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How digital tools can help heal political divisions

Audrey Tang flashes Vulcan salute
Audrey Tang, who served as Taiwan’s first minister of digital affairs, flashes a Vulcan greeting. (Photo © 2025 Danny Ngan / dannyngan.com)

This is a story about how digital tools helped government officials regain the trust of the electorate — but it’s not a science-fiction tale about a future Reunited States of America. Instead, it’s a story about Taiwan, as told by Audrey Tang, the country’s first minister of digital affairs and first transgender cabinet minister.

“It is not inevitable for social media to polarize people,” Tang, who now serves as Taiwan’s cyber ambassador-at-large, said this week at Town Hall Seattle. “It is a consequence of the design of the platform. So, we began bridging systems using our own pro-social media tools.”

Tang traced Taiwan’s moves toward pro-social digital governance during a Seattle Arts & Lectures presentation that also featured a follow-up fireside chat with Ted Chiang, a Seattle-area science-fiction author who has written commentaries on the social impacts of technology for The New Yorker and The New York Times.

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GeekWire

Eviation suspends work on its electric airplane project

Eviation airplane takeoff
Eviation’s Alice electric airplane takes off for its first flight test in 2022. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation Aircraft has laid off most of its employees and paused work on its electric-powered Alice airplane, which had its first and only flight test more than two years ago.

In an emailed statement, Eviation CEO Andre Stein said a temporary pause was necessary in order to focus on “identifying the right long-term partnerships to help us make electric commercial regional flight a reality.”

“We at Eviation are proud of what we have accomplished in advancing electric flight,” Stein said. “This decision was not made lightly.”

Stein’s statement did not refer to layoffs, but citing unnamed sources, The Air Current and The Seattle Times reported that Eviation laid off most of its staff last week as the company sought further funding to continue development of the Alice airplane. As of last month, Pitchbook reported that Eviation had 64 employees.

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Cosmic Tech

Boom goes supersonic with XB-1 jet’s flight test

Boom's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft in flight
Boom Supersonic's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft has achieved a top speed of Mach 1.1. (Boom Supersonic Photo)

Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator aircraft broke the sound barrier during a flight test today, becoming the first civilian jet plane to go supersonic in 22 years.

“Supersonic civil flight is back,” Boom CEO Blake Scholl declared in a posting to X / Twitter.

XB-1 exceeded Mach 1 three times during the 33-minute flight, which was conducted from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. Boom said the top speed was Mach 1.122, or 750 mph, and the plane reached an altitude of 35,290 feet.

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GeekWire

How to tame AI: More regulations, or maybe a boycott?

Gary Marcus and Ted Chiang on stage
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, left, chats with science-fiction author Ted Chiang at Town Hall Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Have the risks of artificial intelligence risen to the point where more regulation is needed? Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus argues that the federal government — or maybe even international agencies — will need to step in.

The Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Aviation Administration could provide a model, Marcus said last week during a fireside chat with Seattle science-fiction author Ted Chiang at Town Hall Seattle.

“I think we would like to have something like an FDA-like approval process if somebody introduces a new form of AI that has considerable risks,” Marcus said. “There should be some way of regulating that and saying, ‘Hey, what are the costs? What are the benefits? Do the benefits to society really outweigh the costs?’”

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GeekWire

Microsoft and Atom push ahead on the quantum frontier

Atom Computing quantum computer in server room
Atom Computing is working with Microsoft on fault-tolerant quantum computers. (Atom Computing Photo)

Microsoft and Atom Computing say they’ve reached a new milestone in their effort to build fault-tolerant quantum computers that can show an advantage over classical computers.

Microsoft says it will start delivering the computers’ quantum capabilities to customers by the end of 2025, with availability via the Azure cloud service as well as through on-premises hardware.

“Together, we are co-designing and building what we believe will be the world’s most powerful quantum machine,” Jason Zander, executive vice president at Microsoft, said in a LinkedIn posting.

Like other players in the field, Microsoft’s Azure Quantum team and Atom Computing aim to capitalize on the properties of quantum systems — where quantum bits, also known as qubits, can process multiple values simultaneously. That’s in contrast to classical systems, which typically process ones and zeros to solve algorithms.

Microsoft has been working with Colorado-based Atom Computing on hardware that uses the nuclear spin properties of neutral ytterbium atoms to run quantum calculations. One of the big challenges is to create a system that can correct the errors that turn up during the calculations due to quantum noise. The solution typically involves knitting together “physical qubits” to produce an array of “logical qubits” that can correct themselves.

In a paper posted to the ArXiv preprint server, members of the research team say they were able to connect 256 noisy neutral-atom qubits using Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system in such a way as to produce a system with 24 logical qubits.

“This represents the highest number of entangled logical qubits on record,” study co-author Krysta Svore, vice president of advanced quantum development for Microsoft Azure Quantum, said today in a blog posting. “Entanglement of the qubits is evidenced by their error rates being significantly below the 50% threshold for entanglement.”

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Fiction Science Club

Why it’ll get harder to draw the line between AI and us

Scene from "Blade Runner 2049"
The movie “Blade Runner 2049” blurs the line between humans and machines. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Some say artificial intelligence will be humanity’s greatest helper. Others warn that AI will become humanity’s most dangerous rival. But maybe there’s a third alternative — with AI agents achieving the status of personhood alongside their human brethren.

The potential for that scenario is the focus of a newly published book titled “The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood.” The author, Duke University law professor James Boyle, says the book has been more than a decade in the making — which suggests more than the usual prescience about the tech world’s current fascination with AI.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, he recalls the reaction he received when he shared his early ideas about the book with federal judges more than a dozen years ago..

“They’re like, ‘Rights are reserved for humans, naturally born of women!’ OK, well, not necessarily a great crowd,” says Boyle, founder of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “Obviously, things have changed since then. The book seems perhaps less unhinged now than it did then.”

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GeekWire

Ultra Safe Nuclear heads for bankruptcy and sale

Illustration: Cutaway view of USNC's MMR nuclear reactor design
An artist’s conception shows a cutaway view of a Micro Modular Reactor system. (USNC Illustration)

Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. says it has filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition as part of a court-supervised process that will lead to its purchase through a public auction.

The process also involves what’s known as a stalking-horse bid for USNC’s assets, amounting to $28 million from Standard Nuclear Inc. The purchase agreement with Standard Nuclear is meant to set a floor for the bidding.

The bankruptcy filing covers USNC as well as its subsidiaries, USNC-Tech, USNC-Power and Global First Power. USNC says it has asked the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware for approval to complete the transaction in December.

USNC’s primary projects focus on the development of microencapsulated nuclear fuel and advanced modular reactors that would be smaller and more efficient than traditional nuclear power plants. The company has also been working on radioisotope batteries and other nuclear technologies for NASA and the Pentagon. One of its projects, aimed at developing designs for space-based nuclear thermal propulsion systems, was set up in collaboration with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and other partners.

Debtor-in-possession financing will keep USNC running during the sale process, the company said.

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Fiction Science Club

How to track untrue tales in the disinformation war

Illustration: A stream of words relating to disinformation superimposed on a hand holding a mobile device
Online tools fuel an arms race between purveyors of disinformation and those who defend against it. (Credit: Skorzewiak / Bigstock.com)

Artificial intelligence is fueling an arms race between the purveyors of disinformation and those who are fighting it in this year’s high-stakes political campaign, but the best tool to defend against fake news is honest-to-goodness human intelligence.

That’s how two expert observers size up the escalating information war in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

“As a longtime AI researcher, I’ve become a huge fan of human intelligence,” says Oren Etzioni, the founder of Seattle-based TrueMedia.org, which uses AI to distinguish between genuine and faked photos and videos. “So, the first, second and third defense has to be media literacy and appropriate skepticism about what you see.”

Annalee Newitz, the author of “Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind,” agrees that humans are “the most important part of the loop” in the fight against disinformation..

“We need technical tools. We need things like TrueMedia. We need access to APIs for social media platforms so that researchers can provide tools like TrueMedia for text and for posts that are mostly text-based,” Newitz says. “But ultimately, it is about people being wary of what they read that’s passed to them by any platform that they’re on, even if it’s something they hear from their neighbors.”

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GeekWire

Space venture veterans boldly go on a Startup Trek

Candid photo of Andrew Woodfield and Chris Le
Andrew Woodfield and Chris Le are the founding partners of Actuate Ventures. (Photo Courtesy of Chris Le)

Two former employees of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company are striking out on their own with Actuate Ventures, a venture studio that specializes in supporting startups in the space industry and other deep-tech markets.

Actuate’s founding partners, Chris Le and Andrew Woodfield, set up shop less than a year ago — but the studio is already building up connections with collaborators, investors and entrepreneurs. This week, they’re participating in events at SF Tech Week, and they’re also in the midst of a campaign to create their first $25 million venture fund for investment.

Le said it’s not just about the money. “We think of ourselves as ‘co-founders in a box,’” he told me. “The venture studio model in particular is a hybrid. It’s like if an incubator and a VC had a baby. We’re here to be in it with you and help grow your company, and not just be a check in the door.”

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GeekWire

OceanGate tale gets new twists as hearings wrap up

Coast Guard's Jamie Frederick at hearing
Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, at center, testifies at a hearing looking into last year’s loss of the Titan sub. (Coast Guard Photo)

The tragic tale of OceanGate’s Titan submersible took on a few added twists today as the U.S. Coast Guard concluded two weeks of public hearings into last year’s catastrophic loss of the sub and its crew.

One former employee of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate quoted the company’s CEO as saying years earlier that he’d “buy a congressman” if the Coast Guard stood in the way of Titan’s development. And the master of Titan’s mothership told investigators that he felt a “shudder” on the sea around the time that the sub imploded on June 18, 2023.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the sub’s pilot, was among the five who died as Titan made its last descent to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The others were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and citizen explorer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business magnate Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Rush’s determination to dive to the Titanic, despite the warnings he received from OceanGate employees and outside engineers, emerged as a major theme during this month’s hearings in South Carolina. Matthew McCoy, a Coast Guard veteran who worked as an operations technician at OceanGate for five months in 2017, reinforced that theme today.

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