When I first heard a banker in Dubai explain his morning routine, he laughed, but it wasn’t a true laugh. He claimed that when he opens the dashboard, eight hundred suspicious transactions that appear to be regular payments are occasionally waiting. That figure would have prompted a crisis meeting and a demanding week of forensic spreadsheets a few years ago. Even before he finishes his first cup of coffee, the majority of them have already been flagged, frozen, and routed. He claimed that the machine doesn’t sleep. Grand prix cancellations or drone headlines don’t divert the machine. The machine does…
A dead star the size of a small city spinning seven hundred times per second…
Spotlight
The King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh doesn’t seem like the birthplace of international tech regulations. Footsteps are absorbed by the thick carpets. Besides the translation headsets are half-finished coffee cups. Attendees lean forward and pay close attention as presenters go over a topic that was previously thought to be solely Californian: the proper conduct of artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley is not the source of this conversation. In collaboration with the Islamic World Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority has started to develop an ethics charter that goes beyond governing AI in the…
The sheer improbability of what the UAE has accomplished begins to feel almost surreal at a certain point, somewhere between the scientific papers and the raw data downloads. Some of the most important atmospheric data ever gathered from Mars is currently being produced by Dubai, a city most people associate with record-breaking skyscrapers and opulent hotels. And researchers are genuinely uneasy about some of what that data is revealing. Launched in the summer of 2020 and reaching Mars in February of 2021, the Hope Probe has been silently circling the Red Planet in a broad elliptical orbit, gathering data in…
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