I don’t know if Spar is right about what the future holds, but her view of the present reveals some limitations. “‘Trans’ is also the perfect segue — the transition, literally — between the changing worlds of reproduction and robotics,” she writes. In “Sex Robots and Vegan Meat,” the journalist Jenny Kleeman looks toward the future from a very different vantage point. Like Spar, Kleeman is interested in technologies of sex, reproduction, gender and death; she also takes on food, investigating the cluster of start-ups that are engineering artificial meat. Kleeman approaches the future as a reporter firmly grounded in the present; her method is to journey to the frontier and take a long look around.

Source: New York Times September 11, 2020 09:00 UTC