This Week's Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 21st)

We'll Train Them Like Dogs Jason Tanz WIRED "Whether you're a member of the coding elite or someone who barely feels competent to futz with the settings on your phone--don't get used to it. Our machines are starting to speak a different language now, one that even the best coders can't fully understand...The neural network's operations are largely opaque and inscrutable. It is, in other words, a black box. And as these black boxes assume responsibility for more and more of our daily digital tasks, they are not only going to change our relationship to technology--they are going to change how we think about ourselves, our world, and our place within it." Drew Endy and Laurie Zoloth Cosmos Magazine "In a world where human reproduction has already become a competitive marketplace, with eggs, sperm and embryos carrying a price, it is easy to make up far stranger uses of human genome synthesis capacities...Given that human genome synthesis is a technology that can completely redefine the core of what now joins all of humanity together as a species, we argue that discussions of making such capacities real, like today's Harvard conference, should not take place without open and advance consideration of whether it is morally right to proceed."