Magazine

The Hard Problems issue

November/December 2023

The intractable problem of plastics. Fixing the internet. Exploring what it would it take for AI to become conscious. Plus: there are so many urgent issues facing the world—where do we begin? Bill Gates, Lina Khan, Jennifer Doudna, and others offer their ideas.

Read the issue

Letter from the editor

Tackling our biggest problems

Michael Byers

Features

Categorized in Climate change and energy
Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.
Plastic is cheap to make and shockingly profitable. It’s everywhere. And we’re all paying the price.
Categorized in Artificial intelligence
Minds of machines: The great AI consciousness conundrum
Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and engineers are grappling with what it would take for AI to become conscious.
Categorized in Policy
Government technology is famously bad. It doesn’t have to be.
New York City is fixing the relationship between government and technology–and not in the ways you’d expect.
Categorized in Space
Inside NASA’s bid to make spacecraft as small as possible
When it comes to exploring the solar system, we must grapple with the hard limits of physics.

Also in this issue
- This mathematician is making sense of nature’s complexity
  Hungarian scholar Gábor Domokos aims to understand the physical world by describing its forms in the simplest possible geometry.
  
  Categorized in Profile
- How to fix the internet
  If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms.
  
  Categorized in Culture
- How this Turing Award–winning researcher became a legendary academic advisor
  Theoretical computer scientist Manuel Blum has guided generations of graduate students into fruitful careers in the field.
  
  Categorized in Computing
- Inside the quest for unbreakable encryption
  Cryptographers want encryption schemes that are impossible for tomorrow’s quantum computers to crack. There’s only one catch: they might not exist.
  
  Categorized in Computing
- The nonprofit that lets girls build the world they want to see
  Girls Garage blends arts, power tools, and STEM.
  
  Categorized in Field notes
- Death to captchas
  Proving you’re human on websites is harder than ever—but alternative tests are gaining ground.
  
  Categorized in Computing
- The quest to re-create nature’s strongest material
  Material inspired by limpet teeth could perform as well as the toughest manmade materials, or better.
  
  Categorized in Biotechnology and health
- The grassroots push to digitize India’s most precious documents
  The Servants of Knowledge collection on the Internet Archive is an effort to make up for the lack of library resources in India.
  
  Categorized in Computing
- Job titles of the future: carbon accountant
  More companies are hiring specialists to help them understand their contributions to climate change.
  
  Categorized in Climate change and energy

Updated

Magazine

The Hard Problems issue

Letter from the editor

Features

Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

Minds of machines: The great AI consciousness conundrum

Government technology is famously bad. It doesn’t have to be.

Inside NASA’s bid to make spacecraft as small as possible

This mathematician is making sense of nature’s complexity

How to fix the internet

How this Turing Award–winning researcher became a legendary academic advisor

Inside the quest for unbreakable encryption

The nonprofit that lets girls build the world they want to see

Death to captchas

The quest to re-create nature’s strongest material

The grassroots push to digitize India’s most precious documents

Job titles of the future: carbon accountant

Past issues

The latest iteration of a legacy

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