“We built it, we trained it, but we don’t know what it’s doing.”

—Sam Bowman, an AI professor at New York University, explains to Vox that AI companies don’t understand exactly how the tools they created work.

The big story

Humanity is stuck in short-term thinking. Here’s how we escape.

October 2020

Humans have evolved over millennia to grasp an ever-expanding sense of time. We have minds capable of imagining a future far off into the distance. Yet while we may have this ability, it is rarely deployed in daily life. If our descendants were to diagnose the ills of 21st-century civilization, they would observe a dangerous short-termism: a collective failure to escape the present moment and look further ahead.

The world is saturated in information, and standards of living have never been higher, but so often it’s a struggle to see beyond the next news cycle, political term, or business quarter. How to explain this contradiction? Why have we come to be so stuck in the “now”? Read the full story.