shuttered storefronts after a catastrophic banking collapse and San Francisco in a military lockdown. “Who’s in charge here? It feels like the train is coming off the tracks,” a narrator says as the clip ends. Anyone who watched the April ad on YouTube could be forgiven for seeing echoes of current events in the scenes. But the spliced news broadcasts and other footage came with a small disclaimer in the top-left corner: “Built entirely with AI imagery.” Not dramatized or enhanced with special effects, but…

NOT LONG AFTER Malika Mathis opened the shipment of clear quartz towers she’d purchased from a dealer in China, she noticed that something felt off. “I’m not talking energy or anything,” Mathis, who runs the online crystal shop Mother Nature Minerals, tells Popular Science. While high-quality quartz crystals can be very clear, Mathis notes, “I’m looking at it and they’re too clear.” Small fractures and imperfections pock most natural quartz crystals. Some flaws are left over from forming under intense heat and pressure deep inside the Earth. The ones Mathis received had none. Instead, these trinkets contained free-floating, tiny bubbles, almost invisible to the naked eye—a telltale sign that they had not formed inside the Earth at all. To Mathis, the bubbles could mean only one thing: They were made…

MAGIC FIRST took shape from the occult—from unseen forces once more popularly believed to flow from the spirit world to alter the course of mortal events. Throughout history, magicians were seen as aloof figures mysteriously granted secret knowledge to channel numinous power. In some cultures and times, magicians held sway as oracles and shamans; in others, they were shunned as sorcerers and witches—or worse. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that magic made a break from its mostly mystical roots. Interest in magic grew exponentially into the 20th century when it became a popular performing art, sparking decades of fantastic feats of illusion, conjuring, and escapology known as the Golden Age of Magic. Given magic’s history, it is particularly apt that in 1930, in the midst of magic’s heyday,…

As chatbots, machine learning, and other automated technologies flood the world, here’s a deep look at what life in the age of AI will be like. CHATBOTS MIGHT APPEAR to be complex conversationalists that respond like real people. But if you take a closer look, they are essentially an advanced version of a program that finishes your sentences by predicting which words will come next. Bard, ChatGPT, and other AI technologies are large language models—a kind of algorithm trained on exercises similar to the Mad Libs-style questions found on elementary school quizzes. More simply put, they are human-written instructions that tell computers how to solve a problem or make a calculation. In this case, the algorithm uses your prompt and any sentences it comes across to auto-complete the answer. Systems…

As chatbots, machine learning, and other automated technologies flood the world, here’s a deep look at what life in the age of AI will be like. YOU ARE NEVER going to beat the world’s best chess programs. After decades of training and studying, you might manage a checkmate or two against Stockfish, Komodo, or another formidable online foe. But if you tally up every match you ever play against an artificial intelligence, the final score will land firmly on the side of the machine. Don’t feel bad. The same goes for the entire human race. Computer vs. chess master has been a losing prospect since 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue beat legendary grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a historic tournament. The game is now firmly in artificial intelligence’s domain—but these chess…

THERE ARE BONES EVERYWHERE. Black- and purple-painted models of the horn-faced carnivore Ceratosaurus nasicornis lie arranged by anatomical element in boxes. The cranium of a crocodile-like creature called a phytosaur rests on a worktable. Skeletons of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and other wonders are stacked floor to ceiling in a storeroom. Past it, a Utahraptor ostrommaysi stands midkick, and the massive skull of the three-horned dinosaur Torosaurus waits to be fitted on a body. An artist grinds away at the head of the massive armored fish Dunkleosteus, sanding down its seams. None of the bones scattered in plain view have been excavated from the ground. They’re resin likenesses that lead many a visitor to wonder aloud, “Are those fakes?” when exploring halls of strange and posed prehistoric skeletons. The answer is…

WHEN YOU LIVE in a big city, sometimes nature comes at you secondhand—a photo from the apple farm upstate, eggs in the grocery store. But for Miami-born and Brooklyn-based Divya Anantharaman, the founder of Gotham Taxidermy, nature is hardly that binary. “Nature is the pigeon that’s on the sidewalk under the Gowanus Bridge,” they say. “It’s the squirrels you see at the park. It doesn’t exist in this pristine box separate from humanity.” In their work, nothing is quite binary. In Anantharaman’s fantastical, ethereal creations, the beauty of life is captured after death. In many of the pieces, what you see isn’t strictly textbook science or purely creative. For a two-headed goat kid, the chances of surviving more than a week are one in 3 million according to the World…