Fixing the Future
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Using AI to Clear Land Mines in Ukraine
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Gabriel Steinberg, co-founder of the nonprofit Demining Research Community and the startup Safe Pro AI talks with Spectrum editor Eliza Strickland a...
Never Recharge Your Consumer Electronics Again?
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Founder and CEO of Exeger, Giovanni Fili, talks with IEEE Spectrum editor Stephen Cass about Exeger's Powerfoyle flexible dye-based solar cells for co...
The UK's ARIA Is Searching For Better AI Tech
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The United Kingdom has created a new government agency, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, or ARIA, similar to the United States' DARPA. ARIA...
Zipline's Droid Brings U.S. Commercial Drone Delivery Closer
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Zipline originally established itself delivering medical supplies in rural Africa. Now, Zipline cofounder and CTO Keenan Wyrobek talks with senior edi...
Heat Pumps Go North
03 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Governments in America and Europe are pushing the deployment of heat pumps to reduce the energy demands of home heating and cooling. Spectrum's power ...
The Cutting Edge of Integrated Circuits: Exploding Chips, How Meta's Stacking It Up For AR, and More
20 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
IEEE Spectrum's semiconductor expert, Samuel K. Moore, talks with Stephen Cass about his visit to one of the key conferences in emerging integrated ci...
Lean Software, Power Electronics, and the Return of Optical Storage
06 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this March roundup, IEEE Spectrum's editor-in-chief Harry Goldstein and senior editor Stephen Cass talk about some of the highlights of Spectrum's ...
The Autonomous Research System Lets Robots Do Your Lab Work
21 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently released the open-source ARES_OS, a key software component of their Autonomous Research System. ARES...
Figuring Out Semiconductor Manufacturing's Climate Footprint
07 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a major expansion driven by the seemingly insatiable demands of AI, the addition of more intelligence in...
The Brain Implant That Sidesteps The Competition
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We've all seen impressive demos of prototype brain implants being used by paralyzed patients to interface with computers, but none of those implants h...
The Finnish Future of Sustainable Electronics
10 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The EU Sustronics program aims to make creating, maintaining, and recycling electronics more sustainable. Liisa Hakola is a senior scientist and proje...
How To Avoid Trusting The Cloud
13 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Security researchers Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan believe it's time to stop trusting our data to the cloud, where it can be exposed by greed, ac...
New MEMS Tech Lets Watches Run For Over A Decade On A Single Battery
29 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Co-CEO's of Silmach, Pierre-Francois Louvigne and Jean-Baptiste Carnet, talk about their new MEMS technology with IEEE Spectrum editor Glenn Zorpette....
SUSE, Oracle, And CIQ Create a New Linux Alliance
15 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Alan Clark of SUSE talks with IEEE Spectrum editor Stephen Cass about the disruption in the enterprise Linux community caused by recent announcements ...
Justine Bateman's Fight Against Generative AI In Hollywood
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Justine Bateman is an author and filmmaker. She also holds a degree in computer science from UCLA and is the AI advisor to SAG-AFTRA, the actors' unio...
Your Life As A Digital Ghost
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Wendy H. Wong is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, and author of the just released book, We, The Data: Human Rig...
The Future of Moore's Law Is Inside This Willy Wonka Machine
04 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
IEEE Spectrum's resident semiconductor expert Samuel K. Moore talks with host Stephen Cass about ASML's enormous machine that's at the heart of chip m...
Finding Battery Minerals With AI
20 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Reducing our global carbon footprint by switching to electric vehicles means we need a lot more batteries. And that means we need a lot more copper, n...
Intel's Open Source Strategy
06 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
IEEE Spectrum's Stephen Cass talks with Arun Gupta, vice president and general manager of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel and chair of the Cloud N...
Finding The Wisest Ways To Global AI Regulation
23 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Around the world, legislators are grappling with generative AI's potential for both innovation and destruction. Russell Wald is the Director of Policy...
Why Cyberwar is Overhyped
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Scott Shapiro is the author of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. You can read an excerpt ...
Explainer: Why No-Code Software Isn't Just For Developers
05 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As large language models like GPT4 and Bard continue to take the world by storm, one of their most high-profile applications is their most unexpected:...
How Our Body's Electrome Defines Us
12 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally Adee's new book, We Are Electric: The New Science of Our Body’s Electrome, exams the centuries-long quest to understand how the body uses elec...
The Race To Link Chips With Light For Faster AI
11 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Samuel K. Moore, IEEE Spectrum's senior editor and semiconductor beat reporter, talks about the competing technologies that hope to dramatically speed...
Functional Programming: The Biggest Change Since We Killed The Goto?
29 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Charles Scalfini, the CTO of Panoramic Software, makes the case for why programmers should make the leap to functional programming, which promises mor...
Truepic's Glass-to-Glass Fight Against Digital Fakes
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Brown, vice-president of product at Truepic, describes how the company's technology and standards developed by the Coalition for Content Provenan...
Rerouting Intention And Sensation In Paralyzed Patients
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Patients who have traumatic nerve injuries can face significant paralysis, including paraplegia and quadriplegia. Chad Bouton's research is on develop...
Better Carbon Sequestration With AI
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
One potential path to tackling climate change due to rising carbon dioxide levels is to lock the carbon dioxide away in geological reservoirs deep und...
The Bionic-Hand Arms Race
06 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Britt S. Young talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about her investigation into high-tech prosthetic hand design: "We are caught in a ...
The Why, How, and Maybe Not of Geoengineering
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Silver Lining's executive direction Kelly Wanser explains why rising temperatures are behind the push to geoengineer the world's climate, the most pla...
Stopping Infection Outbreaks with AI and Big Data
21 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Hospitals are where we go to get cured of infections and diseases, but sadly, sometimes tragically, and ironically, they are also places we go to get ...
A Small Startup Fights Rare Diseases With Big Data
09 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Rare diseases are, well, rare. In two not unrelated ways. By definition, they’re diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 people. But because, in th...
Solving the Electric Vehicle Charging Conundrum
26 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Like a lot of people, you may be thinking about trading in your car. Me too. The case, morally and even financially, for an all-electric car is becomi...
IBM’s Fall From World Dominance
11 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
IBM is a remarkable company, known for many things—the tabulating machines that calculated the 1890 U.S. Census, the mainframe computer, legitimizin...
It’s Easy for Computers to Detect Sarcasm, Right?
01 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There’s no question that computers don’t understand sarcasm—or didn’t, until some researchers at the University of Central Florida starting th...
Fixing the Chemical Industry’s Sustainability Problem
21 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The most honest and inadvertently funny marketing message I ever saw was at a gas station that was closed for remodeling; it had been an Amaco station...
Let’s Put Cheap, Portable Nuclear Reactors onto Barges
11 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s startup invites us to rethink nuclear energy. Their plan? To put cheap, portable nuclear reactors onto barges and float them out to sea. Wha...
Until We Get Rid of Fossil Fuels, Can Data Make Them More Efficient?
03 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A few months ago, we had on the show an economist who specialized in the energy sector. She noted that while the Trump administration had put drilling...
Can a Robot Be Arrested? Hold a Patent? Pay Income Taxes?
25 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When horses were replaced by engines, for work and transportation, we didn’t need to rethink our legal frameworks. So when a fixed-in-place factory ...
The Future of Post-Industrial Cities
18 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As we begin to finally address climate change in a serious way, we need to look at our cities in a serious way. And not just first-tier cities like, w...
Are Fossil Fuels Impoverishing Middle America?
11 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
I suppose it’s elitist and maybe even nationalistic of me but I was surprised to hear the phrase “resource curse,” which I associate with the d...
Self-Walking Exoskeletons
22 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the world of prosthetics, we’re still at the stage where a person has to instruct the prosthetic to first do one thing, then another, then anothe...
Can 5G Close the Digital Divide?
15 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Has there been any technology more widely talked about and yet still less understood than 5G? Qualcomm’s Vice President of Engineering, Our guest, J...
A Theory of (Almost) Everything
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the world is not only changing quickly, it’s changing at a faster rate than ever. Or does it...
Is Cyberwar War?
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
At a conference of chief technology officers in 2016, General Michael Hayden, former head of, at different times, both the NSA and the CIA, told the a...
Mathematics, Politics, and Justice Denied
11 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the 2020 elections for the North Carolina State House, Democrats received 49 percent of the votes but won only 42.5 percent of the seats. In three-...
Reversing Climate Change by Pulling Carbon Out of the Air
19 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Let’s face it. The United States, and, really, the entire world, has squandered much of the time that has elapsed since climate change first became ...
The Uneconomics of Coal, Fracking, and Developing ANWR
11 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Many things have changed in 2020, and it’s an open question which are altered permanently and which are transitory. Work-from-home may be here to st...
Bright X-Rays, AI, and Robotic Labs—A Roadmap for Better Batteries
19 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Batteries have come a long way. What used to power flashlights and toys, Timex watches and Sony Walkmans, are now found in everything from phones and ...
Data-Free Medicine
22 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The saddest fact about the coronavirus pandemic is certainly the deaths it has already caused and the many more deaths to come before the world gets t...
5G Cellular Spectrum Auction—Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard
08 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Federal Communications Commission's very first cellular spectrum allocation was a messy affair. The U.S. was divided up into 120 cellular markets,...
Polling Is Too Hard—for Humans
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1936, after polling its readers, the Literary Digest famously predicted a landslide victory for Alf Landon. On 2 November 1948, based on widespread...
Can Detroit Catch Tesla?
24 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If any cars are mobile phones with wheels, it’s electric cars. And just as the switch from landline phones to mobile phones was quick, and from comp...
Telemedicine Comes to the Operating Room
10 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A modern hospital operating room often has someone you never see on television: a medical device company representative. The device might be a special...
The Battle for Videogame Culture Isn’t Playstation vs Xbox
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
November is a big month for the millions of people who devote their time and money to computer games. Within a two-day period Sony will be releasing i...
5G, Robotics, AVs, and the Eternal Problem of Latency
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Engineers will tell you that for an orchestra to rehearse remotely, it would need at least 500 megabits per second to avoid throwing off the synchroni...
Are Electronic Media Any Good at Getting Out the Vote?
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Get Out the Vote, co-authors Donald Green and Alan Gerber argue that political consultants and campaign managers have underappreciated boots-on-the...
Going Carbon-Negative—Starting with Vodka
20 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, two Google engineers, writing in the pages of IEEE Spectrum, noted that “if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-...
The Problem of Filter Bubbles Hasn’t Gone Away
15 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2011, the former executive director of MoveOn gave a widely-viewed TED talk, “Beware Online Filter Bubbles“ that became a 2012 book and a start...
Fake News Is a Huge Problem, Unless It’s Not
13 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Despite what you think, fake news is a tiny fraction of our news diet, according to Jennifer Allen, a Ph.D. student at the MIT Sloan School of Manage...
Reimagining Public Buses in the Age of Uber
08 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Marchetti’s Constant, named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, is the average time people spend on their daily commute, which is approximatel...
The Problem of Old Code and Older Coders
06 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed any number of weaknesses in our technologies, business models, medical systems, media, and more. Perhaps none is ...
Why Does the U.S. Have Three Electrical Grids?
01 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Electricity is the key to modern life as we know it, and yet, universal, reliable service remains an unsolved problem. By one estimate, a billion peop...
Banking, Cash, and the Future of Money
29 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We’re used to the idea of gold and silver being used as money, but in the in the 1600s, Sweden didn’t have a lot of gold and silver—not enough t...
Spotify, Machine Learning, and the Business of Recommendation Engines
23 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
You’re surely familiar—though you may not know it by name—with the Paradox of Choice; we’re surrounded by it: 175 salad dressing choices, 80,0...