You’re at work, flipping through emails that hang in mid-air. Graphs, text messages and pictures pop up on your desk, then disappear. Bored, you sit back and watch a jellyfish bob across the ceiling.

This is augmented reality – real life only better, bedazzled with digital displays. AR is the next futuristic fantasy the tech industry wants to conquer, and in 2017 it may finally happen.

You can watch demo of the above scene courtesy of secretive Florida start-up Magic Leap. This shows a head-mounted display overlaying surroundings with a broad array of eye-popping graphics — including a game in which you shoot enemy robots as they pop up around you. The release date for Magic Leap’s technology is still unknown – it may be a few years off yet – but you can already get a taste of some AR experiences.

This year, California-based developer Niantic released the AR smartphone game Pokémon Go and Microsoft started shipping the HoloLens, a headset that lets you interact with digital displays only you can see. You could also pick up Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro, the first phone to use Google’s Tango AR platform. Tango apps include an AR tape measure tool, a solar system simulator and a shopping tool that lets you see how furniture would look in your home.

“Your surroundings will be overlaid with eye-popping graphics”

AR enthusiasts envisage the technology being used in the workplace, as well as just for fun. Factory workers could learn to use a new machine with a hands-on tutorial, architects could walk through their vision for a restored building, and police officers could get a different perspective on a crime scene. Meanwhile, gamers could play on battlefields that appear right around them rather than on screen.

But like any invention, AR might take a while to get used to. Pokémon Go already upset some people who didn’t want the animated monsters popping up in homes, museums or cemeteries.

Expect such issues to crop up again as we work out the rules for what we do and don’t accept in the AR world. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for things that don’t quite belong.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Real life gets an upgrade”

“A robot must be able to make appropriate choices if it is to work alongside humans in daily life”

Employers: do the ladies on your payroll have any “female weaknesses” that would make them mentally or physically unfit for the job?

The question comes to you courtesy of the year 1943. It was posed in a , written for the flummoxed male supervisors at Transportation Magazine tasked with integrating a new female workforce during a wartime shortage of manpower.

Back then, you wouldn’t be surprised to see logical reasoning like “Men are to programmers as women are to homemakers”. Or “Men are to surgeons what women are to nurses”. Or “Men are bosses. Women are receptionists”.

But to have these associations littering software in 2016? That’s exactly what at Microsoft Research and his colleagues found at the Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning workshop in New York City. The group let a data mining algorithm loose on Google news articles, where it examined the word associations it found there. When they scoured the associations it had come up with, they discovered a trove of familiar stereotypes coded into occupations, with some weighed heavily as either masculine or feminine. The sexism was straight out of the 1943 playbook, with jobs ranked as male including philosopher, captain, warrior and boss. The top jobs on the “she” end of the spectrum? Homemaker, nurse and receptionist.

It’s tempting to throw your hands up and blame sexism in the tech industry, but the story is more subtle than that. The problem is partly down to the way computers learn our language – and all the inadvertent sexist, racist and otherwise unsavory predispositions it carries.

Picasso = painter

When we humans hear a word like “rose”, it might elicit a rush of related memories and associations: romance, the color red, Shakespeare’s famous line.

But for a machine, there aren’t many clues about meaning in the arrangement of a handful of letters. So, to help computers form associations, programmers often turn to a popular technique called “word-embedding”. The computer crunches through a pile of text, mapping words as “vectors” that demonstrate their relationships to each other.

Through these maps, machines can learn the subtle linguistic links that come intuitively to humans. For example, a king and a queen pair together – they’re both royalty – but one is male and the other female. It’s similar for uncle and aunt. Einstein was the scientist and Picasso the painter. Beijing is probably the capital of China, not Germany. Pile all these relationships together, and you’ve got some semblance of meaning.

Inevitably, less agreeable associations are also hiding in those calculations, and these are what Kalai has been hunting. He thinks it’s valuable to find these flaws, because technology has so much power to amplify our stereotypes. Imagine, for example, that you’re doing a web search for “CMU computer science phD student”. The search engine wants to give you the most relevant results, so perhaps it decides to show you links to male students first, sidelining women to the second page. In an unfortunate loop, this also makes women look even less likely to be programmers, reinforcing the bias.

This mechanism can launder a multitude of sins. In of word-embeddings, and his colleagues at Princeton University looked at how closely words were associated with pleasant terms (“love”, “peace”, “happy”) and unpleasant ones (“death”, “disaster”, “vomit”). Flowers, for example, mapped more closely to pleasant words, while insects related more closely to the unpleasant. Musical instruments ranked as more pleasant than weapons.

Again, worrisome relationships surfaced. Female names were more closely associated with home and the arts, while male names dovetailed with career and mathematics. It wasn’t just sexism: European-American names (Adam, Stephanie, Greg) ranked as more “pleasant” than African-American names (Darnell, Yolanda). “We have found every linguistic bias we looked for,” they write.

Lazy bias

What should we make of findings like these? Well, in short, even the most unbiased algorithm is going to flag up the biases of a slanted culture. If you don’t take steps to remove it, you should assume prejudice is well-represented in all your software. Worse: if you don’t get rid of it, the glossy appearance of impartiality conferred by search engines and algorithms could actually amplify our subtle biases, Kalai says.

It’s a lesson we keep having to re-learn. We learned it when it came out that Google serves higher-paying job ads to men, or that Uber drivers cancel more often on riders of colour, or that artificially intelligent hiring programs or sentencing programs might carry historical baggage.

So how do we get rid of it? It’s less about stamping out prejudice than about not being lazy, says , a web developer in San Francisco. His imaginary culprits are tech bros “Chad and Brad” – “mental shorthand for developers who are just trying to crush out some code on deadline, and don’t think about the wider consequences of their actions,” explained Cegłowski at a talk this month at the Direction16 conference in Sydney, Australia. They don’t mean to algorithmically punish you for being female or having an ethnic name or living in a low-income neighborhood. They were just hustling to push a product out. “The tech industry slaps this stuff together in the expectation that the social implications will take care of themselves.”

Perhaps we could make algorithms that can strip these mistakes back out of software. Kalai’s group has come up with tools to tweak the word maps without losing much of the original meaning. For example, certain words could be reset to gender-neutral. Other words, like “grandma” and “grandpa”, could be “equalised”, making them more similar in meaning without losing the gender essential to their definition.

Their group is hopeful, and maybe we can be too. After all, we know to laugh ruefully when we see the language of 1943. Maybe we can teach our machines the same trick.

Life, but not as we know it

IN 1848, the US and Mexico drew a line. The Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty – and then the Gadsden Treaty a few years later – established an agreement about where the boundary between the two countries lay. Markers made out of stone, marble or iron were placed along the border, spaced a few kilometres apart.

Today, 276 of these obelisks dot the boundary, and thanks to Donald Trump, this strip is more contentious than ever. David Taylor, a photographer in Arizona, first saw one for himself years ago, on a drive out from his then hometown in New Mexico. “I was captivated by them,” he says. “The monuments have been a witness to our changing national identity.”

Taylor made it his mission to visit every single one. On and off over seven years, he explored the 690-mile stretch between the first obelisk near Mount Cristo Rey and the last at Playas de Tijuana. Each was slightly different. One obelisk might be sitting smack in the middle of a busy port of entry, covered in graffiti. Another might be found alone in the Chihuahuan desert, little changed since its installation in the 1800s.

In this photo (top), you see Monument No. 250, located near CaÑon del Padre beside a 5.5-metre-tall fence. Below is Monument No. 1 on the border of Texas and New Mexico, near the town of El Paso.

As for Trump’s wall, Taylor is sceptical. “The border is not impermeable. The likelihood that the border is ever going to be impermeable is probably fantasy.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “The invisible boundary”

Ready or not, here they come. On 19 November, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District gave the green light to a controversial plan to test genetically engineered male mosquitoes.

The mosquitoes – developed by UK biotechnology firm Oxitec – carry a gene that makes their offspring die early. By letting the GM mozzies mate with native female mosquitoes in the wild, the idea is to slash the population of mosquitoes carrying dangerous diseases such as Zika and dengue.

Similar initiatives have already been successful. One trial in Piracicaba, Brazil, also led by Oxitec, reportedly reduced dengue cases by more than 90 per cent.

The Florida trial in Key West would only last a few months, ending when the last of the modified mosquitoes die off. In August, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the plan, saying that it would have “no significant impact” on the environment in the long-term.

Floridians, too, have voted in favour of it, endorsing a ballot measure earlier this month.

Local opposition

But in Key Haven, the part of Key West where the trial will occur, 65 per cent of residents oppose the idea.

One , started by a Key West resident, raises concerns that the trial will harm Key Haven’s environment and residents. It says: “There are more questions than answers and we need more testing to be done.”

The spread of Zika earlier this year was especially worrying in the state, which – although none in Key West. Last week, the that Zika is no longer an international public health emergency.

The opposition among Key Haven residents means the Oxitec team may need to find a new location for the trial.

Costly care

Let me hear your body talk. A new electronic tattoo picks up on subtle noises inside the human body, including the sound of your heart, muscles and gastrointestinal tract.

The skin patch could be used in medical monitoring, to detect irregular heartbeats, for example. It could also act as a human-machine interface to use your voice to control a video games.

“Our body generates a lot of different sounds,” says at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “By designing sensors with a lightweight and thin construction, we are able to capture sounds or vibration signals from our skin.”

The device consists of sensors encased in a flexible silicone shell and flanked on either side by electrodes. It sticks to the skin like a plaster or temporary tattoo and measures just 20 millimetres across. You can stick it on almost any part of the body and it will pick up sounds and vibrations from 0.5 to 550 Hertz – everything from a heartbeat to speech.

The team thinks the patch could be useful for monitoring a broad range of medically significant sounds. In one demonstration, they asked eight people at Camp Lowell Cardiology clinic in Tucson, Arizona, to wear it on their chest. The device detected the patients’ heart murmurs and could tell what type they were, an echocardiogram confirmed.

The researchers think the patch could keep tabs on biological implants, alerting doctors to potential medical issues or mechanical failures. As an experiment they introduced blood clots into a heart pump called a left ventricular assistive device, or LVAD. The blood clots changed the sound made by the LVAD, an anomaly the technology should be able to pick up.

Liu says the patch could also enable people to communicate with drones or prosthetics by voice command.

In one experiment, the team placed the device on people’s throats and set them up with a voice-controlled game of Pac-Man. The sensors listened to the vibrations of the players’ vocal cords, as they said “up”, “down”, “left” or “right” to move the Pac-Man avatar in real time (see video).

As the patch uses vibrations, it can pick out what people are saying even if the sound of their voice is drowned out by background noise, which offers an advantage over other voice control systems.

An algorithm learned to recognise these four basic commands, which the patch was able to capture in quiet and noisy conditions.

“What you’re capturing is the vibration directly from your throat,” says Liu. “If you capture signals of this kind directly, you’re basically immune from all these surrounding noises.”

“This type of signal – these low-frequency signals that one can get from muscle activities, from the heart, all of that – basically opens a new dimension of information, extra to the one that is typically recorded,” says at Imperial College London in the UK.

He says the miniaturisation of electronics and the development of biocompatible materials have made such devices possible.

“The way this collection of known technologies is used to produce something that is actually comfortable and usable by a patient – that is what I would call the added value here,” he says.

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“Cybersickness sets in when people get disconnected from the physical reality of their body“

They say you reap what you sow. The US is just weeks away from handing over massive surveillance powers to a man who has expressed enthusiasm for the idea of spying on those he sees as adversaries.

It’s common knowledge that the US collects massive amounts of data on phone and internet communications involving both its own citizens and people abroad. The National Security Agency (NSA) can read text messages, track social media activity and hack into your computer’s webcam. Since Edward Snowden’s revelations on spying in 2013, US president Barack Obama has been criticised by privacy activists for not doing enough to curb such programmes.

Now, his failure to act threatens to turn into a cautionary tale with a dark moral: don’t build a surveillance state, because you don’t know who will end up in charge of it.

During his campaign, president-elect Donald Trump railed against Apple when the tech giant resisted unlocking the iPhone of one of the perpetrators of the mass shooting in San Bernadino, California. In July, he invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton and publish her deleted emails.

He has also spoken in favour of allowing the surveillance of mosques in the US, as New York City did after the 9/11 attacks, and of asking Muslims to register in a federal database and authorising the NSA to collect metadata. “,” he said last year.

When Trump takes office in January, how will he decide to wield the government’s surveillance powers? He could try to roll back the reforms that Obama has put in place, such as limitations on when the agency can collect people’s data and how it can be stored. He can decide which countries the US spies on. He might choose to push much harder against companies that decline to build government “back doors” to their technology.

Trump has also promised to exact revenge on personal enemies, such as the women who accused him of sexual assault. Back when details of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping came to light, analysts were caught snooping on their partners and love interests. Could Trump take similar advantages?

Wider implications

Meanwhile, the Open Rights Group, a digital rights organisation in London, has raised questions about what Trump’s election might mean for UK citizens. On Wednesday, its executive director, Jim Killock, that security agency GCHQ has worked closely in the past with the NSA, sharing hacking tools and collected data. “We rely so much on US technology and data that it poses questions for our sovereignty,” he writes. “Will Trump threaten the UK with the removal of key technologies, if our government steps out of line?”

Since the election, privacy activists have advised the public to switch to secure platforms, such as internet browser Tor or encrypted messaging apps like Signal or Telegram.

Some wonder what, if anything, Obama could do to dismantle the government’s surveillance powers before he steps down in January. Fight for the Future, a non-profit organisation in Boston, Massachusetts, has called on the president to “”, deleting all data on US citizens and taking down the infrastructure used to collect it. “If Trump wants to spy on hundreds of millions of Americans, make him build this capacity from scratch,” it says.

“The powers of one government are inherited by the next. Reforming them is now the greatest responsibility of this president, long overdue,” Edward Snowden on Thursday. “To be clear, ‘this president’ means this president, right now. Not the next one. There is still time to act.”