For all of historical past we’ve turned to know-how, repeatedly, to assist us resolve our hardest issues. It has made just about all of human data accessible to us immediately on demand. And we will converse to one another in fully totally different languages and be understood utilizing nothing greater than a slim slab of glass and metals in our pocket.

Generally know-how can appear to be a miracle. However, in fact, it’s nothing greater than human achievement. But like all issues human, our creations may be deeply flawed. Because of this, we now have additionally used tech to unleash horrors on ourselves, deliberately and accidentally. 

Know-how is an engine for issues, for fixing them and for creating fully new ones—after which we perversely flip to even newer applied sciences to attempt to resolve these.

In our newest print problem of MIT Know-how Overview, we step again from this cycle. We discover large questions and laborious issues and ask: What position can—and will—know-how play going ahead?

Right here’s simply a few of the nice tales you possibly can learn within the new problem:

+ Assume that your plastic is being recycled? This incisive, fascinating function by Douglas Foremost will make you assume once more.

+ The web feels fairly damaged as of late. However there are actual steps we will take in the direction of fixing it, as Katie Notopoulos explains in her piece for us. 

+ Meet Gábor Domokos, the Hungarian mathematician making sense of nature’s complexity by describing its types within the easiest potential geometry.

+ AI consciousness isn’t only a devilishly difficult mental puzzle; it’s a morally weighty drawback, writes Grace Huckins.

+ Why captchas are getting more durable to resolve—and what comes subsequent.