The first week of 2021 has proved a humbling reminder that the forces that shaped 2020 were not interrupted by the changing calendar. On January 6th, rioters stormed the US Capitol building, emboldened by mob fervor and a tangled web of conspiracy theory. Days later, the full scope of the tragedy and horror is still revealing itself, as the death toll rises and footage of the violence spreads. But despite the all-too-real consequences, there was something uncannily unreal about the riot as it was happening. Though some participants appear to have been poised to take hostages, their overall aim seems to have been symbolic, even theatrical…

We are thrilled to feature an interview with David De Cremer, Provost Chair and Professor of Management and Organizations at the National University of Singapore Business School. Dr. De Cremer is an expert on how organizations, and in particular leaders, can best adapt to the new technologies changing our world. He is the author of Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?, as well as the founder and director of the Centre on AI Technology for Humankind.

DeepMind recently announced an historic advance toward solving the so-called “protein folding problem,” a longstanding and consequential challenge in computational biology. Their AlphaFold program, an AI system made up of multiple deep neural networks, achieved unprecedented predictive accuracy in the annual CASP competition, vastly outstripping the methods deployed by other teams. There are many questions one might ask about AlphaFold…

Pope Francis recently devoted his monthly prayer intention to the safe and beneficial development of artificial intelligence. Though the prayer was expressed primarily in terms of reducing inequality, a theme this Pope has touched on often, its final plea had an uncanny resonance: “Let us pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind… we could say, may it ‘be human.’”

We’re thrilled to present an interview with William Brady, a computational social psychologist and NSF postdoctoral fellow in the psychology department at Yale University. Dr. Brady’s research focuses primarily on how moral emotions are expressed on social media, and how these kinds of expressions affect our broader political conversation.

Despite the occasional dash of statistical optimism, it’s difficult to escape the sense that things — broadly considered — are not going well. The pandemic wears on. Protesters fill the streets. The election is imperiled. Wherever one looks, the world (or at least the United States) appears to be on a downward slide. It is tempting, amid this plethora of apparent problems, to seek out a root cause. The Social Dilemma, a new documentary from Netflix, makes the case for a potential culprit: social media, the business models that drive it, and the misaligned incentives that inevitably result…

There is a classic experiment from 1963 known as the “kitten carousel,” in which two kittens were harnessed to opposite ends of a carousel after being raised from birth in complete darkness. The carousel was built so that only one of the kittens could move voluntarily; the other was simply forced to move by the decisions of the first kitten…