Fixing the Future

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 of Fancy Bear at IEEE Spectrum, but in today's episode of Fixing the Future, Shapiro talks with Spectrum editor David Schneider about why cybersecurity can't be fixed with purely technical solutions, why the threat of cyberwarfare tends to be exaggerated, and why cyberespionage will always be with us.

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: writing code. AI programming systems like Github Copilot are primarily used by software developers as a writing partner, but no-code programming tools can also help non-programmers find new ways to use data. AI-watcher Craig Smith talks to Gina Genkina and explains how this programming ability caught researchers by surprise and how anyone can start leveraging these tools. 

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 electricity. Beyond just how neurons send electrical signals, new research is showing how ancient biological mechanisms use electricity to heal our bodies and dictate how cells behave. Adee, a former editor at IEEE Spectrum, talks with host Stephen Cass about this research and how it may even open the door to regenerative technologies that are currently science fiction.

Samuel K. Moore, IEEE Spectrum's senior editor and semiconductor beat reporter, talks about the competing technologies that hope to dramatically speed up computing, especially for machine learning. 

Charles Scalfini, the CTO of Panoramic Software, makes the case for why programmers should make the leap to functional programming, which promises more maintainable code, and eliminates some of the problems inherent to conventional languages. 

Nick Brown, vice-president of product at Truepic, describes how the company's technology and standards developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity is fighting fakes and other forms of image tampering, by securing data from the camera lens to the users' screens. 

Patients who have traumatic nerve injuries can face significant paralysis, including paraplegia and quadriplegia. Chad Bouton's research is on developing devices that can decode and recode the electrical signals that normally flow between a limb and the brain, allowing damage to be bypassed. 

One potential path to tackling climate change due to rising carbon dioxide levels is to lock the carbon dioxide away in geological reservoirs deep underground. Deep learning AI technologies can produce better models of these reservoirs, essential if they are to be used at a big enough scale to make a difference.

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 bionic-hand arms race. But are we making real progress? It’s time to ask who prostheses are really for, and what we hope they will actually accomplish. Each new multigrasping bionic hand tends to be more sophisticated but also more expensive than the last and less likely to be covered (even in part) by insurance. And as recent research concludes, much simpler and far less expensive prosthetic devices can perform many tasks equally well."

Silver Lining's executive direction Kelly Wanser explains why rising temperatures are behind the push to geoengineer the world's climate, the most plausible technologies, and why we need a lot more research to find out if it's a good idea, and if so, how to do it on a global scale. Hosted by IEEE Spectrum editor Eliza Strickland.