The casual air traveler has never had so much information at his fingertips. He sits before a battleship-worthy console of maps, prices, dates, and times; orders up grids that plot one variable against another. He is monitoring the situation. He is in conversation with his wallet, but also with his future self: Will he want to take the red-eye and leave his bags at the hotel all day' Will he want to leave the house at 4 a.m.' What's so great about Iceland, anyway' This stupendous array of choices, once reserved for professional travel agents, is emblematic of our optimized-shopping era. Consumers don't just price-shop; they scrutinize rates of change, guided by algorithms that purport to know where prices are headed. With airfares at historic highs, the sites that advise travelers whether to buy now or wait have never felt more necessary. Unfortunately, they have rarely felt less helpful. Sites such as Hopper, Kayak, and Google Flights are trained on price histories. 'They use data from the past to inform models in the present that make predictions for the future. Their level of confidence and predictive accuracy drops'whether they disclose that or not'precipitously when there are exogenous shocks,' Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist who built and sold the pioneering airfare-prediction site Farecast to Microsoft in the 2000s, told me. The sites' powers are limited in chaotic times, and chaotic this summer is....
The heat doesn't announce itself with trumpets or warnings....
Back in the web-traffic-obsessed days of 2018, at a time of dawning awareness of how easily audiences online could be manipulated and spoofed by bots, the writer Max Read argued that the internet had crossed a threshold known as 'the Inversion.' Not only had bots proliferated across the internet; they had come to constitute it. In outnumbering humans, bots were also loosening everyone's grasp on the very reality of online experience. 'What's gone from the internet, after all, isn't 'truth,' but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be,' Read wrote. Today, 'the Inversion' feels almost quaint. Autonomous AI agents roam the internet, answering emails, sending texts, and occasionally deleting the code repositories of entire companies. An endless library of chatbot-speak crowds out human-written words in every Google search. Bots are spinning up music and videos, conjuring bad poetry and prose, building websites, doing research, making transactions, writing plodding memos to your boss, solving geometry conjectures. Those AI outputs then ride the rails of an internet controlled by black-box algorithms. Computers talk to computers, producing information to train computers to sound more like humans or to better engage them. Humans type into the box, scroll, and wait....
It's been 37 years since scientists first demonstrated the ability to move single atoms, suggesting the possibility of designing materials atom by atom to customize their properties. Today there are several techniques that allow researchers to move individual atoms in order to give materials exotic quantum properties and improve our understanding of quantum behavior. Now a team of researchers at MIT, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and other institutions has created a way to precisely move tens of thousands of individual atoms within a material in minutes at room temperature. The approach uses a set of algorithms to carefully position an electron beam at specific locations of a material, then scan the beam to drive atomic motions. 'The results demonstrate the ability to deterministically move atoms repeatedly within a material's 3D atomic lattice,' says MIT Research Scientist Julian Klein, who conceived of and directed the project. 'We can reprogram materials to create defects at will, realizing entirely artificial states of matter not found in nature with a wide range of potential applications, including sensing, optical, and magnetic technologies. There are so many opportunities enabled by these techniques.'...
