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A recent scroll through social media got me thinking about trust. About half my feed was filled with AI slop that astute users would call out as being machine-generated, often to the embarrassment of the rube who unknowingly spread it and sometimes to the delight of the poster who shared it deliberately because they found it amusing or useful for sowing confusion. Remember the good old days of GPT-3 when we could ask the chatbot anything and it would almost instantly and very confidently spit ba

At the turn of the last century, the automobile industry was still new and evolving rapidly. In 1898, there were about 50 carmakers in the United States. A decade later, that number had increased fivefold. In 1901, the companies produced 7,000 vehicles. By 1910, production had reached 181,000. For several decades, electric cars vied with those powered by steam and internal combustion, and nobody was sure which technology would come out on top. Steam had the legacy of locomotive technology behind

This article is brought to you by Qualcomm Technologies. For many consumers, much of the promise and appeal of AI is personal. Consumers are looking past generic tools and want to know how these technologies will help them in their daily lives. These trends coincide with the advent of new classes of wearable devices that, in addition to being able to leverage powerful frontier models, feature built-in intelligence that understand the context of a user. Where are they? What are they seeing and he

Modern engineering projects increasingly combine human judgment with machine capability. An engineer can define a problem, then ask an artificial intelligence tool to search relevant research and technical standards, generate design options, test them in simulation, and compare the results. The engineer can then bring the results to specialists who understand the parts AI cannot judge on its own, such as whether a design can be built safely, whether it makes sense in a particular setting, or how

In the cockpit of Beta Technologies’ Alia CX300, pilot Chris Caputo steers onto Runway 33 at Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport in Vermont. Cleared for takeoff, he releases the brakes and nudges the throttle forward. At the back of the aircraft, the five-blade pusher propeller snaps awake, and the Alia bolts forward. There’s no shriek of a turbofan spooling up, no shudder of a piston engine, and no wait for thrust. Just the low hum of an electric motor and a shove of instant accelera

Science has a spam problem. And the spam filter is getting clogged up. According to all reports, academic publishing is drowning in what has come to be called AI slop: low-quality, mass-produced content generated with AI. By 2025, an estimated 57 percent of all published academic articles exhibited detectable evidence of large language model (LLM) influence, a massive jump from 12 percent in 2023. What’s more, over 12 percent of Nature Communications reviews were found to be completely AI-genera

IEEE recently released the IEEE Xplore AI Research Suite, built on the full text of millions of peer-reviewed publications in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The library offers full-text access to IEEE standards, journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and more. Researchers who use the AI suite to search the digital library receive answers grounded in verified scientific results, ensuring a high level of accuracy and trust. The suite is available as an optional subscription upgrade to all

Like many a nerd, I have a certain fascination with locks. This originates in reading the memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman as a teenager, in which Richard Feynman recounts picking locks and cracking combinations while at his day job working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. I currently have a couple of locksport pick sets and training locks that I purchased at hacker conferences over the years (although I’m still terrible at it), and I delight in the YouTube exploits of folks like

I step into the warm moist air among the columns of the pines, their net of twigs and roots complex as any lines of code. The trees purify and anchor. Their branches balance my restlessness. Their calling is to be present, mine to develop apps. Our tasks verge toward a common logic: living filaments of root, of interface.

Many engineers are more comfortable working behind the scenes developing technology than speaking to consumers about products. But Preethi Ashwath has learned to take center stage, talking about the “hearable” and wearable devices she has had a hand in developing as an analog integrated circuit designer in the consumer electronics division at Analog Devices of Wilmington, Mass. The IEEE member is one of the few women who work in the specialized field, where about 11 percent are female, according

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! If you’re an engineer, you may feel like your skills aren’t commanding the premium they once did. Many engineers have faced layoffs or restructuring. But even for those of us who still have jobs, something corrosive is happening. You may have heard so

When San Antonio–based software engineer Nikhil Jathar first went to Washington, D.C., to advocate for federal support for technology education and research funding, he was in awe of the opportunity. It was spring of 2025, not long after Jathar settled in the United States from India, when he got an invitation to join the annual Congressional Visits Day organized by IEEE-USA. “My first reaction was, ‘Wow, I get to visit Congress,’ ” says Jathar, CTO of AvanSaber, a business software company he c

IEEE Life Fellow Manfred “Fred” J. Schindler has been elected as the 2027 IEEE president-elect. He will begin serving as president on 1 January 2028. Schindler, who was nominated by the IEEE Board of Directors, received 16,421 votes in the election. Senior Member David Alan Koehler received 13,874 votes. Schindler’s Top 3 Goals as President-Elect Strengthen IEEE’s connection with industry by coordinating events across geography, industry, and technology to revitalize professional activities, esp

Ellia Lebleu is a founding member of the WikiProject AI Cleanup, a volunteer effort launched in 2023 to find and remove AI-generated material from Wikipedia that breaks the website’s guidelines. When the cleanup began, AI writing was often betrayed by conspicuous clichés. Today, the project’s volunteers are developing tools to detect subtler forms of machine-generated content and debating AI’s role in the world’s most widely used encyclopedia. When did you realize Wikipedia had a problem with AI

Advancing technology for the benefit of humanity isn’t just the tagline for IEEE’s mission as a public charity. It’s something that the organization’s more than 500,000 members strive to do all the time. IEEE’s recently released 2025 Social Impact Report showcases a variety of programs volunteers worked on to increase public awareness of technology’s impact on society, many of which The Institute covered. Here is a selection of the programs from the report, with links to our related articles: Sh

Agility Robotics, the company I cofounded out of my robotics lab at Oregon State University in 2015, has just launched Digit 5. It’s designed to be the first humanoid robot that can safely and economically do useful work at scale, allowing us to bring tens of thousands of humanoid workers into the real world. Engineered to lift 23-kilogram bins onto high shelves and with a battery that can run for 90 minutes on a 9-minute charge, Digit 5’s goal is to handle heavy warehouse tasks shift after shif