A short history of AI, and what it is (and isn’t)
Science & Technology

A short history of AI, and what it is (and isn’t)

Technology tamfitronics This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It’s the simplest questions that are often the hardest to answer. That applies to AI, too. Even though it’s a technology being sold as a solution to the world’s problems, nobody seems to know what it really is. It’s a label that’s been slapped on technologies ranging from self-driving cars to facial recognition, chatbots to fancy Excel. But in general, when we talk about AI, we talk about technologies that make computers do things we think need intelligence when done by people. For months, my colleague Will Douglas Heaven has been on a quest to go deeper to understand why everybody seems to disagree on exactly...
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Even Short Trips to Space can Change an Astronaut’s Biology

NASA Space Technology Only about 600 people have ever traveled to space. The vast majority of astronauts over the past six decades have been middle-aged men on short-duration missions of fewer than 20 days.Today, with private, commercial and multinational spaceflight providers and flyers entering the market, we are witnessing a new era of human spaceflight. Missions have ranged from minutes, hours and days to months.As humanity looks ahead to returning to the Moon over the coming decade, space exploration missions will be much longer, with many more space travelers and even space tourists. This also means that a wider diversity of people will experience the extreme environment of space – more women and people of different ethnicities, ages and health status.Since people respond differently to the unique stressors and exposures of space, researchers...
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