The Challenge of Driverless Cars Goes Far Beyond Safety
While engineers devise systems narrowly focused on safety, no one is grappling with the moral and enivornmental quandaries driverless cars pose.
Are We Conditioning Our Air or Ourselves?
Air conditioning is ruining our body’s ability to adapt to heat, while it wastes a tremendous, and growing, amount of energy.
The Problems of Industrial Meat: A Primer
Industrial meat production has extraordinary costs to animal welfare, the environment, and human health. Acknowledging the immorality of these practices gives us an opportunity to align our behavior with our more humane ideals.
Google’s Smart Reply: Convenience Over Connection
Gmail offers users canned responses to emails, based on AI interpretations of the contents and the user’s typical writing style. This convenience, unknown to the recipient, comes at a social cost.
New Digital Fakery May Make Truth Even More Elusive
Software now in development makes it easy to fabricate audio and video of real people, literally putting words in their mouths.
Warped Incentives Cultivated by US Industrial Agriculture
Industrial agriculture has increased the food supply, but it has done so at tremendous cost to the environment, food quality, health, and family farming.
How Climate Change Could Affect Culinary Culture
Climate change is already affecting agriculture. What will this mean for iconic food items that help define cultures? Can we gracefully adapt?
Plastic’s Legacy of Pollution
Our obsession with disposability and sterility has ironically led to an explosion of plastic, which is non-biodegradable and full of contaminants.