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Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

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A Big Think article, examining whether smart cities controlled by big tech companies are really a good idea.

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A Big Think article, examining whether smart cities controlled by big tech companies are really a good idea.

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A Big Think article, examining whether smart cities controlled by big tech companies are really a good idea.

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The development of a Smart City in Toronto, in partnership with Google, should be the realization of the tech utopia we'd been imagining. Complete with robots, autonomous cars, and the latest tech integrated into the city itself, it seems as if the residents are the lucky beneficiaries of Life 2.0. When the project was announced with great excitement in 2017, it seemed as if Canadians would be the luckiest, most advanced citizens on the planet.

Which is why the vehement civic resistance to the project has come as such a surprise.

Lack of information regarding the project has led to open resistance from citizens, some recently forming a group called Block Sidewalk. The former privacy commissioner resigned, stating, "I imagined us creating a smart city of privacy, as opposed to a smart city of surveillance."

More technology isn't always the answer

Two authors, Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin, were already wary about the hype over what they termed "smart urbanism" (SU) back in 2015, and discussed the concept's myriad potential issues in Urban Studies. They summarized:

SU discourses are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where digital technology stands as the primary driver for change...Yet our understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and implications of SU is limited. Research in this field is in its infancy, fragmented along disciplinary lines and based on single city case studies.

Who defines "smart"?

As the authors highlight, the discussion of smart cities brings up complex questions about the motives behind the city's construction and the potential direction of its future.

For example, a smart city powered by Google versus a smart city powered by Microsoft versus a smart city powered by Facebook are going to use different tech, different interfaces, and may have distinctly different looks, feels, and cultures. They would most likely be hubs for those particular companies, and any data collected would be owned by the company using the software that harvested it. The implications of that are enormous.

"Fundamentally a political exercise"

A city is a complex mix of the cultural, economic, and personal, and any control over a city is going to naturally carry significant political clout.

The writers recognized this and realized that ultimately, whoever is governing the city, whoever is controlling the software humming inside it, whoever resides in its smart apartments and, perhaps most importantly, whoever is kept outside, is going to reveal a lot about its power dynamics, and that isn't something that should go unexamined.

Luckily, perhaps in the face of Facebook scandals and continuous data breaches, this is something the public has realized.

The Atlantic's scathing condemnation of smart cities, Axios's list of the troubled implementation of next-gen cities in North America, and continued hand-wringing over the Toronto smart city project show that, in the face of these cities becoming steel-and-microchip realities, Luque-Ayala and Marvin's questions have jumped off the papers of Urban Studies and into activist groups, online newspapers, and even government circles.
This article appeared on JSTOR Daily, where news meets its scholarly match.

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Lack of information about what a "smart city" actually entails has led to open resistance from citizens, who fear for their privacy.

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A Guardian article, reporting on a UK supermarket’s use of eye-tracking technology to find what messaging encourages take-up of unpackaged fruit and veg.

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A Guardian article, reporting on a UK supermarket’s use of eye-tracking technology to find what messaging encourages take-up of unpackaged fruit and veg.

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With thick black frames and hidden cameras, the glasses look designed for espionage or the metaverse but instead the eye-tracking headgear is being deployed to get inside shoppers' heads as part of the drive to cut plastic packaging from the weekly food shop.

It is an unlikely scene. Hooked up with the glasses a shopper is being tailed around a Waitrose produce department by a researcher carrying a large tablet that displays live footage of them picking up banal things such as potatoes, apples and bananas.

While not cinematic the film clips will be analysed by experts who are looking at the in-store messages that are the most effective at getting people to switch from buying pre-packaged fruit and veg to picking and weighing their own.

The store in Thatcham, Berkshire, is being used to see if prompts such as "same quality, no packaging" and "perfectly packaged by nature" can help break a cycle that contributes to UK households throwing away nearly 100bn pieces of plastic packaging a year.

Shoppers have got used to the "convenience" of plastic packaging, says Joanna Linley of the anti-waste charity Wrap, who helped set up the trial. "Regardless of what we say, and what we know we should do, realistically when we go into a shop grabbing a bag of something is much easier and more convenient than buying something loose."

In addition to the issue of plastic packaging, fresh fruit and veg is the prime source of shoppers' food waste. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

In 2018 UK supermarkets and food companies signed up to voluntary targets to cut plastic packaging over the next seven years. The goals of the UK Plastics Pact - which is led by Wrap, whose work helps shape government policy on sustainability matters - include 30% of all fresh produce being sold loose by 2025.

However, the industry looks set to miss that target. A progress report published late last year said that in 2022 an average of 19.4% of fresh produce sales was loose, with the proportion by retailer varying from 2% to 30%.

There are compelling reasons to "choose loose". Fresh fruit and veg is responsible for more food waste than anything else we buy, with 1.6m tonnes - nearly £4bn worth - thrown away each year. Removing the packaging should mean less plastic and food waste because households will be able to buy closer to the right amount.

But at the moment supermarkets offer primarily pre-packaged produce because that is what sells, and people buy it because that is on the shelves. In 2019 Iceland abandoned a loose produce trial after it led to a 30% drop in sales. "I certainly can't justify investing millions in new tills and scales to offer something our customers don't want to buy," said its boss, Richard Walker, at the time.

Part of the reason packaging keeps sales higher is that shoppers pay more when they buy a bagged kilo of spuds instead of just the three or four they need. However, many also seem to prefer the convenience and perceived hygiene benefits of pre-priced packets.

A recent Wrap study on the topic included some telling customer testimonials. One said: "I do a serious job and I have lots of things to think about ... so when I go to Aldi I don't want to have a debate about what I'm doing." Others said they were put off by the thought of "other people touching the fruit" or simply "like the convenience" of picking up a packet.

It's great asking the retailers to sell more loose but if people aren't choosing it, then there's a real disconnect

Joanna Linley of anti-waste charity Wrap

The study concluded that for loose to become the norm again it was not as simple as asking people or supermarkets to change. "We will need interventions that work across the system, shifting the environments, incentives and norms that drive the buying and selling of pre-packaged fruit and veg," it said.

"The biggest thing we need is for people to choose loose when it's available," says Linley. "It's obviously great asking the retailers to sell more loose but if people aren't choosing it, then there's a real disconnect."

Waitrose currently sells roughly 100 loose produce lines (about 16% of its range) and did not change the level of choice for the trial. The retailer is committed to offering more loose fruit and veg in store, says Catherine Loader, its sustainability manager, but the reality is complicated. There is no point removing packaging if it means more is then required in the supply chain, for example.

"One of the biggest challenges is that customers pick up items, go to the weighing scales, and then only at that point realise how much they're actually going to be paying," says Loader. "That's something that we've been working on ... how do we move to per piece pricing, so it's really clear."

As well as eye-tracking data that will create a "heat map" of the most effective signage, another 300 Waitrose shoppers will be interviewed - split across Thatcham and a "control" store. The results will be shared with rival supermarkets.

The results of the Waitrose experiment will be shared with other retailers. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Rachel Green, who has popped into the store during her lunch break, has not noticed the signs but already buys loose anyway. "I think it's quite nice that you can actually touch what you are buying," she says. "I go home and wash it anyway."

Another shopper, who has just recycled a bag of soft plastic packaging in store, says she "can't be bothered to fiddle around counting out potatoes" as she needs a lot so is going to pay more for the ease of picking up a bag. Potatoes are the UK's most wasted food with nearly 3m thrown away every day.

Faced with the same plastic problem countries such as France have passed laws banning packaging on many products and it has been reported that the UK government is considering introducing new guidelines. Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket, has said it would welcome "effective government intervention on produce packaging removal".

"This should start with products we think are most achievable - for example where multiple retailers share the same supplier," wrote Ashwin Prasad, Tesco's chief product officer, in its 2023 packaging update report. "Government intervention will ensure change is made at scale and create a level playing field - where packaging changes will not put any one retailer at a competitive disadvantage."

Asked about the reports of a packaging ban, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says only that it is "leading the global effort to reduce food waste with a commitment to halve it by 2030" and "continued to support Wrap on their campaigns".

Wrap is now conducting a global policy review of legislation in this area and says: "Any policy (ban or otherwise) that is considered should be developed in consultation with industry to avoid any negative unintended consequences. At this time, no changes in the law have been announced."

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Can a Waitrose shopper's gaze boost loose produce and cut plastic waste?

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A supermarket is using eye-tracking technology to find what messaging encourages take-up of unpackaged fruit and veg

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A Vox article, investigating the work of Elon Musk’s Neuralink company “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” 

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A Vox article, investigating the work of Elon Musk’s Neuralink company “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is Elon Musk’s end goal for his brain chip company, Neuralink - and why is he starting with technology that will help paralyzed people? What are the ethical and physical risks of these aims? What other companies and organizations are working on the same technology - and how do they compare to Neuralink?  To wrap up: Is there a danger of our ‘final privacy frontier’ being breached? Should steps be taken to prevent that from happening?

KEY TERMS Clinical trial, Risks, Symbiosis, Ethical risks, Final privacy frontier, Brainjacking

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Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?

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The brain implant company Neuralink is pushing a needlessly risky approach, former employees say.

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A Guardian article, looking at a hyperloop test track being built in the Netherlands, and what it might mean for the future of travel. 

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A Guardian article, looking at a hyperloop test track being built in the Netherlands, and what it might mean for the future of travel. 

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The longest hyperloop test track in Europe has opened, raising faint hopes once more that the maglev meets vacuum tube transport technology could be the future.

Operators said the facility would help prove the hyperloop's feasibility, saying it could allow a 6,200-mile (10,000km) network of high-speed tubes to be in place around the continent by 2050.

As it stands, the European Hyperloop Center test bed in Veendam is not so much a loop as a 420-metre-long forked white pipe running alongside the railway and road that must still be used, for now, to transport people around this corner of the Netherlands.

Made of 34 interconnected prefabricated 2.5-metre-wide steel cylinders, the partly EU-funded test pipe is somewhat shorter than the 2-mile track envisaged in 2020, and allows speeds of only a fraction of the 620mph (1000km/h) that proponents believe the technology can achieve.

The test track at the European Hyperloop Center in Veendam. Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/Rex/Shutterstock

The fork in the Vandeem pipe will allow engineers to test what happens at a "lane switch" when a high-speed vehicle changes course. First tests will be carried out by the Dutch company Hardt Hyperloop in the coming weeks.

The centre's director, Sascha Lamme, said it was a "pivotal moment", telling Agence France-Presse: "You need this to create a network. The lane switch is a diverging part of the infrastructure, so one part goes for example to Paris, the other one heads off to Berlin."

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The idea of the hyperloop was floated by Elon Musk in 2013, who proposed a line linking San Francisco and Los Angeles, using magnets to propel shuttles along pipes in near-vacuum conditions, with the lack of friction and air resistance potentially allowing the vehicles to rival the speed of aeroplanes.

His fellow tycoon Richard Branson continued to put the hype in hyperloop with a Virgin-branded company testing a passenger capsule in the Nevada desert in 2020. He sold up and the renamed Hyperloop One collapsed last year.

While past predictions for the hyperloop have appeared unduly bold, Lamme maintained a pan-European network could appear in a few decades. "If you look at how highways were developed over time, it goes exponentially when the technology is ready. It should really be possible to get into a station in Amsterdam and travel to a city like Barcelona in two hours."

Supporters say the hyperloop offers potentially cleaner and quieter as well as quicker transport, although passengers may balk at the idea of travelling in a windowless pod hurtling through an airless tube. Lamme suggested reluctance could be overcome with "a capsule with a nice ceiling which might display stars or a nice sunny day".

Europe's innovation may yet allow it to keep up with developments in China, which opened a one-mile test track for "low-vacuum pipeline magnetic levitation technology" in Shanxi province in 2022, according to state media.

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Europe's longest hyperloop test track revives futuristic tube transport hype

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Operators hope newly opened Dutch track will help prove feasibility of high-speed shuttle system

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An MIT News report into a start-up which will pull carbon from the air. 

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An MIT News report into a start-up which will pull carbon from the air. 

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MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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In order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the United Nations has said we'll need to not only reduce emissions but also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. One method for achieving carbon removal is direct air capture and storage. Such technologies are still in their infancy, but many efforts are underway to scale them up quickly in hopes of heading off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

The startup Noya, founded by Josh Santos '14, is working to accelerate direct-air carbon removal with a low-power, modular system that can be mass manufactured and deployed around the world. The company plans to power its system with renewable energy and build its facilities near injection wells to store carbon underground.

Using third-party auditors to verify the amount of carbon dioxide captured, Noya is selling carbon credits to help organizations reach net-zero emissions targets.

"Think of our systems for direct air capture like solar panels for carbon negativity," says Santos, who formerly played a role in Tesla's much-publicized manufacturing scale-up for its Model 3 electric sedan. "We can stack these boxes in a LEGO-like fashion to achieve scale in the field."

The three-year old company is currently building its first commercial pilot facility, and says its first full-scale commercial facility will have the capacity to pull millions of tons of carbon from the air each year. Noya has already secured millions of dollars in presales to help build its first facilities from organizations including Shopify, Watershed, and a university endowment.

Santos says the ambitious approach, which is driven by the urgent need to scale carbon removal solutions, was influenced by his time at MIT.

"I need to thank all of my MIT professors," Santos says. "I don't think any of this would be possible without the way in which MIT opened up my horizons by showing me what's possible when you work really hard."
Finding a purpose
Growing up in the southeastern U.S., Santos says he first recognized climate change as an issue by experiencing the increasing intensity of hurricanes in his neighborhood. One year a hurricane forced his family to evacuate their town. When they returned, their church was gone.

" The storm left a really big mark on me and how I thought about the world," Santos says. "I realized how much climate change can impact people."

When Santos came to MIT as an undergraduate, he took coursework related to climate change and energy systems, eventually majoring in chemical engineering. He also learned about startups through courses he took at the MIT Sloan School of Management and by taking part in MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), which exposed him to researchers in the early stages of commercializing research from MIT labs.

More than the coursework, though, Santos says MIT instilled in him a desire to make a positive impact on the world, in part through a four-day development workshop called LeaderShape that he took one January during the Institute's Independent Activities Period (IAP).

"LeaderShape teaches students how to lead with integrity, and the core lesson is that any privilege you have you should try to leverage to improve the lives of other people," Santos says. "That really stuck with me. Going to MIT is a huge privilege, and it makes me feel like I have a responsibility to put that privilege to work to the betterment of society. It shaped a lot of how I view my career."

After graduation, Santos worked at Tesla, then at Harley Davidson, where he worked on electric powertrains. Eventually he decided electric vehicle technology couldn't solve climate change on its own, so in the spring of 2020 he founded Noya with friend Daniel Cavaro.

The initial idea for Noya was to attach carbon capture devices to cooling towers to keep equipment costs low. The founders pivoted in response to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 because their machines weren't big enough to qualify for the new tax credits in the law, which required each system to capture at least 1,000 tons of CO2 per year.

Noya's new systems will combine thousands of its modular units to create massive facilities that can capture millions of tons of CO2 right next to existing injection wells.

Each of Noya's units is about the size of a solar panel at about 6 feet wide, 4.5 feet tall, and 1 foot thick. A fan blows air through tiny channels in each unit that contain Noya's carbon capture material. The company's material solution consists of an activated carbon monolith and a proprietary chemical feedstock that binds to the carbon in the air. When the material becomes saturated with carbon, electricity is applied to the material and a light vacuum collects a pure stream of carbon.

The goal is for each of Noya's modules to remove about 60 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year.

"Other direct air capture companies need a big hot piece of equipment - like an oven, steam generator, or kiln - that takes electricity and converts it to get heat to the material," Santos says. "Any lost heat into the surrounding environment is excess cost. We skip the need for the excess equipment and their inefficiencies by adding the electricity directly to the material itself."
Scaling with urgency
From its office in Oakland, California, Noya is putting an experimental module through tests to optimize its design. Noya will launch its first testing facility, which should remove about 350 tons of CO2 per year, in 2024. It has already secured renewable energy and injection storage partners for that facility. Over the next few years Noya plans to capture and remove thousands of tons of CO2, and the company's first commercial-scale facility will aim to remove about 3 million tons of carbon annually.

"That design is what we'll replicate across the world to grow our planetary impact," Santos says. "We're trying to scale up as fast as possible."

Noya has already sold all of the carbon credits it expects to generate in its first five years, and the founders believe the growing demand from companies and governments to purchase high-quality carbon credits will outstrip supply for at least the next 10 years in the nascent carbon removal industry, which also includes approaches like enhanced rock weathering, biomass carbon storage, and ocean alkalinity enhancement.

"We're going to need something like 30 companies the size of Shell to achieve the scale we need," Santos says. "I think there will be large companies in each of those verticals. We're in the early innings here."

Santos believes the carbon removal market can scale without government mandates, but he also sees increasing government and public support for carbon removal technologies around the world.

"Carbon removal is a waste management problem," Santos says. "You can't just throw trash in the middle of the street. The way we currently deal with trash is polluters pay to clean up their waste. Carbon removal should be like that. CO2 is a waste product, and we should have regulations in place that are requiring polluters, like businesses, to clean up their waste emissions. It's a public good to provide cleaner air."

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MIT startup has big plans to pull carbon from the air

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Noya, a startup founded by MIT alumnus Josh Santos, has developed low-power, modular units that can be combined to create facilities for removing millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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A Guardian article, looking at the thinking behind a 170 mile long city that will be built in the Saudi Arabian desert. 

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A Guardian article, looking at the thinking behind a 170 mile long city that will be built in the Saudi Arabian desert. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE See also the trailer here. How do the arts inform the way society develops over time?

Key terms Imagination, Dystopian, Mistakes of the past, Fantasies

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he contemporary city needs a full redesign," purrs a seductive voice, over surging orchestral strings. "What if we removed cars? What if we got rid of streets? What if everything you needed was always a five-minute walk away?" The words accompany an animation depicting an oblong megastructure sprouting from a desert landscape, slicing through sand dunes and mountains in a continuous urban strip: a city of 9 million people, sealed inside a mirror-clad box. "A 170km revolution in urban living," the narrator continues, "protecting the Earth's most stunning nature, while creating unmatched liveability."

Most cities don't come with their own Hollywood-style trailers, but then most cities are not the Line. Unveiled in July, the project is the latest heady fantasy to emerge from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's marketing machine, garnering breathless headlines and torrents of clicks ( its videos have 400m views and counting). The slick trailers promise a car-free, carbon-neutral bubble with its own temperate microclimate, where artificial intelligence will be "continuously learning predictive ways to make life easier".

The city's 500-metre-high glass walls drip with lush hanging gardens, a vision of hyper-nature taking over the buildings' pixelated glass blocks, their facades etched with circuit-board motifs, as if the metropolis itself were a habitable supercomputer. The walls frame a deep canyon sprinkled with Edenic terraces, swimming lakes and picnicking couples, all floating above a high-speed rail line ready to whisk them along the urban ribbon, safely protected from the outside world.

If it looks like something from a Marvel movie, there's a reason. The army of consultants commissioned to work on Neom, the $500bn urban region of which the Line is part, comprises not only urban planners but numerous digital artists from the special effects industry. According to a Bloomberg report, they include Olivier Pron, a designer who helped create the look of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy films; Nathan Crowley, known for his work on the brooding Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies; and futurist Jeff Julian, who worked on the apocalyptic extravaganzas World War Z and I Am Legend. The ominous dystopian undertone to the aesthetic of the project can also be partly explained by Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman's apparent penchant for cyberpunk - a sci-fi genre, notes the Oxford English Dictionary, "typified by a bleak, hi-tech setting in which a lawless subculture exists within an oppressive society dominated by computer technology". If ever there was an urban vision that embraced our end-of-days climate apocalypse, a petrodollar mirage of horizontal glass skyscrapers in the desert as the world burns, then this is it.

The plans for the Line were instantly compared to the Continuous Monument, a theoretical project drawn up by Italian collective Superstudio in 1969, which was not a blueprint for a smart city but a searing critique of the relentless urbanisation of the planet. Their collages of a glass megastructure, ploughing through desert landscapes, cutting across oceans and engulfing Manhattan, were intended to represent a "negative utopia", according to Superstudio co-founder Adolfo Natalini, and stand as a warning against "the horrors architecture had in store, with its scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide". Another Superstudio member, Gian Piero Frassinelli, was rueful in a recent interview: "Seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created," he said, referring to the Line, "is not the best thing you could wish for."

It may now be seen as a dystopian nightmare, the far-flung folly of an autocrat desperate for global approval, but the idea of building a self-contained linear city has preoccupied the imaginations of architects and planners for generations. The Line might bill itself as a "never-before-seen approach to urbanisation", but the principles behind it have been proposed many times over - though never successfully realised.

The origins of the linear city dream are usually credited to the Spanish town planner Arturo Soria y Mata, who first articulated the concept 140 years ago. Writing in 1882, in the Madrid newspaper El Progreso, he argued that the "almost perfect" type of city would be "a single street unit 500 metres broad, extending if necessary from Cádiz to St Petersburg, from Peking to Brussels". His Ciudad Lineal imagined urban functions separated in bands either side of a central boulevard and tramway, "for every family its own house, for each house an orchard and garden," the urban strip insulated by woodland on either side. Soria even went as far as founding a tram company and buying land on the outskirts of Madrid to test out his theory. But the surrounding land values soon inflated out of reach, and his experiment gradually became swallowed up by the city.

If history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, the first tragic attempt to follow in Soria's footsteps came in 1910 in the United States. That year, Edgar Chambless took a map and a ruler, and drew a straight line from the Atlantic coast to the Allegheny mountains of West Virginia, then on to the Mississippi, across the prairies to the Rockies, and down to the beaches of the Pacific. His line represented the path of a continuous street of two-storey houses, to be built atop a triple-decker stack of railway lines, with a promenade along the rooftops, leaving untouched expanses of countryside extending for miles around on either side.

"The idea occurred to me to lay the modern skyscraper on its side," Chambless wrote. "I would take the apartment house and all its conveniences and comforts out among the farms by the aid of wires, pipes and rapid and noiseless transportation. I would extend the blotch of human habitations called cities out in radiating lines. I would surround the city worker with the trees and grass and woods and meadows, and the farmer with all the advantages of city life - I had invented Roadtown."

Just like the Line, Roadtown was premised on the lure of convenience, and the idea that the messy chaos of the city could be corralled inside a singular, sanitised strip, with "rent reduced, taxes minimised, slums exterminated". Chambless's sales pitch sounds almost identical to the Saudi scheme, describing the linear city as a hyper-connected place, joined by modern communication and "arrow-swift" noiseless transport, with "telephones, telegraphs, teleposts, parcel-carriers, freight service, compact, punctual, prompt, accurate, enabling you to live along the line from part to part and from end to end, and be served with the best at the cheapest at all times, while sitting in your easy chair".

Roadtown was enthusiastically backed by Thomas Edison, who donated his patents for moulded-cement housing, and the inventor William H Boyes, who gifted his monorail invention. But, as with Soria's scheme, wider support was unforthcoming. Undeterred, Chambless continued to promote his project for the next two decades, entering his plan to the 1939 New York World's Fair competition, suggesting that the fair itself should be built around transportation, with prefabricated buildings to prevent waste. His submission went unanswered, and he killed himself in 1936.

While Chambless's vision was an embodiment of the American dream of freedom, mobility and man's triumph over the land, the idea of the linear city was also taking root among radical architects of the Soviet Union around the same time, driven by a very different ideology. Mikhail Okhitovich, a constructivist theorist and town planner, rejected the centralised city as a product of capitalism. Instead, he championed the idea of " disurbanism ", plotting cities in the form of long ribbons of decentralised development, as a means of populating the country's sprawling rural hinterland with self-sufficient settlements. Housing would be dispersed along linear routes, with communal dining, leisure facilities and employment centres at major road junctions.

Okhitovich put his ideas to the test in 1930, in a competition proposal for Magnitogorsk, an industrial city named after its "magnetic mountain" of iron ore. He imagined a network of eight 25km-long ribbons, along which the city's resident-workers would live in individual "pod-houses" that could be easily reconfigured, the ribbons converging on a giant iron and steel works. Children would receive their own separate pods, with the aim of dissolving traditional family structures, while a divorce would no longer entail haggling over property - you could simply decouple your pods and go your own way.

But Okhitovich's disurbanist thinking was rejected as economically crippling and politically dangerous. He was reprimanded by the politburo for speaking out against the Stalinist "cult of hierarchy" and sent to the gulag, where he was executed in 1937.

While Chambless was peddling Roadtown across America, and Okhitovich imagining urban ribbons snaking through the Ural mountains, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, maestro of megalomaniacal urban plans, was busy drawing up a linear city of his own. In 1931, to mark the centennial of French rule in Algeria, the colonial government unveiled a new city plan for the capital, Algiers. Le Corbusier saw it as a sorely missed opportunity - and a promotional opportunity for himself to offer a more radical vision. Without any official commission, he concocted Plan Obus, a wildly implausible scheme that included a vast elevated highway winding between the hills, with 14 storeys of housing for the working class stuffed underneath it, like a kind of inhabited viaduct, with room for 180,000 people.

"Here is the new Algiers," he declared. "Instead of the leprous sore which had sullied the gulf and the slopes of the Sael, here stands architecture."

Le Corbusier's brutal intervention in the landscape was strangely at odds with his professed appreciation of the local vernacular. "O inspiring image!" he wrote, stirred by the sight of the dense, cubic architecture of the city's casbah. "Arabs, are there no peoples but you who dwell in coolness and quiet, in the enchantment of proportions and the savour of a humane architecture?" Yet, at the same time, his plan advocated razing more than half of the casbah to make way for a new business centre. Thankfully, his inflated colonial ambitions remained just that.

Despite these failures, linear city fever returned in the 1960s, fuelled by a wave of postwar techno-utopian optimism, and the firm belief that infrastructure could cure the ills of the overcrowded metropolis. In 1961, Japanese architect Kenzō Tange presented his scheme for the future of Tokyo Bay on national television, and, in doing so, triggered among architects a thirst for megastructures that would last for the next two decades. He proposed an 80km urban spine stretching across the bay, with city modules connected by three levels of looping roads, and modular buildings clipped on to the highway skeleton - a plug-and-play system that could be easily updated as and when needed. As with Roadtown before it, Tange's plan was based on a firm belief that communication and mobility would inevitably shape the future city in linear form.

"Mass communication has released the city from the bonds of a closed organisation and is changing the structure of society itself," he proclaimed. "It is the arterial system which preserves the life and human drive of the city, the nervous system which moves its brain. Mobility determines the structure of the city." Just as the cathedral had stood at the symbolic centre of the medieval city, so would his "civic axis" provide the new organisational spine of the modern metropolis. In fine tradition, his proposals remained firmly on paper, although they went on to inspire the Japanese metabolist movement, which would conjure ever more feverish sci-fi plans, the linear city sprouting branches and blooming into vertical clusters of inhabited trees.

Back in the US, the evangelical belief in roads as the saviour of cities continued apace. In 1965, young architects Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves imagined a linear city that would stretch all the way from Boston to Washington DC, built on a podium of multi-deck highways. Depicted without any of the seductive finesse of Tange's plan, the architects' vision included a pair of spartan oblong blocks, one for industry, the other for housing, offices and shops, looking like an infinite extrusion of a generic office-cum-mall. The idea, they wrote, was that these urban "corridors" might join existing cities from Maine to Miami, like links in an endless chain.

"The final result could be a system which at once would send the longest manmade structure ever seen on earth snaking across its horizons," cooed Life magazine, "and at the same time make it possible to conduct most urban activities within distances a man enjoys to walk." The article noted that the linear form "would avoid any cross-town traffic jams" - conveniently overlooking the fact that the city itself would probably be one gigantic linear traffic jam, stretching up the entire eastern seaboard.

So will The Line succeed where other linear city dreams before it have failed, or is it merely set to repeat the mistakes of the past, on an epic scale? In the deserts of northwestern Saudi Arabia, a faint linear furrow is already visible from the air. Time will tell if it becomes anything more than that, or if it remains a line in the sand, an Ozymandian bookend to 140 years of deluded urban fantasies.

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Nine million people in a city 170km long; will the world ever be ready for a linear metropolis?

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he contemporary city needs a full redesign," purrs a seductive voice, over surging orchestral strings. "What if we removed cars? What if we got rid of streets? What if everything you needed was always a five-minute walk away?"

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A CNN article, exploring the designs for a new plane, which will have the largest wingspan ever. 

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A CNN article, exploring the designs for a new plane, which will have the largest wingspan ever. 

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There's a global energy crisis and onshore wind farms are a potential growth option. Larger wind turbines produce more power than standard ones, but the components are too big to be transported by road.

What's the solution? A Colorado-based energy startup named Radia has an idea. It's developing the biggest aircraft in aviation history.

Meet the WindRunner airplane, whose mission will be to deliver gigantic 300-foot-long blades directly to wind farms.

To help the world meet its decarbonization targets, it'll use sustainable aviation fuel and needs only a simple packed-dirt or gravel runway to land on.

It'll operate from regional hubs, says Radia, delivering where needed - and "can land on airstrips as short as 6,000 feet (1,800 meters), something no other large commercial aircraft can achieve."

Let's talk about specs, baby

When it comes to carrying the largest payloads ever moved by air, dainty just isn't going to cut it.

So WindRunner will have a cargo bay volume of 272,000 cubic feet, enough to hold three Olympic swimming pools. That's 12 times the volume of a Boeing 747-400 and - at 356 feet in length, it's 127 feet longer too.

As for the wingspan, that's 261 feet - imagine four bowling lanes laid end to end.

It will also dwarf the Antonov An-225, the heaviest aircraft ever built, which was destroyed at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The aircraft's scale might be groundbreaking, but the engineering is not - and that's by design. Radia says it's focusing "on existing technology and safety by using, where applicable, tried-and-true aviation materials, components and fabrication techniques that have FAA [US Federal Aviation Administration] approval, are already in mass production and are lowest-risk."

The idea is to hit the ground running with a fast, well-built fleet that meets aerospace industry standards. Online reports say commercial operations as soon as 2027, but there's no timeline confirmed on Radia's website. CNN has reached out to the company for comment.

There she blows

Radia is banking on research organisation Bloomberg NEF's estimation that up to $10 trillion will be spent on onshore wind through 2050. The development of WindRunner is to enable GigaWind, the XXL turbines made by Radia's partners, which include five of the world's top six turbine manufacturers.

Currently, turbine blades today are ordinarily 230 feet or less (70 meters), but Radia wants to deploy blades of up to 104 meters (341 feet). The company says GigaWind turbines could potentially be two to three times more powerful - and two to three times more profitable than those typically deployed today.

So who are the folks behind these ambitious claims? The founder and CEO is Mark Lundstrum, a cross-industry entrepreneur and MIT aerospace engineer who founded Radia in 2016. The company says its team of advisers include former top brass from Boeing, MIT, Rolls-Royce and the FAA, as well as former US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull.

It's an impressive lineup and the decision to focus on safe, existing technology is a smart one. Might we see a WindRunner take off before the end of the decade? Could its distinctive shape one day be as popular as the Beluga XL transporter planes created by Airbus? Watch the skies.

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Gigantic new aircraft design aims to create the largest plane ever to fly | CNN

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A Colorado-based energy startup named Radia is developing the biggest aircraft in aviation history. Say hello to the WindRunner airplane, with a payload 12 times that of a 747.

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An Atlantic article, exploring the recent outage of the Internet, and how it exposed the gap in our knowledge about the technology that surrounds us. 

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An Atlantic article, exploring the recent outage of the Internet, and how it exposed the gap in our knowledge about the technology that surrounds us. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Use this story to explore Carl Sagan’s quote (which goes way back to the early 1990s) “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” Do students feel that this applies to them personally? Did the recent outage, discussed in the article, support this dissonance of knowledge? Are there obligations on us to develop more knowledge of the technology that surrounds us?

Key terms Overcomplicated, Gaps, Oblivious, Inscrutable magic, Humility

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An internet outage exposes the gap between how we think technology might work and how it actually does.

Many Americans woke up this morning to discover that some of the most popular sites on the web were down. CNN, The New York Times, Reddit-even The Atlantic-all suffered issues. Was it a coordinated cyberattack? Something to do with Amazon Web Services? No, it was because of Fastly. As NPR explained, Fastly "provides vital but obscure behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web's high profile sites."

We are living in an era of massively complex technologies, of such complexity that they verge on incomprehensible. Overcomplicated, I've called it. But in many cases, we are shielded from the interdependencies and components of these systems that must all work seamlessly in order to operate. Until, that is, something goes wrong. Failures expose the gaps between how we thought a technology worked and how it actually did.
Charles Fishman: The system that actually worked
There are many such stories. In 2010, for example, a water main burst in the Boston suburb of Weston, depriving a large fraction of the Boston area's population access to drinkable water for several days. The water from the Quabbin Reservoir was no longer accessible, and the backup reservoir held the equivalent of " untreated pond water." The city of Cambridge, though, was one of the few places in the area that got its water from a separate source, and there, the water kept running. Perhaps for the first time in their life, residents of the Boston area were forced to pay attention to the complicated systems that brought water to their homes.

All too often, even experts learn that there's a gap between how they think a system operates and how it actually does only when something goes wrong. Years ago, when IBM's Deep Blue played Garry Kasparov in a chess match, it made a curious move in one game. Was it a good move? A bad move? A bug? According to one account, "outside analysts were divided over a mysterious move made by the program, thinking it either weak or obliquely strategic. Eventually, the programmers discovered that the move was simply the result of a bug that had caused the computer not to choose what it had actually calculated to be the best move-something that could have appeared as random play." The error in Deep Blue's code was revealed to the programmers solely through the mystery of its actions.

And that is how we live as well: in a world awash with incomprehensible technologies, yet oblivious to their workings until they go wrong. Engineers have labored hard to shield us from this complexity, which is far from a bad thing. We don't want to have to open command-line terminals all the time or handle machine code. We like our friendly interfaces to our computers. But in the process, we do lose something.
Read: The internet that was (and still could be)
When the Apple Watch was first released, The Wall Street Journal quoted a mechanical-watch enthusiast explaining his passion: "When I wear a mechanical watch, I think of the precision required to make it work on such a micro scale. That's pretty awesome as opposed to just a chip." A microchip is unbelievably more complex than a mechanical watch's gears and complications. The intricacies of a microchip, however, are so small and hidden from view that we forget about their complexity.

And in the process, we can be drawn to responding to the complicated technologies that surround us as objects of either fear or inscrutable magic. We worry that machines will kill us, or we talk about the wonderful mind of Google, tended by its wise masters. But both of these responses are counterproductive, shutting down further inquiry and preventing us from understanding the systems on which we rely.

Better to approach complex technologies in a state of humility, seeking to improve our understanding although we might never fully grasp them. Because in an age when even the experts are not wholly aware of how everything is connected and what might go wrong, we need to try to peek under the hood. Otherwise, the only time we might begin to comprehend how a system works is when it fails.

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An internet outage exposes the gap between how we think technology might work and how it actually does. Many Americans woke up this morning to discover that some of the most popular sites on the web were down. CNN, The New York Times, Reddit-even The Atlantic-all suffered issues.

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A Slate article, considering how the most significant modern borders are the ones that demarcate different brands of mobile phone. 

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A Slate article, considering how the most significant modern borders are the ones that demarcate different brands of mobile phone. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What determines borders, and do they matter?

Key terms Borders, Globaloney, Transcend

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Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday
When Tim Cook was recently asked by a reporter whose mom uses an Android phone whether he was doing anything to improve texting with non-iPhone users, Cook responded: " Buy your mom an iPhone."

When I first read this, my mind turned to a subject that has been on my mind a lot: borders. Specifically, the ways in which they still matter.

The realms of Android and iMessage aren't separate territories on a map in a literal sense, but borders pop up in all sorts of unexpected places, even in the world of technology, where engineers fetishize the concept of interoperability. Closer to home, where I work for a university that prides itself on being innovative and transdisciplinary, borders between academic units and disciplines retain a stubborn resilience.

The fact that actual borders between actual American states are becoming more rather than less meaningful feels like a reversal of time's normal progression. The Supreme Court's unprincipled stab in the back to our most intimate rights, and to the concept of the Union as their primary guarantor, now means we are all at the mercy of our individual states. Hop on to one of our wondrous interstate highways-monuments to that fading yearning to transcend borders-and the extent to which you can assert some fundamental human rights will vary depending on the most recent dopey "Welcome to the XX State" sign you drove by.

I have been feasting over the past year on Rick Perlstein's engaging histories of the tumultuous voyage from the Goldwater movement to the Reagan revolution-the saga encompassed in his four masterpieces Before the Storm, , The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland-which are a reminder that anxieties about borders are a constant in our history. Within the more isolationist and populist base, the term globaloney was often used to describe the party's elites' internationalism. But what constitutes "globaloney" can shift over time: At one point in The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein recounts how as a candidate leading up to the 1980 Republican primaries, Reagan asked his advisers to prepare an "open border" proposal to allow Mexican workers to come and go freely.

In The Lawless Roads, a book about his travels through Mexico in the 1930s, the English novelist Graham Greene wrote: "The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped."

That 2,000-mile-long border to the south remains a particularly nettlesome riddle. I can't turn on the television in Arizona without seeing campaign commercials featuring a candidate standing by the border, promising to finish the wall, mobilize the military, dig ditches, unspool barbed wire, or do whatever else is necessary to "secure" the porous line in the sand and protect us from its unspeakable dangers and from their opponents espousing a Reaganesque "open border." In the real world, meanwhile, beyond elections, Mexico and the United States are so intertwined that the recent legislation passed in Congress providing subsidies for electrical vehicles produced domestically counts Mexico and Canada as being on this side of the customs house, the passport officer, and the man with the gun.

And yet, Greene wasn't wrong, things are different down there, once your passport has been stamped. On the day my colleague Mia Armstrong published this piece on the persistence of mask-wearing in Mexico, I was flying down to Mexico City from Houston. Our flight attendant announced before takeoff in Houston that while we no longer needed to wear masks during the flight, we'd all better have one as we would need to put it on upon landing in Mexico, or we wouldn't be able to go through the airport, which still has a mask mandate in place. Groans ensued. Borders still matter.

Mia got married last weekend, by the way, to a Mexican she first met while spending a college semester on an exchange program in Mexico City. The wedding was a moving tribute to globaloney's highest ideals, the fusion of two cultures and nations, at the familial level. Mia and Ricardo proved love can transcend distance and borders, and that made their celebration all the more meaningful.

I also discovered they have transcended the border between iPhone and Android, because she has an iPhone and Ricardo has an Android. What about texting interoperability, I ask.

"Well, we only use Whatsapp!" Mia answers, "because Mexico."

But it has been difficult between him and her family, Mia conceded.

"We had to get my parents on WhatsApp."

Take that, Tim Cook.

Here are some stories from the recent past of Future Tense.

Wish We'd Published This

" Amazon Wanted a Lord of the Rings Show. It Turned to Frodo and Sam," by Ben Cohen, the Wall Street Journal

What Next: TBD

On Friday's episode of Slate's technology podcast, host Lizzie O'Leary talks to Protocol's Issie Lapowsky and organizer Wanda Manning about the fight for broadband in Louisiana-and in rural communities across the U.S. Last week, Lizzie dug in to YouTube with writer and former Google employee Claire Stapleton and Mark Bergen, author of Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. She also chatted with the Washington Post's Drew Harwell on how A.I. is changing art. Tomorrow, Lizzie will talk to ProPublica's Cezary Podkul about how human traffickers are forcing their victims into cybercrime.

Upcoming Events

1. Someone Disrupted the Trash Can. It ... Doesn't Suck?

2. Wikipedia's Supreme Court Is About to Take on One of the Site's Most Controversial Subjects

3. Elon Musk Went to Mexico and Was Surprised They Have Bed Bath & Beyond

4. Indoor Cannabis Farms Are Booming, but There's a Dark Side

On Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 12 p.m. ET, join Annual Reviews, Knowable Magazine, and Future Tense for a conversation about the challenges that the climate crisis poses for insurance-and why some experts think that new forms of insurance, built on technological advances in data collection and machine learning, could be one of the most effective ways to make communities more resilient. RSVP now for a conversation between Alice Hill, senior fellow for climate change policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Carolyn Kousky, associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Then, on Thursday, Oct. 13 at 1 p.m., join the New America Fellows program for a conversation with Rachel Aviv about Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us. In the deeply reported book, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are, and explores how the stories we tell about mental illness shape its course in our lives.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Apple, Android, and 21st-Century Borders

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Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday When Tim Cook was recently asked by a reporter whose mom uses an Android phone whether he was doing anything to improve texting with non-iPhone users, Cook responded: " Buy your mom an iPhone."

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A Conversation article about how a quantum breakthrough in computing is affecting the way we understand physics and mathematics. 

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A Conversation article about how a quantum breakthrough in computing is affecting the way we understand physics and mathematics. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How important are technological advances in helping us to produce new scientific knowledge?

Key terms Abstract theory, Real-world application, Trust

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MIP* = RE is not a typo. It is a groundbreaking discovery and the catchy title of a recent paper in the field of quantum complexity theory. Complexity theory is a zoo of "complexity classes" - collections of computational problems - of which MIP* and RE are but two.

The 165-page paper shows that these two classes are the same. That may seem like an insignificant detail in an abstract theory without any real-world application. But physicists and mathematicians are flocking to visit the zoo, even though they probably don't understand it all. Because it turns out the discovery has astonishing consequences for their own disciplines.

In 1936, Alan Turing showed that the Halting Problem - algorithmically deciding whether a computer program halts or loops forever - cannot be solved. Modern computer science was born. Its success made the impression that soon all practical problems would yield to the tremendous power of the computer.

But it soon became apparent that, while some problems can be solved algorithmically, the actual computation will last long after our Sun will have engulfed the computer performing the computation. Figuring out how to solve a problem algorithmically was not enough. It was vital to classify solutions by efficiency. Complexity theory classifies problems according to how hard it is to solve them. The hardness of a problem is measured in terms of how long the computation lasts.

RE stands for problems that can be solved by a computer. It is the zoo. Let's have a look at some subclasses.

The class P consists of problems which a known algorithm can solve quickly (technically, in polynomial time). For instance, multiplying two numbers belongs to P since long multiplication is an efficient algorithm to solve the problem. The problem of finding the prime factors of a number is not known to be in P; the problem can certainly be solved by a computer but no known algorithm can do so efficiently. A related problem, deciding if a given number is a prime, was in similar limbo until 2004 when an efficient algorithm showed that this problem is in P.

Another complexity class is NP. Imagine a maze. "Is there a way out of this maze?" is a yes/no question. If the answer is yes, then there is a simple way to convince us: simply give us the directions, we'll follow them, and we'll find the exit. If the answer is no, however, we'd have to traverse the entire maze without ever finding a way out to be convinced.

Such yes/no problems for which, if the answer is yes, we can efficiently demonstrate that, belong to NP. Any solution to a problem serves to convince us of the answer, and so P is contained in NP. Surprisingly, a million dollar question is whether P=NP. Nobody knows.

Trust in machines

The classes described so far represent problems faced by a normal computer. But computers are fundamentally changing - quantum computers are being developed. But if a new type of computer comes along and claims to solve one of our problems, how can we trust it is correct?

Phatcharapon/Shutterstock

Imagine an interaction between two entities, an interrogator and a prover. In a police interrogation, the prover may be a suspect attempting to prove their innocence. The interrogator must decide whether the prover is sufficiently convincing. There is an imbalance; knowledge-wise the interrogator is in an inferior position.

In complexity theory, the interrogator is the person, with limited computational power, trying to solve the problem. The prover is the new computer, which is assumed to have immense computational power. An interactive proof system is a protocol that the interrogator can use in order to determine, at least with high probability, whether the prover should be believed. By analogy, these are crimes that the police may not be able to solve, but at least innocents can convince the police of their innocence. This is the class IP.

If multiple provers can be interrogated, and the provers are not allowed to coordinate their answers (as is typically the case when the police interrogates multiple suspects), then we get to the class MIP. Such interrogations, via cross examining the provers' responses, provide the interrogator with greater power, so MIP contains IP.

Quantum communication is a new form of communication carried out with qubits. Entanglement - a quantum feature in which qubits are spookishly entangled, even if separated - makes quantum communication fundamentally different to ordinary communication. Allowing the provers of MIP to share an entangled qubit leads to the class MIP*.

It seems obvious that communication between the provers can only serve to help the provers coordinate lies rather than assist the interrogator in discovering truth. For that reason, nobody expected that allowing more communication would make computational problems more reliable and solvable. Surprisingly, we now know that MIP* = RE. This means that quantum communication behaves wildly differently to normal communication.

Far-reaching implications

In the 1970s, Alain Connes formulated what became known as the Connes Embedding Problem. Grossly simplified, this asked whether infinite matrices can be approximated by finite matrices. This new paper has now proved this isn't possible - an important finding for pure mathematicians.

In 1993, meanwhile, Boris Tsirelson pinpointed a problem in physics now known as Tsirelson's Problem. This was about two different mathematical formalisms of a single situation in quantum mechanics - to date an incredibly successful theory that explains the subatomic world. Being two different descriptions of the same phenomenon it was to be expected that the two formalisms were mathematically equivalent.

But the new paper now shows that they aren't. Exactly how they can both still yield the same results and both describe the same physical reality is unknown, but it is why physicists are also suddenly taking an interest.

Time will tell what other unanswered scientific questions will yield to the study of complexity. Undoubtedly, MIP* = RE is a great leap forward.

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Major quantum computational breakthrough is shaking up physics and maths

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MIP* = RE is not a typo. It is a groundbreaking discovery and the catchy title of a recent paper in the field of quantum complexity theory. Complexity theory is a zoo of "complexity classes" - collections of computational problems - of which MIP* and RE are but two.

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A Vox article, considering the significance of Google announcing ‘quantum supremacy’ in computers.

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A Vox article, considering the significance of Google announcing ‘quantum supremacy’ in computers.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students can read about how that knowledge is being used to construct quantum computers, and think about the implications of this new generation of technology. What does it mean in terms of the way ideas are produced and communicated? Is the world as we know it about to be changed?

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Why scientists are so excited about “quantum supremacy”

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With a quantum computer, scientists are dipping into deeply weird physics to solve problems.

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A BBC article looking at how ‘quantum sensing’ will allow us to completely revisualise the world, and transform the work of engineers, architects, and surveyors. 

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A BBC article looking at how ‘quantum sensing’ will allow us to completely revisualise the world, and transform the work of engineers, architects, and surveyors. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do students think that we’re set for a revolution in how we understand reality?

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Imagine a world where you can find out exactly what lies under your feet, get advanced warning of volcanic eruptions, look around corners or into rooms, and detect initial signs of multiple sclerosis.

Welcome to quantum sensing, a technology that could transform our world.

At their heart, these sensors rely on the often baffling behaviour of subatomic particles, where the classical assumptions of Newtonian physics cease to exist.

"Quantum physics is said to be 'spooky', with particles being in two places at once, but it might be less spooky if you think of them as waves - and waves can be in several places at once," says Prof Kai Bongs of Birmingham University.

Currently, the only way to find out what is underneath the ground is often to carry out exploratory digging, which is both time-consuming and expensive.

"Some have said that what lies below one metre under the streets of London is less well-known than Antarctica," says Prof Bongs.

This is a major headache for construction companies who have to carry out surveys that can take days.

"But the new sensor will be able to see most of them."

It uses rubidium atoms cooled by lasers to just above absolute zero (-273C) that are propelled upward in a vacuum and then measured as they fall back under gravity.

It is so sensitive it can detect the tiny fluctuations in gravity that result from such relatively small underground structures.

This should help speed up survey times, says engineering firm Teledyne e2V, which is turning Birmingham's prototype into a commercial model.

Cheaper sensors

Quantum sensing will also help in monitoring volcanoes.

Glasgow University researchers are working with Italian volcanologists to place a network of 40 tiny gravimeters on Sicily's Mount Etna, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. As magma chambers fill up below ground their gravity readings will change, thus giving advanced warning of volcanic activity.

Scientists already use an array of instruments - such as seismometers, ground deformation recorders, gas monitors, infrared cameras and satellite imagers - to monitor volcanoes.

"Essentially, we will for the first time be able to provide gravity imaging for long time periods," says Prof Giles Hammond at Glasgow's Institute of Gravitational Research.

Using the current generation of bulky non-quantum gravimeters means scientists have to go on to the mountain and move them around - which has risks on an active volcano like Etna.

The team is using micro- and nano-fabrication techniques to make tiny quantum gravimeters on silicon wafers that are 10 times cheaper than conventional models.

"Our sensor is a mass on a soft spring, and where that spring sits with a given mass is dependent on gravity. As gravity changes, where that spring sits also changes," explains Prof Hammond.

Conventional lidar measures the distance to an object by illuminating it with pulsed laser light and then measuring the reflected pulses. But quantum technology enables scientists to measure the arrival time of single photons with very high accuracy, in trillionths of a second.

"In a canyon you'll hear your voice echo back," says Prof Daniele Faccio, head of Glasgow University's Extreme Light group.

"You can do the same with light or a laser beam. The light will bounce off walls - so long as you have the geometry right. Then you can build a 3D image using this data."

The aim is to develop next-generation lidar for self-driving cars to give them enhanced awareness - through fog, smoke and over longer distances.

Glasgow's prototype sensor can already detect moving people 100m away, even when they're a few metres round a corner.

Health benefits

While technology like MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] is already in use, quantum sensors are simpler, cheaper and have better resolution, says Sussex University's Prof Peter Kruger.

"In diseases like multiple sclerosis, the processing speed of the spinal cord to the brain changes. But existing tools cannot pick this up," he says.

"New quantum sensors would be able to detect these changes in the way that MRI sensors can't."

Stealthy detection

Not surprisingly, militaries across the world are also backing research in to quantum sensing.

Gravimeters in particular offer the potential for detecting your opponent's submarines, for instance. Gravity may be a weak force, but you can't shield against it.

So while stealth technology may hide your radar signature, it won't hide you from a quantum gravity sensor.

"This greatly increases the atom's sensitivity to electric fields. We've made a giant compass needle that is much more sensitive than conventional ones," says Dr Paul Kunz, part of the research team.

Armies will want to detect what electrical devices may be transmitting or receiving data - in other words, "where the good guys and the bad guys are," adds Dr Kevin Cox.

Unlike conventional receivers designed to detect signals over a particular frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum, Rydberg atoms are sensitive to a wide range of frequencies.

And as they don't absorb energy from the field that they measure, you can use them to detect signals without your opponents realising.

In short, "quantum technology has the potential to transform the world in ways we can barely imagine," concludes Birmingham University's Prof Bongs.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

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How quantum sensing is changing the way we see the world

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Imagine a world where you can find out exactly what lies under your feet, get advanced warning of volcanic eruptions, look around corners or into rooms, and detect initial signs of multiple sclerosis. Welcome to quantum sensing, a technology that could transform our world.

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A Big Think article, looking at the different worldviews of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, how this led to different concepts of quantum mechanics, and why this is still relevant today. 

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A Big Think article, looking at the different worldviews of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, how this led to different concepts of quantum mechanics, and why this is still relevant today. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Focus on the two different worldviews featured in the article - that of Einstein and Bohr. How do they function as “maps for us human observers to make sense of reality”, and what directions do they both take us in? Finally, how does the article align with the famous painting by Magritte, “Ceci n'est pas une pipe”?

Key terms Worldviews, Rational vs. weird, Theories as maps

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Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, two giants of 20 th century science, espoused very different worldviews.

To Einstein, the world was ultimately rational. Things had to make sense. They should be quantifiable and expressible through a logical chain of cause-and-effect interactions, from what we experience in our everyday lives all the way to the depths of reality. To Bohr, we had no right to expect any such order or rationality. Nature, at its deepest level, need not follow any of our expectations of well-behaved determinism. Things could be weird and non-deterministic, so long as they became more like what we expect when we traveled from the world of atoms to our world of trees, frogs, and cars. Bohr divided the world into two realms, the familiar classical world, and the unfamiliar quantum world. They should be complementary to one another but with very different properties.

The two scientists spent decades arguing about the impact of quantum physics on the nature of reality. Each had groups of physicists as followers, all of them giants of their own. Einstein's group of quantum weirdness deniers included quantum physics pioneers Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, and Erwin Schrödinger, while Bohr's group had Werner Heisenberg (of uncertainty principle fame), Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac.

Almost a century afterward, the debate rages on.

Einstein vs. Bohr, Redux

Two books - one authored by Sean Carroll and published last fall and another published very recently and authored by Carlo Rovelli - perfectly illustrate how current leading physicists still cannot come to terms with the nature of quantum reality. The opposing positions still echo, albeit with many modern twists and experimental updates, the original Einstein-Bohr debate.

Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, two giants of 20th century science, espoused very different worldviews.

I summarized the ongoing dispute in my book The Island of Knowledge: Are the equations of quantum physics a computational tool that we use to make sense of the results of experiments (Bohr), or are they supposed to be a realistic representation of quantum reality (Einstein)? In other words, are the equations of quantum theory the way things really are or just a useful map?

Einstein believed that quantum theory, as it stood in the 1930s and 1940s, was an incomplete description of the world of the very small. There had to be an underlying level of reality, still unknown to us, that made sense of all its weirdness. De Broglie and, later, David Bohm, proposed an extension of the quantum theory known as hidden variable theory that tried to fill in the gap. It was a brilliant attempt to appease the urge Einstein and his followers had for an orderly natural world, predictable and reasonable. The price - and every attempt to deal with the problem of figuring out quantum theory has a price tag - was that the entire universe had to participate in determining the behavior of every single electron and all other quantum particles, implicating the existence of a strange cosmic order.

Later, in the 1960s, physicist John Bell proved a theorem that put such ideas to the test. A series of remarkable experiments starting in the 1970s and still ongoing have essentially disproved the de Broglie-Bohm hypothesis, at least if we restrict their ideas to what one would call "reasonable," that is, theories that have local interactions and causes. Omnipresence - what physicists call nonlocality - is a hard pill to swallow in physics.
Credit: Public domain
Yet, the quantum phenomenon of superposition insists on keeping things weird. Here's one way to picture quantum superposition. In a kind of psychedelic dream state, imagine that you had a magical walk-in closet filled with identical shirts, the only difference between them being their color. What's magical about this closet? Well, as you enter this closet, you split into identical copies of yourself, each wearing a shirt of a different color. There is a you wearing a blue shirt, another a red, another a white, etc., all happily coexisting. But as soon as you step out of the closet or someone or something opens the door, only one you emerges, wearing a single shirt. Inside the closet, you are in a superposition state with your other selves. But in the "real" world, the one where others see you, only one copy of you exists, wearing a single shirt. The question is whether the inside superposition of the many yous is as real as the one you that emerges outside.

To Einstein, the world was ultimately rational... To Bohr, we had no right to expect any such order or rationality.

The (modern version of the) Einstein team would say yes. The equations of quantum physics must be taken as the real description of what's going on, and if they predict superposition, so be it. The so-called wave function that describes this superposition is an essential part of physical reality. This point is most dramatically exposed by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, espoused in Carroll's book. For this interpretation, reality is even weirder: the closet has many doors, each to a different universe. Once you step out, all of your copies step out together, each into a parallel universe. So, if I happen to see you wearing a blue shirt in this universe, in another, I'll see you wearing a red one. The price tag for the many-worlds interpretation is to accept the existence of an uncountable number of non-communicating parallel universes that enact all possibilities from a superstition state. In a parallel universe, there was no COVID-19 pandemic. Not too comforting.

Bohm's team would say take things as they are. If you stepped out of the closet and someone saw you wearing a shirt of a given color, then this is the one. Period. The weirdness of your many superposing selves remains hidden in the quantum closet. Rovelli defends his version of this worldview, called relational interpretation, in which events are defined by the interactions between the objects involved, be them observers or not. In this example, the color of your shirt is the property at stake, and when I see it, I am entangled with this specific shirt of yours. It could have been another color, but it wasn't. As Rovelli puts it, "Entanglement... is the manifestation of one object to another, in the course of an interaction, in which the properties of the objects become actual." The price to pay here is to give up the hope of ever truly understanding what goes on in the quantum world. What we measure is what we get and all we can say about it.

What should we believe?

Both Carroll and Rovelli are master expositors of science to the general public, with Rovelli being the more lyrical of the pair.

There is no resolution to be expected, of course. I, for one, am more inclined to Bohr's worldview and thus to Rovelli's, although the interpretation I am most sympathetic to, called QBism, is not properly explained in either book. It is much closer in spirit to Rovelli's, in that relations are essential, but it places the observer on center stage, given that information is what matters in the end. (Although, as Rovelli acknowledges, information is a loaded word.)

We create theories as maps for us human observers to make sense of reality. But in the excitement of research, we tend to forget the simple fact that theories and models are not nature but our representations of nature. Unless we nurture hopes that our theories are really how the world is (the Einstein camp) and not how we humans describe it (the Bohr camp), why should we expect much more than this?

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The Einstein-Bohr legacy: can we ever figure out what quantum theory means?

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Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, two giants of 20 th century science, espoused very different worldviews. To Einstein, the world was ultimately rational. Things had to make sense. They should be quantifiable and expressible through a logical chain of cause-and-effect interactions, from what we experience in our everyday lives all the way to the depths of reality.

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A Guardian article, looking at a Swedish startup that is aiming to help cities go green.

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A Guardian article, looking at a Swedish startup that is aiming to help cities go green.

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In early 2018, Tomer Shalit looked at the overwhelming mass of data and the tens of thousands of pages of scientific studies and parliamentary reports that had gone into the making of Sweden's bold new Climate Act, and thought: this is hopeless.

"There was this avalanche of material, but none of it was operational," he said. "There were solid, ambitious targets, but no roadmaps for reaching them. There was a ton of evidence, but no concrete action plans. And nothing was connected."

So Shalit - then a consultant devising "agile solutions" for business - took it all and turned it into one four-metre poster that broke Sweden's entire green transition down into its constituent parts, presenting them in a way that made sense.

He gatecrashed a government event and showed it to an enthusiastic environment minister. With the backing of Sweden's environment and energy agencies, it went digital and became Panorama - a national climate action plan, on one webpage.

Five years later, Shalit's poster has evolved into an online tool used in eight countries by a rapidly lengthening list of cities - now more than 50 - including Helsingborg and Malmö in Sweden, Madrid in Spain, Kiel and Mannheim in Germany, Cincinnati in the US, and Bristol and Nottingham in the UK.

"Cities account for more than 70% of global CO ₂ emissions," Shalit said. "They are clearly critical to climate action, but they are also complex and highly interconnected systems - and they really lacked the tools to plan and manage their transition."

ClimateOS, the integrated platform developed by Shalit's Stockholm-based startup, ClimateView, aims to help cities plan and manage their transition to zero carbon by breaking it down into distinct but interconnected "building blocks".

Combining data-crunching and analytics, the blocks are in effect mini-models, individually showing the effects of a wide range of high- to low-carbon environmental levers, and collectively generating a comprehensive socioeconomic picture.

"Cities get the big, integrated picture," said Shalit. "They can connect emissions, climate actions and now also economics, at a system-wide level. They see what activities drive emissions, and what the effects of reducing them will be. It allows them to simulate, and understand, the 'what if' scenarios."

Recently upgraded to include economic projections, the tool also allows planners to assess the likely consequences of the full range of environmental levers - such as, for example, shifting a proportion of city journeys from cars to walking or cycling.

"It will show, of course, the reduction in emissions," said Shalit. "But also the knock-on effects: the health benefits from cleaner air, for example, as well as from people doing more, and more regular, exercise - such as less heart disease."

In its latest iteration, ClimateOS quantifies the financial costs and co-benefits of possible climate actions, allowing cities to make a convincing economic case to their financial controllers, to public funding bodies under programmes such as the EU's Green New Deal, and to private investors.

"If we don't connect climate action to financing, we're simply not going to solve the problem," said Shalit. "There are huge amounts of funding available, but to secure a share of it, cities need to make comprehensive climate investment plans, supported by accurate data. The money is there, but without the analysis, cities can't access it."

City halls need to be able to consider investments "holistically", Shalit said, calculating the co-benefits of every environmental investment - so weighing up, for example, the cost of new cycle paths against the benefits for the city's health system.

The cost to a city such as Mannheim of installing heat pumps in 30% of its public housing, for example, would be roughly €10m. Offset against that, however, would be lower maintenance (a saving of €0.71m over 10 years) and fuel costs (€21m), and an estimated €3m in savings from reduced carbon emissions - an overall benefit of €15m.

The more cities that join ClimateView's platform, Shalit said, the more useful to all the platform will inevitably become. "A very big part of this project is about transparency and sharing - of data, knowledge, experience, intelligence," he said.

Cities already using it are fulsome in their praise. The platform is "a great asset", said Jonas Kamleh, head of Climate Transition Malmö, one of 112 "mission cities" supported by the EU in their drive to become climate neutral.

"We need to know what our emissions are, what measures have the best climate and societal impact, what are the costs and benefits of change, how are they distributed," he said, adding that transforming the city's district heating model - its biggest single emission source - was one area where ClimateOS was proving particularly useful.

"Before, we ran other models, we used consultants - it was all very cost-intensive, and very closed. The advantage of this data platform is that politicians, business people, whoever, can go in, pull various levers, and basically see how that would play out - for the climate, but also society."

Wayne Bexton, the director of environment and sustainability at Nottingham council, which has one of Britain's most ambitious carbon neutrality targets, said the city was "very engaged" with ClimateOS. "It's helping us shape our plans, reinforcing that what we do will have the impact we want it to," he said.

The platform notably filled a "positivity gap", Bexton said, allowing the council to quantify the benefits of transforming the former Broadmarsh shopping centre in the city centre into a tree-filled green space, and helping it monitor the health impacts of insulating public housing and fitting sustainable heating systems.

Helsingborg's climate strategist, Milou Mandolin, said ClimateOS "visualises our total emissions for various sectors, clarifying how big the gaps are between emissions and targets, and also shows us possible areas for change".

The city would be using the platform in its climate and energy plan starting this year, Mandolin said. "It creates a common starting point and overview for everyone involved, clearly shows where we lack effective measures, and demonstrates the impact of different scenarios," she said.

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'They get the big picture': the Swedish tech startup helping cities go green

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Online tool used by more than 50 cities helps planners weigh costs against climate and social benefits

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A Big Think article, exploring the extent to which dystopian sci-fi representations of the future undermine our ability to create more positive futures.

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A Big Think article, exploring the extent to which dystopian sci-fi representations of the future undermine our ability to create more positive futures.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does the article provide about popular culture representations of the future, and do these influence your imagination? Why did our vision of the future become defined by “radical pessimism”? What is the responsibility of the creators of popular fiction when it comes to the way we represent the future, according to the article? To wrap up: What do popular culture representations of the future tell us about the relationship we have with the present?

KEY TERMS Anti-anti-progress, Demoralization campaign, Countercultural hostility, Radical pessimism, Responsibility, Truth, Power

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Are fictional dystopias blocking us from better futures?

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Do grim sci-fi visions crush our dreams of a better future? Author Michael Harris thinks something else is going on.

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A Big Think video, in which Peter Schwartz discusses his work “think intelligently and thoughtfully about the future”. 

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A Big Think video, in which Peter Schwartz discusses his work “think intelligently and thoughtfully about the future”. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What roles do imagination and collaboration play in helping Schwartz to make predictions about the future? Why does he use the case of missionaries in California to highlight what can happen when you apply your logic incorrectly? Why does he feel that fear of the future is one of the biggest problems that faces society today? Overall, what makes a good ‘scenario planner’ - and do students think they possess the necessary skills to become one?

Key terms Imagine, scenario planning, Ruthless curiosity, truth, data junkies, Failure of imagination, Collaborative

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PETER SCHWARTZ: - It's very easy to imagine how things go wrong. It's much harder to imagine how things go right than to say, oh, you could have a pandemic or a war or a terrorist act. That's easy to come up with. It's a big act of imagination, constructing a believable scenario of how all these forces come together to create a better future. When I meet someone new and they ask, what does a futurist do? I basically say, I help study the future so people today can make better decisions. I'm an explorer of the future trying to imagine the possibilities that lay ahead. In fact, Steven Spielberg asked me, to bring together a team to create all the details of the future that you saw in the film "Minority Report." Advertisements that knew who you were, doors that recognized you, hydrogen-powered vehicles, electric cars. It is not the goal to get everything right. It's almost impossible but you test your decisions against multiple scenarios, so you make sure you don't get it wrong in the scenarios that actually occur.

I'm Peter Schwartz, the Chief Future Officer of Salesforce, and Head of Strategic Planning. I've written a book called the "Art of the Longview" and I've been studying the future for the last 50 years.

I was born in a refugee camp in 1946, came to the United States as an immigrant in 1951, but fell in love immediately with science, my father was an engineer, and with technology. What I knew was that I wanted a better world. I'd studied politics and everything like that and I still didn't understand what a better future was. The way in which my career evolved was I ended up at a place called Stanford Research Institute. It was the early days that became Silicon Valley. It's where technology was accelerating. I was one of the first thousand people online. It was the era when LSD was still being used as an exploratory tool.

So everything around me was the future being born. And we were part of a group that was studying where all this technology might go, and what the consequences would be for the world. So at the end of 1981 I left SRI and joined Royal Dutch Shell in London. And there, I had the opportunity to apply these tools to real business decisions, helping one of the biggest companies in the world navigate uncertainty. And shortly thereafter, I launched a company with a group of friends called Global Business Network. And it was basically to create a membership organization of companies and remarkable thinkers to think together about the possible scenarios for the future. What I realized was that the right question was not what did I think about the future, but what did everybody else think about the future? And that's when I was involved in helping to create something that is known as 'Scenario planning.' And so my question shifted to what are the tools that people need to think more intelligently and thoughtfully about the future? To do scenario planning you have to have a number of skills. First of all, when I hire, I'm looking for something I call 'Ruthless curiosity.'

One of the interesting stories that has always fascinated me, that kind of set the stage for how I think about the future and the challenge of making decisions, was the map of California. If you look at maps of California beginning around the year 1605, and going for almost a century and a half, you'll find that it shows California as an island. What actually happened was that when the Spanish were exploring the western side of North America, they sailed up into the Gulf of Baja, and then later all the way up the coast to the Puget sound and they thought these must be connected. Now the truth is this would only be a historical curiosity were it not for the problem of the missionaries. Because the missionaries actually use these maps and they would arrive at Monterey Bay. They had to cross California, and take their boats over the Sierra Nevada mountains and down to the beach on the other side. And that beach unfortunately went on and on and on, until they realized they were in the middle of the deserts of Nevada, and there was no sea of California. And the weird thing is they actually wrote back to the map makers in Spain and said, "Hey, listen your bloody map is wrong." And the mapmakers wrote back and said, "No, no, no you are in the wrong place. "The map is right." Now, many people who work in large organizations understand that logic very well.

If you get your facts wrong, you get your map wrong. If you get your map wrong, you do the wrong thing. Good scenario planners are desperate for data and information. They read widely, they read about science. They read about economics. They read about politics. They read about the environment. So they're data junkies, but you also need to bring a lot of imagination, be able to break the boundaries of those trends, because trends change direction. One of the early examples of, how shall I say, bad decision making that shows why you need good scenario planning was a crucial decision that IBM made in 1981 about whether to go in the business of making a new product, the personal computer. And they said, "Well, look, we need to forecast demand. "Is there a really big demand for this product? "Is this going to be important?" And the forecast showed that it would peak at about 200,000 units and then decline pretty close to zero within a couple of years. So this was not a very viable product.

So we'll buy the chips from Intel, we'll get the operating system from Bill Gates, and we'll put it in a box and we'll call it an IBM PC. That was their idea. And they thought, this will last two or three years and it'll kill off Apple. Unfortunately, they were a little wrong. It wasn't 240,000 units, it was 25,000,000. It was that failure of imagination that pointed to the need for scenarios. They needed to imagine what people could actually do when they had a bit of computing power in their hands. So you have to have the trends, but then you also have to see the imagination about how it can change direction. And part of the way you do that an important ingredient is the ability to collaborate and learn from others. 'Cause you almost always do this with other people and work together. And I'll give you a concrete example. One of the earliest projects that Global Business Network did was for AT&T, on the future of the information industry. And we brought in a number of interesting, outside people.

One of those was Peter Gabriel, the British rockstar. He brilliantly used technology to make his music. And one of the AT&T executives said, "Peter, look they're just starting to do digital CDs, "which means you can get perfect copies of your music. "And now we're gonna have lots of piracy around the world." And he said, "Look, I can't stop it. "I know they're gonna do that. "So what I'm gonna do is treat that pirate CD "as free advertising. "And I'm gonna follow it with a concert. "I'll make my money on the concerts, not the CDs." And that became the model in the music industry within about five years. Peter saw that before everybody else 'cause he understood the implications of the technology and how to compete with this rather dramatic change. And so can you have a thoughtful dialogue and learn and adapt your thinking from other people?

So are you curious and gather lots of information? Are you imaginative? And are you collaborative? If you have those three skills then you're gonna be a pretty good scenario planner. I think fear of the future is one of the worst problems that we have today. We live so much better today than any time in human history. Yes, there are ups and downs. There'll be setbacks, there'll be wars and panics, and pandemics and so on. That will happen. But the great arc of human progress and the gain of prosperity and a better life for all, that will continue. I like to think about the next 50 years, 100 years, even a thousand years or more. What happens in the development of human evolution, of human societies? Will we be able, for example, to build star drives that allow us to explore the stars as in "Star Trek."

Could we reinvent physics so that we can go faster than the speed of light? So for me, the interesting questions are based on an understanding of history on the one hand, and on the possibilities created by science. And these two combine together to give me a kind of long arc of human history, from the last few hundred years to the next few hundred years. I think the really big thing is gonna be genetic engineering. And what we're gonna start doing is getting rid of genetic diseases, for example, sickle cell anemia, diabetes, all these things that have genetic roots, new forms of cancer treatment. But beyond that, which I'm excited about, is improving people, smarter, stronger, longer lives. I believe people being born today will have the option of living many centuries, and that will obviously change life rather fundamentally. So if you have a young child today, make sure you tell them to choose their spouse wisely because a couple hundred years with the same person, I love my wife, but I'm not sure about centuries.

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PETER SCHWARTZ: - It's very easy to imagine how things go wrong. It's much harder to imagine how things go right than to say, oh, you could have a pandemic or a war or a terrorist act. That's easy to come up with.

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A Vox article looking at the extent to which knowledge on the Internet should be based on open-access. 

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A Vox article looking at the extent to which knowledge on the Internet should be based on open-access. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the relationship between the production of knowledge, and accessibility to data?

Key terms Academic paywalls, Open access

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The 27,500 scientists who work for the University of California generate 10 percent of all the academic research papers published in the United States.

Their university recently put them in a strange position: Starting July 10, these scientists will not be able to directly access much of the world's published research they're not involved in.

That's because in February, the UC system - one of the country's largest academic institutions, encompassing Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis, and several other campuses - dropped its nearly $11 million annual subscription to Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of academic journals.

On the face of it, this seemed like an odd move. Why cut off students and researchers from academic research?

In fact, it was a principled stance that may herald a revolution in the way science is shared around the world.

The University of California decided it doesn't want scientific knowledge locked behind paywalls, and thinks the cost of academic publishing has gotten out of control.

Elsevier owns around 3,000 academic journals, and its articles account for some 18 percent of all the world's research output. "They're a monopolist, and they act like a monopolist," says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, head of the campus libraries at UC Berkeley and co-chair of the team that negotiated with the publisher.Elsevier makes huge profits on its journals, generating billions of dollars a year for its parent company RELX.

This is a story about more than subscription fees. It's about how a private industry has come to dominate the institutions of science, and how librarians, academics, and even pirates are trying to regain control.

The University of California is not the only institution fighting back. "There are thousands of Davids in this story," says the head of campus libraries at the University of California Davis MacKenzie Smith, who, like other librarians around the world, has been pushing for more open access to science. "But only a few big Goliaths."

Will the Davids prevail?

The academic publishing industry, explained

Imagine your tax dollars have gone to build a new road in your neighborhood.

Now imagine that the company overseeing the road work charged its workers a fee rather than paying them a salary.

The overseers in charge of making sure the road was up to standard also weren't paid. And if you, the taxpayer, want to access the road today, you need to buy a seven-figure annual subscription or pay high fees for one-off trips.

We're not talking about roads - this is the state of scientific research, and how it's distributed today through academic publishing.

Indeed, the industry built to publish and disseminate scientific articles - companies such as Elsevier and Springer Nature - has managed to become incredibly profitable by getting a lot of taxpayer-funded, highly skilled labor for free and affixing a premium price tag to its goods.

Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish. Peer reviewers, the overseers tasked with making sure the science published in the journals is up to standard, typically aren't paid either.

And there's more: Academic institutions have to purchase exorbitant subscriptions priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars each year so they can download and read their own and other scientists' work from beyond the paywall. The same goes for members of the public who want to access the science they've funded with their tax dollars. A single research paper in Science can set you back $30. Elsevier's journals can cost, individually, thousands of dollars a year for a subscription.

Publishers and journal editors say there are steep costs associated with digital publishing, and that they add value at every step: They oversee and manage peer reviewers and editors, act as quality gatekeepers, and publish an ever-larger number of articles each year.

We spoke with executives at both Elsevier and Springer Nature, and they maintain their companies still provide a lot of value in ensuring the quality of academic research. It's true these companies are not predatory journals, businesses that will publish just about any paper - without any scientific vetting - for a fee.

In 2018, Elsevier's revenue grew by 2 percent, to a total of $3.2 billion. Gemma Hersh, a senior vice president for global policy at Elsevier, says the company's net profit margin was 19 percent (more than double the net profit of Netflix).

But critics, including open access crusaders, think the business model is due for a change. "I think we're nearing the tipping point, and the industry is going to change, just like the industry for recorded music has changed, the industry for movies has changed," MacKie-Mason says. "[The publishers] know it's going to happen. They just want to protect their profits and their business model as long as they can."

It's a business model as convoluted as the road you paid for but can't use. And it grows more expensive for universities every year.

Now the status quo is slowly shifting. There is a small army of people who aren't putting up with the gouging any longer.

This disparate band of revolutionaries is waging war on the scientific publishing industrial complex on three fronts:

Librarians and science funders are playing hardball to negotiate lower subscription fees to scientific journals.

Scientists, increasingly, are realizing they don't need paywalled academic journals to act as gatekeepers anymore. They're finding clever workarounds, making the services that journals provide free.

Open access crusaders, including science pirates, have created alternatives that free up journal articles and pressure publishers to expand access.

If they succeed, the cloistered, paywalled way that science has been disseminated for the past century could undergo a massive transformation. The walls, in other words, could fall.

If paywalls fall, the impact would reverberate globally. When science is locked behind paywalls, it means cancer patients can't easily access and read the research on their conditions (even though research is often taxpayer-funded). When scholars can't read the latest research, "that hinders the research they can do, and slows down the progress of humanity," MacKie-Mason says.

But there's a big thing getting in the way of a revolution: prestige-obsessed scientists who continue to publish in closed-access journals. They're like the road workers who keep paying fees to build infrastructure they can't freely access. Until that changes, the walls will remain firmly intact.

How academic journals became so unaffordable

Scientific journals, published mainly by small scientific societies, sprouted up alongside the printing industry in the 17th century as a way to disseminate science and information about scientific meetings.

The first scientific journals, the Journal des sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, were distributed via mail. Like all pre-internet publishing models, early journals sold subscriptions. It wasn't the hugely profitable industry it is today.

After World War II, the business changed dramatically. The journals - which were mostly based in Europe - focused on selling subscriptions internationally, targeting American universities flush with Cold-War era research funding. "They realized you can charge a library a lot more than an individual scholar," says Aileen Fyfe, a historian specializing in academic publishing at the University of St. Andrews.

As more and more journals popped up, publishing companies began consolidating. In the 1950s, major publishers started to purchase journals, transforming a once diffuse business into what's been called an oligopoly: a market controlled by a tiny number of producers.

By the early 1970s, just five companies - Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis - published one-fifth of all natural and medical scientific articles, according to an analysis in . By 2013, their share rose to 53 percent.

No single publisher embodies the consolidation, and the increase of costs, more than Elsevier, the biggest and most powerful scientific publisher in the world. The Dutch company now publishes nearly half a million articles in its 3,000 journals, including the influential Cell, Current Biology, and The Lancet.

And the consolidation, the lack of competition, means publishers can get away with charging very high prices.

When the internet arrived, electronic PDFs became the main medium through which articles were disseminated. At that point, "librarians were optimistic this was going to be the solution; at last, journals are going to become much, much cheaper," Fyfe says.

But instead of adopting a new business and pricing model to match the new means of no-cost dissemination, consolidation gave academic publishers the freedom to raise prices. Starting in the late 1990s, publishers increasingly pushed sales of their subscriptions into large bundled deals. In this model, universities pay a hefty price to get a huge subset of a publisher's journals, instead of purchasing individual titles.

The publishers argue the new mode of digital delivery has come with an array of additional costs. "We're continuing to invest significantly in digital infrastructure, which has a lot of fixed costs that repeat each year. We're employing thousands of technologists," said Elsevier's Gemma Hersh. "So it's not the case that digital is cheaper."

The publishers also say that the volume of articles they publish every year increases costs, and that libraries ought to be funded to pay for them. "The libraries are treated by the senior academics at these institutions as a fixed cost; they're not a fixed cost," says Steven Inchcoombe, the chief publishing officer at Springer Nature, which publishes the prestigious Nature family of journals.

In a July 10 statement, Hersh said of Elsevier's battle with the UC system "this stalemate was avoidable" and that the company hopes "we can find a pragmatic way forward if there is will and engagement from both sides."

The librarians beg to differ. For universities, the most frustrating development is that cost of access keeps rising at a very steep rate.

Take a look at this graph from the Association of Research Libraries. It shows the percent change in spending at university libraries. The category "ongoing resources expenditures" includes spending on academic journals, and it rose 521 percent between 1986 and 2014. Over that time, the consumer price index - the average increase of costs of common household goods - rose 118 percent.

Librarians at the breaking point

The University of Virginia has a website where you can see how much money its library is spending on journals. From 2016 to 2018, the costs for Elsevier journals increased by $118,000 for the university, from $1.716 million a year to $1.834 million.

The data shows that the university is also spending a lot of money for journals that no one who uses their library system reads. In 2018, the university paid Springer Nature $672,000 for nearly 4,000 journals - 1,400 of which no one ever accessed. No one at UVA read the Moscow University Chemistry Bulletin, or Lithology and Mineral Resources, for example.

Why are universities paying for journals that no one reads? "It's a lot like the cable bundle - they tell you you're getting 250 channels, but if you look inside your heart, you know all you want is ESPN and AMC," says Brandon Butler, director of information policy at the University of Virginia Library. An individual journal subscription can cost a university thousands of dollars. "UVA is absolutely considering cutting these bundles," he says. "It's quite likely we will, unless the price and other terms change radically."

As the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill librarian, Elaine Westbrooks is facing what she and so many other academic librarians call the "serials crisis": "If we buy the exact same journals every year, I have to pay at least $500,000 more just for inflation," she says. "I can't afford it."

In her ongoing negotiations with Elsevier, Westbrooks is considering "the nuclear option," as she puts it. That is, canceling the subscription that gives UNC Chapel Hill students and faculty access to thousands of Elsevier journals.

"It felt very much in 2017 the librarians felt beaten by the system and they couldn't afford it," says David Stuart, the researcher behind a yearly survey on the academic publishing industry. "Whereas in 2018, you could feel there was a bit more strength and power emerging, and they had the ability to push back on the publishers a bit."

Science funders increasingly are calling for open access

It's not only librarians waking up to the fact that the costs of accessing science are unsustainable - so are science funders. A lot of the money that fuels this system comes from government grants. In the US, taxpayers spend $140 billion every year supporting research, a huge percentage of which they cannot access for free. When scientists do want to make their work open access (meaning published without a paywall), they're charged an extra fee for that as well.

This year, a consortium of public research institutions in Norway canceled its Elsevier contract, a move that followed a research consortium in Hungary breaking ties with the Dutch giant. In Germany, nearly 700 libraries and research institutes made a deal with the publisher Wiley: For about 25 million euros, they're paying to access journal content - but also demanding the work of their researchers, published in Wiley journals, be made open access for all at no additional cost.

These institutions and funders are also banding together as part of Coalition S: The agreement says all scientific publications that have sprung from publicly funded research grants must be published on open access journals or platforms by 2020.

"The ambition is if the University of California does this deal, Germany does this deal - we eventually get to the point where [all science is] open access. The libraries are no longer paying to subscribe, they're paying to publish," said Robert Kiley, the head of open research at the UK's Wellcome Trust.

But open access doesn't necessarily mean cheap. Currently, publishers typically charge academics to publish that way too. If you want your article to be open access in an Elsevier journal, you could pay anywhere from $500 - the fee to publish in Chemical Data Collections - up to $5,000, the fee to publish in European Urology.

"Open access is absolutely in the best interest of the research process," Inchcoombe, the chief publishing officer at Springer Nature, says. "If you can pay once and then it's free for everybody, you eliminate a lot of the friction from the system of access and entitlement." He hopes publishing will transition, over time, to open access.

But he stresses that open access won't change "the fact that if you do more research, and you want to communicate it to more people, then there is a cost of doing that that rises with volume."

Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.

This brings us to another band of revolutionaries in the fight against the status quo: the scientists who want to find ways to circumvent the behemoth publishers.

Some scientists are saying no to the big publishers and spinning off open access journals of their own

The structure of academic publishing isn't just a pain for librarians and funders; it's a bad deal for academics too. Basically, scientists trade in their hard work, their results for their toils in the lab, for free, to a private industry that makes tons of money off their work, in return for prestige.

Some researchers have been waking up to this and spinning off freely accessible journals of their own. One of those scholars is a University of Cambridge mathematician named Timothy Gowers. In 2012, he wrote a post bemoaning the exorbitant prices that journals charge for access to research and vowed to stop sending his papers to any journal from Elsevier.

To his surprise, the post went viral - and spurred a boycott of Elsevier by researchers around the world. Within days, hundreds of researchers left comments commiserating with Gowers, a winner of the prestigious Fields Medal. Encouraged by that response, in 2016, Gowers launched a new online mathematics journal called Discrete Analysis. The nonprofit venture is owned and published by a team of scholars. With no publisher middlemen, access is completely free for all.

University of Montreal professor and open access researcher Vincent Larivière has helped take the Elsevier boycott another step further. In January 2019, the entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics (including Larivière) resigned, and moved to MIT Press to start another open access journal, Quantitative Science Studies.

Again, the move was a principled one. "There's a universalistic aspect to science, where you want it to be available to everyone," Larivière said.

Even in the absence of starting open access journals, though, some scientists have been taking quieter, but equally principled, stands. One paleontologist took his name off a paper because his co-authors wouldn't publish in an open access journal.

One key reason scientists, librarians, and funders can fight back is because other crusaders have made research more accessible. Enter the pirates.

Pirating and preprints are also pressuring the publishing industry to increase access

Over the past decade, it's been getting easier and easier to circumvent the paywalls and find free research online. One big reason: pirates, including Kazakh neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan. Her (illegal) website Sci-Hub sees more than 500,000 visitors daily, and hosts more than 50 million academic papers.

But Sci-Hub is just one tool to get around paywalls. Scientists are also increasingly publishing prepublication versions of their studies (often called preprints). These study drafts are free to access.

The problem is that often, these studies have not yet been peer-reviewed. But advocates of preprints say they're a net benefit to science: They allow for the public discussion of papers before they're set in a finalized form - a type of peer review. And there are more preprints than ever before. (Some of the preprint servers are owned by the big publishers too.)

To find these preprints, all it takes is a single click: Unpaywall, a browser extension, helps users find the preprints associated with paywalled journal articles.

These mounting pressures on the academic publishing industry aren't so different from the pressures on the music industry in the late '90s. If you recall, in the late '90s, music pirating was suddenly everywhere. You could log in to Napster and Limewire and illegally download any song you wanted for free.

"Piracy seems to come in when there's a market failure," UVA's Butler says, "and people aren't getting what they need at a price that makes sense for them."

But as Larivière points out, Sci-Hub isn't a long-term solution, and eventually, it may not even be needed: "Once there's no paywalls, there's no Sci-Hub anymore."

What's standing in the way of a full-on revolution? The culture of science.

For now, the paywalls mostly stand. Elsevier's profits have actually increased in recent years. And as Elsevier's Hersh told us, while the volume of open access research published by the company has been growing, so has the volume of paywalled papers.

Even with the growing pressure from the open science crusaders, the publishers remain in an extremely strong and nimble position. More and more, Elsevier's business is not in the publication of journal articles, but in data-mining its enormous library. That means it's using analytics to report on research trends, recommend articles scientists ought to be reading, and suggest co-authors to collaborate with based on shared interests.

Even if the publishers lose ground on selling subscriptions, they'll still offer a profitable service based on control of the content. Still, it's not hard to imagine a future where more and more institutions of science simply ignore, or circumvent, the major publishers.

The growing popularity of preprints is giving them one avenue to escape. One could imagine a system where researchers upload their drafts to preprint servers and then other academics choose to peer-review the articles. After peer review and revision, that preprint paper could be given a stamp of approval and added to a digital journal. This system is called an overlay journal (in that the editing and journal gatekeeping is overlain on top of preprints), and it already exists to a small extent. (Gowers's Discrete Analysisis an overlay journal.)

So it's not technology or innovation holding science back from a revolution. "The biggest elephant in the room is how researchers are rewarded for the work they do," said Theodora Bloom, the executive editor at BMJ.

At the moment, researchers' careers - the grants they're given, the promotions they attain - rise or fall based on the number of publications they have in high-profile (or high-impact) journals.

"If an academic has a paper in Nature or Science, that's seen as their passport to their next grant or promotion," said Bloom.

As long as those incentives exist, and scientists continue to accept that status quo, open access journals won't be able to compete. In fact, many academics still don't publish in open access journals. One big reason: Some feel they're less prestigious and lower quality, and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists.

"I'm also waiting to see change within academic culture," says Fyfe, the historian. "Until we have enough academics who are willing to do something different, then I don't see a big change happening."

So for now, the revolution is just beginning. "Everyone agrees, in some way, the future is open access," UVA's Butler says. "Now the question is, in that future, how much control do the big publishers retain over every step in the scientific process? They've been working for over a decade to ensure the answer is the most possible control."

Academic publishing isn't a hot-button political topic. But it could be. "If citizens really cared, they could talk to their representatives and senators and tell them open access matters," MacKie-Mason says, "and the government should get involved in changing this."
Illustrations by Javier Zarracina

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The 27,500 scientists who work for the University of California generate 10 percent of all the academic research papers published in the United States. Their university recently put them in a strange position: Starting July 10, these scientists will not be able to directly access much of the world's published research they're not involved in.

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A Big Think article, looking at the ethical and technical complexity of coding. 

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A Big Think article, looking at the ethical and technical complexity of coding. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What role does coding play in the moral development of the epistemic community?

KEY TERMS Complex, Irresponsible.

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Programming computers is a piece of cake. Or so the world's digital-skills gurus would have us believe.

From the non-profit Code.org's promise that 'Anybody can learn!' to Apple chief executive Tim Cook's comment that writing code is 'fun and interactive', the art and science of making software is now as accessible as the alphabet.

Unfortunately, this rosy portrait bears no relation to reality. For starters, the profile of a programmer's mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten. Attaining this level of concentration requires a state of mind called being 'in the flow', a quasi-symbiotic relationship between human and machine that improves performance and motivation.

Coding isn't the only job that demands intense focus. But you'd never hear someone say that brain surgery is 'fun', or that structural engineering is 'easy'. When it comes to programming, why do policymakers and technologists pretend otherwise? For one, it helps lure people to the field at a time when software (in the words of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen) is 'eating the world' - and so, by expanding the labour pool, keeps industry ticking over and wages under control. Another reason is that the very word 'coding' sounds routine and repetitive, as though there's some sort of key that developers apply by rote to crack any given problem. It doesn't help that Hollywood has cast the 'coder' as a socially challenged, type-first-think-later hacker, inevitably white and male, with the power to thwart the Nazis or penetrate the CIA.

Insisting on the glamour and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science. It insults their intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their heads that you don't need discipline in order to progress. As anyone with even minimal exposure to making software knows, behind a minute of typing lies an hour of study.

It's better to admit that coding is complicated, technically and ethically. Computers, at the moment, can only execute orders, to varying degrees of sophistication. So it's up to the developer to be clear: the machine does what you say, not what you mean. More and more 'decisions' are being entrusted to software, including life-or-death ones: think self-driving cars; think semi-autonomous weapons; think Facebook and Google making inferences about your marital, psychological or physical status, before selling it to the highest bidder. Yet it's rarely in the interests of companies and governments to encourage us to probe what's going on beneath these processes.

All of these scenarios are built on exquisitely technical foundations. But we can't respond to them by answering exclusively technical questions. Programming is not a detail that can be left to 'technicians' under the false pretence that their choices will be 'scientifically neutral'. Societies are too complex: the algorithmic is political. Automation has already dealt a blow to the job security of low-skilled workers in factories and warehouses around the world. White-collar workers are next in line. The digital giants of today run on a fraction of the employees of the industrial giants of yesterday, so the irony of encouraging more people to work as programmers is that they are slowly mobilising themselves out of jobs.

In an ever-more intricate and connected world, where software plays a larger and larger role in everyday life, it's irresponsible to speak of coding as a lightweight activity. Software is not simply lines of code, nor is it blandly technical. In just a few years, understanding programming will be an indispensable part of active citizenship. The idea that coding offers an unproblematic path to social progress and personal enhancement works to the advantage of the growing techno-plutocracy that's insulating itself behind its own technology.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article.

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Coding is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex

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Programming computers is a piece of cake. Or so the world's digital-skills gurus would have us believe. From the non-profit Code.org's promise that 'Anybody can learn!' to Apple chief executive Tim Cook's comment that writing code is 'fun and interactive', the art and science of making software is now as accessible as the alphabet.

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An Aeon article, looking at whether it will be human brains, or algorithms, that will drive forward science. 

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An Aeon article, looking at whether it will be human brains, or algorithms, that will drive forward science. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Use it to explore questions such as: What drives the production of scientific knowledge?

KEY TERMS Understanding & prediction, Big data, Algorithms, Limits of understanding

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Will brains or algorithms rule the kingdom of science? | Aeon Essays

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Science today stands at a crossroads: will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created?

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A Conversation article, looking at 25 years of Google - and how we managed life before it existed. 

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A Conversation article, looking at 25 years of Google - and how we managed life before it existed. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  Before Google, how was information about the world accessed, and what were the limitations with these methods? Why was Google so successful when it was launched in 1998? How is Google adapting to the rise of AI? What does the article mean when it refers to “the tensions between public access and increasingly powerful commercial entities”? To wrap up: Is it becoming more or less challenging to access information about the world?

KEY TERMS Open access to information, Human search engine, Complex, Revolution, Tension

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Today marks an important milestone in the history of the internet: Google's 25th birthday. With billions of search queries submitted each day, it's difficult to remember how we ever lived without the search engine.

What was it about Google that led it to revolutionise information access? And will artificial intelligence (AI) make it obsolete, or enhance it?

Let's look at how our access to information has changed through the decades - and where it might lead as advanced AI and Google Search become increasingly entwined.

1950s: public libraries as community hubs

In the years following the second world war, it became generally accepted that a successful post-war city was one that could provide civic capabilities - and that included open access to information.

So in the 1950s information in Western countries was primarily provided by local libraries. Librarians themselves were a kind of "human search engine". They answered phone queries from businesses and responded to letters - helping people find information quickly and accurately.

Libraries were more than just a place to borrow books. They were where parents went to look for health information, where tourists requested travel tips, and where businesses sought marketing advice.

The searching was free, but required librarians' support, as well as a significant amount of labour and catalogue-driven processes. Questions we can now solve in minutes took hours, days or even weeks to answer.

1990s: the rise of paid search services

By the 1990s, libraries had expanded to include personal computers and online access to information services. Commercial search companies thrived as libraries could access information through expensive subscription services.

These systems were so complex that only trained specialists could search, with consumers paying for results. Dialog, developed at Lockheed Martin in the 1960s, remains one of the best examples. Today it claims to provide its customers access "to over 1.7 billion records across more than 140 databases of peer-reviewed literature".

Another commercial search system, The Financial Times' FT PROFILE, enabled access to articles in every UK broadsheet newspaper over a five-year period.

But searching with it wasn't simple. Users had to remember typed commands to select a collection, using specific words to reduce the list of documents returned. Articles were ordered by date, leaving the reader to scan for the most relevant items.

FT PROFILE made valuable information rapidly accessible to people outside business circles, but at a high price. In the 1990s access cost £1.60 a minute - the equivalent of £4.65 (or A$9.00) today.

The rise of Google

Following the world wide web's launch in 1993, the number of websites grew exponentially.

Libraries provided public web access, and services such as the State Library of Victoria's Vicnet offered low-cost access for organisations. Librarians taught users to find information online and build websites. However, the complex search systems struggled with exploding volumes of content and high numbers of new users.

In 1994, the book Managing Gigabytes, penned by three New Zealand computer scientists, presented solutions for this problem. Since the 1950s researchers had imagined a search engine that was fast, accessible to all, and which sorted documents by relevance.

In the 1990s, a Silicon Valley startup began to apply this knowledge - Larry Page and Sergey Brin used the principles in Managing Gigabytes to design Google's iconic architecture.

After launching on September 4 1998, the Google revolution was in motion. People loved the simplicity of the search box, as well as a novel presentation of results that summarised how the retrieved pages matched the query.

In terms of functionality, Google Search was effective for a few reasons. It used the innovative approach of delivering results by counting web links in a page (a process called PageRank). But more importantly, its algorithm was very sophisticated; it not only matched search queries with the text within a page, but also with other text linking to that page (this was called anchor text).

Google's popularity quickly surpassed competitors such as AltaVista and Yahoo Search. With more than 85% of the market share today, it remains the most popular search engine.

As the web expanded, however, access costs were contested.

Although consumers now search Google for free, payment is required to download certain articles and books. Many consumers still rely on libraries - while libraries themselves struggle with the rising costs of purchasing material to provide to the public for free.

What will the next 25 years bring?

Google has expanded far beyond Search. Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Pixel devices and other services show Google's reach is vast.

With the introduction of AI tools, including Google's Bard and the recently announced Gemini (a direct competitor to ChatGPT), Google is set to revolutionise search once again.

As Google continues to roll generative AI capabilities into Search, it will become common to read a quick information summary at the top of the results page, rather than dig for information yourself. A key challenge will be ensuring people don't become complacent to the point that they blindly trust the generated outputs.

Fact-checking against original sources will remain as important as ever. After all, we have seen generative AI tools such as ChatGPT make headlines due to " hallucinations " and misinformation.

If inaccurate or incomplete search summaries aren't revised, or are further paraphrased and presented without source material, the misinformation problem will only get worse.

Moreover, even if AI tools revolutionise search, they may fail to revolutionise access. As the AI industry grows, we're seeing a shift towards content only being accessible for a fee, or through paid subscriptions.

The rise of AI provides an opportunity to revisit the tensions between public access and increasingly powerful commercial entities.

Read more: The hidden cost of the AI boom: social and environmental exploitation

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Google turns 25: the search engine revolutionised how we access information, but will it survive AI?

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It's hard to remember life before Google, when the closest thing to it was your local librarian. Soon the search engine will be offering AI-based summaries in its search results.

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A BBC article, reporting on how scientists have used AI to help them discover a new antibiotic that will treat a deadly superbug.

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A BBC article, reporting on how scientists have used AI to help them discover a new antibiotic that will treat a deadly superbug.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How significant is the discovery made by scientists from McMaster University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? How was AI used to assist their work? Why will AI be so important in supporting scientists who work on finding treatments for hospital ‘superbugs’? Overall, do students agree that “the tools of artificial intelligence can be a revolutionary force in science and medicine”?

KEY TERMS Revolutionary force, Precision, Enhances the rate

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Health and science correspondent

Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug.

The AI helped narrow down thousands of potential chemicals to a handful that could be tested in the laboratory.

The result was a potent, experimental antibiotic called abaucin, which will need further tests before being used.

The researchers in Canada and the US say AI has the power to massively accelerate the discovery of new drugs.

It is the latest example of how the tools of artificial intelligence can be a revolutionary force in science and medicine.

Stopping the superbugs

Antibiotics kill bacteria. However, there has been a lack of new drugs for decades and bacteria are becoming harder to treat, as they evolve resistance to the ones we have.

More than a million people a year are estimated to die from infections that resist treatment with antibiotics.

The researchers focused on one of the most problematic species of bacteria - Acinetobacter baumannii, which can infect wounds and cause pneumonia.

You may not have heard of it, but it is one of the three superbugs the World Health Organization has identified as a "critical" threat.

It is often able to shrug off multiple antibiotics and is a problem in hospitals and care homes, where it can survive on surfaces and medical equipment.

Dr Jonathan Stokes, from McMaster University, describes the bug as "public enemy number one" as it's "really common" to find cases where it is "resistant to nearly every antibiotic".

Artificial intelligence

To find a new antibiotic, the researchers first had to train the AI. They took thousands of drugs where the precise chemical structure was known, and manually tested them on Acinetobacter baumannii to see which could slow it down or kill it.

This information was fed into the AI so it could learn the chemical features of drugs that could attack the problematic bacterium.

The AI was then unleashed on a list of 6,680 compounds whose effectiveness was unknown. The results - published in Nature Chemical Biology - showed it took the AI an hour and a half to produce a shortlist.

The researchers tested 240 in the laboratory, and found nine potential antibiotics. One of them was the incredibly potent antibiotic abaucin.

Laboratory experiments showed it could treat infected wounds in mice and was able to kill A. baumannii samples from patients.

However, Dr Stokes told me: "This is when the work starts."

The next step is to perfect the drug in the laboratory and then perform clinical trials. He expects the first AI antibiotics could take until 2030 until they are available to be prescribed.

Curiously, this experimental antibiotic had no effect on other species of bacteria, and works only on A. baumannii.

Many antibiotics kill bacteria indiscriminately. The researchers believe the precision of abaucin will make it harder for drug-resistance to emerge, and could lead to fewer side-effects.

In principle, the AI could screen tens of millions of potential compounds - something that would be impractical to do manually.

"AI enhances the rate, and in a perfect world decreases the cost, with which we can discover these new classes of antibiotic that we desperately need," Dr Stokes told me.

The researchers tested the principles of AI-aided antibiotic discovery in E. coli in 2020, but have now used that knowledge to focus on the big nasties. They plan to look at Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa next.

"This finding further supports the premise that AI can significantly accelerate and expand our search for novel antibiotics," said Prof James Collins, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He added: "I'm excited that this work shows that we can use AI to help combat problematic pathogens such as A. baumannii."

Prof Dame Sally Davies, the former chief medical officer for England and government envoy on anti-microbial resistance, told Radio 4's The World Tonight: "We're onto a winner."

She said the idea of using AI was "a big game-changer, I'm thrilled to see the work he (Dr Stokes) is doing, it will save lives".

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New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI

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Health and science correspondent Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug. The AI helped narrow down thousands of potential chemicals to a handful that could be tested in the laboratory.

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A Wired article, pointing out that if we want to understand the nature and purpose of robotics, we must stop comparing them to humans. 

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A Wired article, pointing out that if we want to understand the nature and purpose of robotics, we must stop comparing them to humans. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does reframing the way we perceive an issue change our understanding of it?

KEY TERMS Human replacement, Envision

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Humans have worked alongside animals for centuries. So why are we so obsessed with comparing robots to ourselves?