Fixing the Future

Fixing the Future from IEEE Spectrum magazine is a biweekly look at the cultural, business, and environmental consequences of technological solutions to hard problems like sustainability, climate change, and the ethics and scientific challenges posed by AI. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine of IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences.

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Episodes

Reimagining Public Buses in the Age of Uber

Marchetti’s Constant , named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, is the average time people spend on their daily commute, which is approximately a half-hour each way, all around the world. The average U.S. commute is about 27 minutes, up 8 percent from a decade earlier. But that averages people who walk 10 minutes to work with people who drive an hour; it averages people who have a quick subway ride and people taking two or three buses that run only infrequently. But in the mind of another...

Oct 08, 2020•19 min•Ep. 5

The Problem of Old Code and Older Coders

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed any number of weaknesses in our technologies, business models, medical systems, media, and more. Perhaps none is more exposed than what my guest today calls, “ The Hidden World of Legacy IT .” If you remember last April’s infamous call for volunteer COBOL programmers by the governor of New Jersey, when his state’s unemployment and disability benefits systems needed to be updated, that turned out to be just the tip of a ubiquitous multi-trillion-dollar iceberg...

Oct 06, 2020•16 min•Ep. 4

Why Does the U.S. Have Three Electrical Grids?

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 people still do without it. Even in a modern city like Mumbai, generators are commonplace, because of an uncertain electrical grid. This year, California once again saw rolling blackouts, and with our contemporary climate producing heat waves that can stretch from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains, they won’t be the last. Electricity is hard to...

Oct 01, 2020•24 min•Ep. 3

Banking, Cash, and the Future of Money

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 to sustain its economy. The Swedes had a lot of copper, though, so that’s what they used for their money. Copper isn’t really great for the job—it’s not nearly scarce enough—so Swedish coins were big—the largest denomination weighed forty‐three pounds and people carried them to market on their backs. So the Swedes created a bank that gave people paper mon...

Sep 29, 2020•30 min•Ep. 2

Spotify, Machine Learning, and the Business of Recommendation Engines

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, 80,000 possible Starbucks beverages, 50 different mutual funds for your retirement account. “All of this choice,” psychologists say, “starts to be not only unproductive, but counterproductive—a source of pain, regret, worry about missed opportunities, and unrealistically high expectations.” And yet, we have more choices than ever— 32,000 hours to watch on Netf...

Sep 23, 2020•27 min•Ep. 1

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