Building the Future, One Brick at a Time
Whatever we build today will create our future. And if we’re not thoughtful about it, the forward steps we take now could be seen as steps back in the years to come. Building is a popular tech industry motif, especially in Silicon Valley, where ‘Time to build’ has become something of a call to arms that lamented America’s seeming inability to build just about anything.
Robotics and artificial intelligence are ushering in the era of helper robots
That essay was published four years ago, at the apex of the country’s disastrous response to covid-19, when masks, PPE, and even hospital beds were in short supply. It’s an alluring argument. Yet the future is built brick by brick from the imperfect decisions we make in the present. We don’t often recognize that the seeming steps forward we are taking today could be seen as steps back in the years to come.
“The future is built brick by brick from the imperfect decisions we make in the present.”
This could very well be how we come to view some of the efforts we are making in terms of climate remediation. Sometimes the things we don’t do, or the steps we skip, have bigger implications than the actions we do take. For the space program, the decision to race to the moon rather than to first build a way station—as was originally envisioned by some of the pioneers of space travel—may have had the long-term effect of keeping us more earthbound than we might otherwise be.
A way station could have changed the course of space travel
Other times, we’re just held back because we haven’t figured out how to do things yet. Simply put: the tech just isn’t quite there.
In our cover story on home robots, we look at how the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence, and especially large language models, could at last be ushering in the era of helper robots that we’ve been dreaming of since the days of The Jetsons.
Home robots are finally becoming a reality
It’s such a fertile area of development, with action from both big industry incumbents like Google and highly specialized, sometimes secretive startups, that there is far more than we could get into in a single story.
We also explore the history of brainwashing, building accountability into police body cameras, and designing vegan cheese with generative AI.
Vegan cheese is now a reality thanks to generative AI
We hope you find something to take away and build on. Thanks for reading.
