Fixing the Future

The United Kingdom has created a new government agency, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, or ARIA, similar to the United States' DARPA. ARIA's first foray is into creating new enabling technologies to make AI faster and more energy efficient, and the program lead, Suraj Bramhavar spoke with Spectrum editor Dina Genkina about some of areas, such as new ways to use noise, that ARIA would be helping investigate.

Zipline originally established itself delivering medical supplies in rural Africa. Now, Zipline cofounder and CTO Keenan Wyrobek talks with senior editor Stephen Cass about recent milestones in bringing commercial drone delivery to the United States, including the development of Platform 2 and its tethered mini-droid that makes precision drop-offs possible in urban areas.

Governments in America and Europe are pushing the deployment of heat pumps to reduce the energy demands of home heating and cooling. Spectrum's power and energy editor Emily Waltz talks with Stephen Cass about her reporting on new advances that will let heat pumps work in colder climates than before, expanding their range considerably.

IEEE Spectrum's semiconductor expert, Samuel K. Moore, talks with Stephen Cass about his visit to one of the key conferences in emerging integrated circuit technology, ISSCC. We talk about Meta's new 3D chip-stacking tech for faster AR, faster AI through in-memory computation, and security technology that can cause a chip to self-destruct if anyone tries to hack it.

In this March roundup, IEEE Spectrum's editor-in-chief Harry Goldstein and senior editor Stephen Cass talk about some of the highlights of Spectrum's recent coverage, including a plea for programmers to stop producing bloated programs, a new transistor that could help make how we handle electrical power smarter, and the potential return of optical discs as a high-density date storage medium.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently released the open-source ARES_OS, a key software component of their Autonomous Research System. ARES_OS allows relatively simple robots to perform experiments, and develop new experiments based on the results. The AFRL's Benji Maruyama talks with IEEE Spectrum associate editor Dina Genkina about how he hopes the system becomes not just an invaluable helper for grad students, but opens up research to many more people outside traditional labs and enables progress in tackling hard problems like climate change.

The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a major expansion driven by the seemingly insatiable demands of AI, the addition of more intelligence in transportation, and national security concerns, among many other things. What this expansion might mean for chip-making's carbon footprint? Can we make everything in our world smarter without worsening climate change? Lizzie Boakes is a lifecycle analyst at IMEC, the Belgium-based nanotech research organisation, and she speaks with senior editor Samuel K. Moore about her work on this problem.

We've all seen impressive demos of prototype brain implants being used by paralyzed patients to interface with computers, but none of those implants have entered general clinical use. Biomedical device company Synchron is close to actually coming to market with its stentrode technology, promising less spectacular results than some of its competitors, but making up for that with ease of use and implant longevity. Synchron's co-founder Tom Oxley talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Eliza Strickland about the new tech, and you can read more in our January issue article by Emily Waltz.

The EU Sustronics program aims to make creating, maintaining, and recycling electronics more sustainable. Liisa Hakola is a senior scientist and project manager at the VTT Technical Research Center in Finland. She talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about VTT's role in the EU's program, helping manufacturers to develop flexible, printed—and even compostable—electronics.

Security researchers Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan believe it's time to stop trusting our data to the cloud, where it can be exposed by greed, accident, or crime. In the December issue of IEEE Spectrum, they proposed a plan for "data decoupling" that would protect our data without sacrificing ease of use, and in this episode Raghavan talks through the highlights of the plan with Spectrum editor Stephen Cass.

Co-CEO's of Silmach, Pierre-Francois Louvigne and Jean-Baptiste Carnet, talk about their new MEMS technology with IEEE Spectrum editor Glenn Zorpette. The tech has been used to create the first major upgrade to the movement of quartz watches in decades, a power efficient motor that is 50 percent smaller, allows fluid forward-and-back motion of the hand, and requires so little power a watch can run for over a decade before it needs a new battery. Louvigne talk about their new hybrid watch, which combine smartwatch electronics with analog faces, and partnerships with manufacturers such as Timex.

Alan Clark of SUSE talks with IEEE Spectrum editor Stephen Cass about the disruption in the enterprise Linux community caused by recent announcements by Red Hat over open source access to its codebase, and the formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Alliance (Open ELA) by SUSE, Oracle and CIQ in response.

Justine Bateman is an author and filmmaker. She also holds a degree in computer science from UCLA and is the AI advisor to SAG-AFTRA, the actors' union currently striking against movie and television studios. In this episode, Bateman talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about actors' demands for control and compensation over digital avatars created in their likeness, and the destructive potential of generative AI in Hollywood.

Wendy H. Wong is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, and author of the just released book, We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age. An excerpt from the book regarding the emerging prospect of digitally reanimating the departed is available on IEEE Spectrum's website. In this episode of Fixing The Future, Wong talks with senior editor Eliza Strickland about how the increasing datification of our lives could make this prospect possible—with or without our consent.

IEEE Spectrum's resident semiconductor expert Samuel K. Moore talks with host Stephen Cass about ASML's enormous machine that's at the heart of chip manufacturing and explain the latest tricks with extreme ultraviolet that will keep Moore's Law going. In addition, new technologies from Edwards and Nvidia should make manufacturing chips greener and faster respectively.

Reducing our global carbon footprint by switching to electric vehicles means we need a lot more batteries. And that means we need a lot more copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium to make those batteries. Josh Goldman of KoBold Metals talks to senior editor Eliza Strickland about using AI to decipher geological formations and find new deposits of these minerals, and you can read more in his recent feature for IEEE Spectrum.

IEEE Spectrum's Stephen Cass talks with Arun Gupta, vice president and general manager of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel and chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, about Intel's contributions to open source software projects and efforts to make open source greener and more secure.

Around the world, legislators are grappling with generative AI's potential for both innovation and destruction. Russell Wald is the Director of Policy for Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. In this episode, he talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Eliza Strickland about creating humane regulations that are able to cope with a rapidly evolving technology.

Scott Shapiro is the author of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. You can read an excerpt of Fancy Bear at IEEE Spectrum, but in today's episode of Fixing the Future, Shapiro talks with Spectrum editor David Schneider about why cybersecurity can't be fixed with purely technical solutions, why the threat of cyberwarfare tends to be exaggerated, and why cyberespionage will always be with us.

As large language models like GPT4 and Bard continue to take the world by storm, one of their most high-profile applications is their most unexpected: writing code. AI programming systems like Github Copilot are primarily used by software developers as a writing partner, but no-code programming tools can also help non-programmers find new ways to use data. AI-watcher Craig Smith talks to Gina Genkina and explains how this programming ability caught researchers by surprise and how anyone can start leveraging these tools.