Tag: 2016 in Review

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Why 2017 will be challenging for Boeing

Boeing logo
Boeing is headquartered in Chicago, but most of its planes are built in the Seattle area. (Boeing Photo)

As Boeing begins its second century, the Seattle-born company is facing a slew of daunting challenges. But 2017 isn’t like the 1970s, when the Boeing Bust prompted a pair of real-estate salesmen to put up a billboard reading “Will the Last Person Leaving Seattle Turn Out the Lights?”

There’s still plenty of business to keep the lights on at Boeing’s plants in Everett and Renton. The challenges have more to do with how brightly they’ll burn in the years ahead, and whether Boeing’s historical role as Puget Sound’s biggest employer will be overshadowed by other companies.

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Microsoft’s chatbot makes MIT’s worst-tech list

Tay
Tay turned into a big controversy for Microsoft. (Microsoft Illustration)

Tay, the Microsoft chatbot that pranksters trained to spew racist comments, has joined the likes of the Apple Watch and the fire-prone Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone on MIT Technology Review’s list of 2016’s biggest technology failures.

Tay had its day back in March, when it was touted as a millennial-minded AI agent that could learn more about the world through its conversations with users. It learned about human nature all too well: Mischief-makers fed its artificial mind with cuss words, racism, Nazi sentiments and conspiracy theories. Within 24 hours, Microsoft had to pull Tay offline.

Other technological missteps were rated as fails because they didn’t take off as expected, as was the case for Apple’s smartwatch; or because they took off in flames, like the batteries in the Samsung phone.

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2016: The Year in Aerospace and Science

Orbiting black holes
A visualization shows gravitational waves produced by orbiting black holes. (NASA Graphic / C. Henze)

The biggest science story of 2016 was a century in the making, and will surely earn someone a Nobel Prize. The first detection of gravitational waves from the crash of two black holes is important not only for the physics of the past and present, but for the physics of the future as well.

The discovery – made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO – serves as powerful confirmation for Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was published in 1916. It also points the way for scientists to study black holes and other exotic phenomena that can’t be observed using the traditional tools of astronomy.

“What’s really exciting is what comes next,” David Reitze, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, said when the discovery was announced in February. “I think we’re opening a window on the universe – a window of gravitational wave astronomy.”

Check out 2016’s top 10 stories and 2017’s top 5 trends on GeekWire.