In 2015, Nextdoor, the location-based social networking app, gained a reputation as a locus of racial profiling. Users were sending alerts for merely spotting hoodie-wearing Black men walking in their neighborhoods. One damning report described Nextdoor as “a forum for paranoid racialism—the equivalent of the nosy Neighborhood Watch appointee in a gated More
Over time, all these Facebook posts, Instagram captions, and tweets have become a treasure trove of human thought and feeling. People might rarely look back on their dashed-off online thoughts, but if their posts are publicly accessible, they’re ripe for analysis. And some psychologists are using algorithms to figure out More
Who among us hasn’t wished we could read someone else’s mind, know exactly what they’re thinking? Well that’s impossible, of course, since our thoughts are, more than anything else, our own. Private, personal, unreachable. Or at least that’s what we’ve always, well, thought. … Advances in neuroscience have shown that More
Virtual reality and other sensory technologies promise new ways of teaching, enhancing cognitive function, compensating for sensory-motor loss, and more, according to APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Roberta L. Klatzky. More
Our recent research indicates that patients are reluctant to use health care provided by medical artificial intelligence even when it outperforms human doctors. Why? Because patients believe that their medical needs are unique and cannot be adequately addressed by algorithms. To realize the many advantages and cost savings that medical More
Last July, I went to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the blue-sky government research lab that helped to invent the computer and the internet. I was there, strange as it may seem, to talk about babies. The latest big DARPA research project, Machine Common Sense, is funding collaborations More
