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Is humanity headed toward a Star Trek-like utopia or a Mad Max-inspired dystopia?
This is one of the big questions Vivek Wadhwa examines in his new book, co-authored with Alex Salkever, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future.
In the book, Wadhwa and Salkever explore to what extent we can control technological progress, which at times, can seem like force of nature.
While it’s tempting to believe technology is beyond influence, however, Wadhwa emphasizes people ultimately hold the power to determine our future.
Utopia or dystopia? It’s up to us.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that. How do we make good decisions?

Wadhwa uses three questions as an ethical lens for evaluating new technologies. Each question relates back to the themes of equality, risk, and autonomy.
Does the technology have the potential to benefit everyone equally?
What are the risks and rewards?
Does the technology more strongly promote autonomy or dependence?
Knowing the ethical nuances aren’t always black and white, Wadhwa believes these questions are a helpful framework for understanding and evaluating technology.
In the book, Wadhwa runs technologies such as artificial intelligence, CRISPR gene editing, and robotics through this framework. In the case of artificial intelligence, for example, Wadhwa suggests all AI systems should be built with a kill switch, allowing humans to shut them down, no matter how advanced.
“With both AI and robotics, we must design all systems with this key consideration in mind, even if it reduces the capabilities and emergent properties of those systems and robots.”
Wadhwa urges readers to engage in the ethical debates of our time that technology is surfacing, and stresses that technology is evolving too rapidly to leave policy decisions up to political leaders alone.

What’s the key to making change in the tech sector?
Wadhwa believes it’s the power of the masses—that collective citizen power should also be used to influence the very design of certain technologies.
Though at times a skeptic, Wadhwa ends the book optimistically, writing, “Despite my fears, I know that humanity will rise to the occasion and uplift itself because it always has.”
The Driver in the Driverless Car calls for readers to become more informed and engaged with emerging technologies. It’s a reminder that we all play a role in deciding whether technology creates a future Captain Picard would applaud.
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What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear ‘artificial intelligence’? For those raised on a steady diet of big budget Hollywood sci-fi, the answer to that question is something along the lines of “evil robots and all-knowing computers that are going to destroy humanity.”
But AI is already playing an active role in our day-to-day lives, and its capabilities are only going to increase from here on out. To help ease the anxiety that will likely accompany that increase, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly has suggested we re-frame the way we’re thinking about AI, both by changing the vocabulary we use for it and by putting it into historical context.

Kelly thinks the word ‘intelligence’ has taken on undue baggage, including a somewhat negative connotation. When it’s not used in reference to a human mind, the word can conjure images of spying, classified information, or invasion of privacy.
Since the scope of artificial intelligence goes far beyond that, and we may be past the point of instilling a new definition of old words, why not use new words instead?
Kelly’s word of choice is cognification, and he uses it to describe ‘smart’ things.
At this point only a handful of things have been cognified, and more are in process: phones, cars, thermostats, TVs. But in the future, Kelly says, everything that’s already been electrified will also be cognified. Smart homes? Smart office buildings? Smart cities? Only a matter of time.
The cognification of things can be viewed similarly to the electrification of things that took place during the Industrial Revolution.
The industrial revolution saw a large-scale switch from the agricultural world—where everything that was made was made by muscle power—to the mechanized world, where gasoline, steam engines, and electricity applied artificial power to everything. We made a grid to deliver that power, so we could have it on-demand anytime and anywhere we wanted, and everything that used to require natural power could be done with artificial power.
Movement and transportation, among other things, were amplified by this new power. Kelly gives the example of a car, which is simple but compelling: you summon the power of 250 horses just by turning a key. Pressing your foot to the gas pedal can make your vehicle go 60 miles an hour, which would have been unthinkable in the era when all we had to go off of was muscle power.
The next step is to take that same car that already has the artificial power of 250 horses and add the power of 250 artificial minds. The result? Self-driving cars that can not only go fast, they can make decisions and judgment calls, deliver us to our destinations, and lower the risk of fatal accidents.
According to Kelly, we’re currently in the dawn of another industrial revolution. As it progresses, we’ll take everything we’ve previously electrified, and we’ll cognify it.
Imagining life before the Industrial Revolution, we mostly wonder how we ever lived without electricity and human-made power, thinking, “Wow, I’m sure glad we have lights and airplanes and email now. It’s nice not to have to light candles, ride in covered wagons, or send handwritten letters.” Admittedly, our relief is sometimes mixed with some nostalgia for those simpler times.
What will people think in 200 years? Once everything has been cognified and the world is one big smart bubble, people will probably have some nostalgia for the current ‘simpler times’—but they’ll also look back and say, “How did we ever live without ubiquitous AI?”
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ROBOTICS
Meet Iorek, the Robot That Communicates in a Remarkable WayMatt Simon | WIRED"The big question now is: How do humans want to communicate with the machines? One idea is to use EEGs to actually have them read our minds. (Also demonstrated with a Baxter robot, by the way. Baxter is quite popular in robotics labs.) That’s far off, of course. But Iorek shows how good machines are getting at recognizing vocal commands and gestures."
FUTURE OF FOOD
In Its New Factory, Impossible Foods Will Make 12 Million Pounds of Plant-Based Burgers a YearAdele Peters | Fast Company"As the company scales up its beef alternative, it will focus on restaurants. In a year, it says, U.S. restaurants serve more than 5 billion pounds of burgers, and Impossible wants its 12 million pounds to be among them…'Our long-term goal is to basically develop a new and better way to create all the foods we make from animals,' says Brown."
BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE
Quadriplegic Man Regains Use of Arms With Brain-Computer InterfaceMichael Bryne | MOTHERBOARD"The process of returning mobility to Kochevar was hardly easy. It began with a brain surgery in which electrodes were placed in the motor cortex region of the brain responsible for hand movement. Over the course of four months, the electrodes recorded brain signals while a computer learned which signals encoded commands for movement as Kochevar controlled a hand in virtual reality."

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Elon Musk's Neuralink Is Not About Preventing an AI ApocalypseNick Statt | The Verge"What Neuralink and Kernel are trying to do is take the first steps toward hacking the brain, so to speak, so that human beings can in the future stay healthier for longer and potentially enjoy the benefits of treating the human brain like a computing platform. This means using a chip inside the skull or some other electronic device that could improve our memory and our ability to perform complex mental tasks, as well as increase speed at which we could communicate with one another."
SPACE
Air Force's Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Breaks Orbital RecordMike Wall | Space.com"'Technologies being tested in the program include advanced guidance, navigation and control; thermal protection systems; avionics; high-temperature structures and seals; conformal reusable insulation, lightweight electromechanical flight systems; and autonomous orbital flight, re-entry and landing,' Annicelli told Space.com, declining to offer details about OTV-4 in particular."
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