Good morning! Today: SpaceX internet satellites could double as an unjammable alternative to GPS, how to make plans during a pandemic, and the weird images that show AI is getting smarter. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. | The US Army wants to modify SpaceX’s Starlink satellites for unjammable navigation
What’s happening: SpaceX has already launched more than 700 Starlink satellites, with thousands more due to come online in the years ahead. Their prime mission is to provide high-speed internet virtually worldwide. But now research funded by the US Army has concluded that the growing mega-constellation could have a secondary purpose: by doubling as a low-cost, highly accurate and almost unjammable alternative to GPS. The research: Two researchers from the University of Texas at Austin claim to have devised a system that uses Starlink satellites, piggybacking on traditional GPS signals, to deliver location precision up to ten times as good as GPS, and much less prone to interference. Why it matters: The US military relies heavily on GPS, which can be jammed or spoofed. It would be far harder to do this using this new system. However, it would be an expensive undertaking, and would struggle to operate at the Earth’s poles. Read the full story. —Mark Harris
| | How to plan your life during a pandemic The issue: Life already felt uncertain before the pandemic thanks to automation, geopolitical tensions, and widening inequalities. Now, planning for the future can feel impossible. Even short-term decisions—What will we do this weekend? Should I send my kids to school?—now require us to process a broad set of data and considerations. What’s needed: Strategic foresight offers an alternative to unproductive worry. It’s a way of thinking that uses alternative futures to guide the decisions we make today, letting us anticipate possible circumstances and adapt to them. How to apply it in your own life: Clarify your goals, consider potential outcomes, monitor and adapt, and crucially, accept uncertainty as the norm. Read the full story. —Kristel Van der Elst is CEO of the Global Foresight Group and a fellow at the Center for Strategic Foresight of the US Government Accountability Office. | | These weird, unsettling photos show that AI is getting smarter
Hype vs reality: Of all the AI models, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has most captured the public’s imagination. It can spew short stories and songs with little prompting, and has even fooled people into thinking its outputs were written by a human. But its eloquence is more of a parlor trick, not to be confused with real intelligence.
The promise: Nonetheless, researchers think the way GPT-3 was trained (using enormous amounts of text data) could contain the secret to more advanced AI. What if the same methods were trained on both text and images? New research from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence has taken this idea to the next level, creating a new text-and-image model that can generate images from a caption. The images look unsettling, but they might demonstrate a promising new direction for achieving more generalizable intelligence, and perhaps smarter robots as well. Read the full story.
—Karen Hao | The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Over one million people have now died of covid-19 How we got to this awful milestone. ( WP $) + Cases are going up again in the US. ( Axios) + Where it’s most risky to reopen schools. ( Axios) + How to think about risk during the pandemic. ( Wired UK) + How to know when a vaccine is ready. ( Stat) 2 We should worry more about voter fraud misinformation than QAnon It’s paving the way for Trump to cast doubt on the validity of the upcoming election. ( Recode) + How QAnon spread in one town in Colorado. ( The Intercept) + How to protect your social media feeds from election misinformation. ( Recode) + Most Americans would like social media to shut down during the week of the election. ( Axios) + Ransomware could cause chaos during the election. ( NYT $) 3 Some cities want to go green post-covid 🌳 The climate crisis is a far bigger, longer-term emergency after all. ( Wired $) 4 How Signal became the app of choice for the privacy-conscious Downloads have rocketed in recent months, fueled by protests against racism and police brutality. ( Time) 5 How Amazon conquered Italy The pandemic has rapidly boosted the growth of e-commerce all over the world. ( NYT $) 6 Jewish teens say they are bombarded with anti-semitism on TikTok This isn’t something anyone should have to deal with, ever. ( NBC) + A judge has given a temporary reprieve to TikTok, letting US downloads continue. ( NBC) + A pop star says he quit TikTok for the sake of his mental health. ( BBC) 7 Why Magic Leap failed to take augmented reality mainstream Profligate spending, too much hype, and a founder that was way out of his depth. ( Bloomberg $) 8 How the pandemic is changing our dreams 🛌 More time in bed means more REM sleep, when dreams get more bizarre and memorable. ( Scientific American) 9 The troubling decline in autopsies The autopsy rate has gone from 60% in the 1960s to under 5% today, meaning the official cause of death is often wrong. ( Elemental) 10 Why Spotify is full of SEO spam artists 🎵 “Relaxing Music Therapy” and “White Noise Baby Sleep” are just two examples. ( OneZero) | | “It seemed like a cult.” —Recruiter Paul Florence gives his verdict on how eBay’s security division operated to the New York Times, as six employees face cyberstalking charges. | | | | | |
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