Many high school seniors are now focusing on what they will do once they graduate – or how they don’t at all know what is to come. Families trying to guide and support these students at the juncture of a major life transition likely also feel nervous about the open-ended possibilities, from starting at a […] … learn more→

On Feb. 22, 2020, “Mad” Mike Hughes towed a homemade rocket to the Mojave Desert and launched himself into the sky. His goal? To view the flatness of the Earth from space. This was his third attempt, and tragically it was fatal. Hughes crashed shortly after takeoff and died. Hughes’ nickname – Mad Mike – might […] … learn more→

At times, I feel exhausted and irritable. I might get angry at a petty request to sign another PDF or because I have to send another reminder. I end up trapped between past times when I had the patience and time to take care of everything and my current need to minimise frustration and take […] … learn more→

While we ask artificial intelligence (AI) to help us solve climate change, its own carbon footprint is skyrocketing. And while it helps us design drugs, optimize power grids, and predict natural disasters, this technology comes at a hidden and exorbitant cost. The problem is its energy appetite. Training a model like GPT-3, now outdated, required around […] … learn more→

The use of generative artificial intelligence is now widespread among new generations of students, disrupting the established norms and challenges of knowledge assessment. This poses a number of dilemmas for universities. How can they rethink their exams to maintain the credibility of their degrees? If truly disruptive innovations exist in education, the uses of generative […] … learn more→

In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a spacecraft and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of an injured astronaut to remove a life-threatening blood clot from his brain. The Academy Award-winning movie – later developed into a novel by Isaac Asimov – seemed like pure fantasy at the time. […] … learn more→

When OpenAI’s Sam Altman told reporters in San Francisco earlier this year that the AI sector is in a bubble, the American tech market reacted almost instantly. Combined with the fact that 95 per cent of AI pilot projects fail, traders treated his remark as a broader warning. Although Altman was referring specifically to private startups rather than publicly […] … learn more→

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded notably to Philippe Aghion, has brought renewed emphasis to the benefits of technological innovation and its crucial role in economic growth. But are there not also forced innovations? The philosophy of Ivan Illich can shed light on this question. In theory, we […] … learn more→

You’ve probably come across the term “researcher positioning” in methods texts or heard it thrown around in doctoral seminars, and perhaps wondered what al the fuss is about. Positioning might sound like one of those unnecessarily complicated concepts but actually, it’s pretty straightforward once you get your head around it. More importantly, it gets at […] … learn more→

In the eyes of big AI companies such as OpenAI, the troves of data on the internet are highly valuable. They scrape photos, videos, books, blog posts, albums, painting, photographs and much more to train their products such as ChatGPT – usually without any compensation to or consent from the creators. In fact, OpenAI and […] … learn more→