At first glance, it seems as if life teems around Carmen Suárez Vázquez’s little teal-painted house in the municipality of Guayama, on Puerto Rico’s southeastern coast. The edge of the Aguirre State Forest, home to manatees, reptiles, as many as 184 species of birds, and at least three types of mangrove trees, is just a…
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said. Uttered more out of exasperation than as inspiration, his remark has nevertheless attained gospel-like status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in particular a handful of tech billionaires who fancy themselves the chief architects of humanity’s future. Sam…
Earlier this week, two new leaders of the US Food and Drug Administration published a list of priorities for the agency. Both Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad are controversial figures in the science community. They were generally highly respected academics until the covid pandemic, when their contrarian opinions on masking, vaccines, and lockdowns turned many…
It sounds like the start of a 21st century horror film: Your browser history has been public all along, and you had no idea. That’s basically what it feels like right now on the new standalone Meta AI app, where swathes of people are publishing their ostensibly private conversations with the chatbot. When you ask […]