Tag: author_name|Andrew Tarantola
Hitting the Books: Who’s excited to have their brainwaves scanned as a personal ID?
All of those fantastical possibilities promised by burgeoning brain-computer interface technology come with the unavoidable cost of needing its potentially hackable wetware to ride shotgun in your skull. Given how often our personal data is already mishandled online, do we really want to trust the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley…
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Hitting the Books: We’d likely have to liquidate Jupiter to build a Dyson Sphere around the Sun
The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere — having one in your solar system will…
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Hitting the Books: Why nobody knows Hiram Maxim, inventor of the incandescent lightbulb
One detail that’s often omitted from modern founders myths is whether or not said scion of capitalist success actually invented the thing they’re famous for inventing. Just like Elon Musk didn’t invent electric vehicles so much as be the first to successfully market them to the American public, Thomas Edison’s…
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Hitting the Books: Tech can’t fix what’s broken in American policing
It’s never been about safety as much as it has control, serving and protecting only to the benefit of the status quo. Clearview AI, PredPol, Shotspotter, they’re all Carolyn Bryant Donham’s testimony behind a veneer of technological validity — a shiny black box to dazzle the masses while giving the…
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We can build immortal celebrities from ChatGPT and their existing back catalogs
Our reverence towards stars and celebrities was not borne of the 19th century’s cinematic revolution, but rather has been a resilient aspect of our culture for millennia. Ancient tales of immortal gods rising again and again after fatal injury, the veneration and deification of social and political leaders, Madame Tussauds’…
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Hitting the Books: Sputnik’s radio tech launched a revolution in bird migration research
“Birds fly South for the winter and North for the summer,” has historically proven to be only slightly less reliable a maxim than the sun always rising in the East and setting in the West. Humanity has been fascinated by the comings and goings of our avian neighbors for millennia,…
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