This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Why virologists are getting increasingly nervous about bird flu

Bird flu has been spreading in dairy cows in the US—and the scale is likely to be far worse than it looks. In addition, 14 human cases have been reported in the US since March. Both are worrying developments, say virologists, who fear that the country’s meager response to the virus is putting the entire world at risk of another pandemic.

Infections in dairy cattle, first reported back in March, brought us a step closer to human spread. Since then, the situation has only deteriorated. The virus appears to have passed from cattle to poultry on multiple occasions, and worse, this form of bird flu that is now spreading among cattle could find its way back into migrating birds. If that’s the case, we can expect these birds to take the virus around the world.

So far, although the virus has mutated, it hasn’t acquired any more dangerous mutations—yet. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

AI-generated content doesn’t seem to have swayed recent European elections 

The news: AI-generated falsehoods and deepfakes seem to have had virtually no effect on election results in Europe this year, according to new research. 

The bigger picture: Since the beginning of the generative-AI boom, there has been widespread worry that AI tools could boost bad actors’ ability to spread fake content with the potential to interfere with elections or even sway the results. Those fears now seem unwarranted. The Alan Turing Institute identified just 16 cases of AI-enabled falsehoods or deepfakes that went viral during the UK general election and only 11 cases in the EU and French elections combined, none of which appeared to definitively sway the results. 

Why it matters: These findings are in line with recent warnings from experts that the focus on AI’s role in elections is distracting us from deeper and longer-lasting threats to democracy. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

How AI can help spot wildfires

Anything from stray fireworks to lightning strikes can start a wildfire. While it’s natural for many ecosystems to see some level of fire activity, the hotter, drier conditions brought on by climate change are fueling longer fire seasons with larger fires that burn more land.

This means that the need to spot wildfires earlier is becoming ever more crucial. Some groups are turning to technology to help, including a new effort from Google to fund an AI-powered wildfire-spotting satellite constellation. 

Casey Crownhart, our senior climate reporter, has dug into how this project fits into the world of fire-detection tech and some of the challenges that lie ahead. Read what she found.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: The entrepreneur dreaming of a factory of unlimited organs

At any given time, the US organ transplant waiting list is about 100,000 people long. Martine Rothblatt sees a day when an unlimited supply of transplantable organs—and 3D-printed ones—will be readily available, saving countless lives.

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast. In partnership with News Over Audio, we’ll be making a selection of our stories available, each one read by a professional voice actor. You’ll be able to listen to them on the go or download them to listen to offline.

We’re publishing a new story each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, including some taken from our most recent print magazine. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Israel’s exploding pagers contained batteries laced with explosives 
The devices started shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022. (NYT $)
+ Walkie-talkies detonated across the city yesterday/. (Wired $)
+ Securing electronic supply chains against threats is virtually impossible. (WP $)
+ That doesn’t mean you should fret about your smartphone, though. (The Atlantic $)

2 The European Union has a warning for Apple
Open up your operating systems or face the consequences. (Bloomberg $)

3 The US and allies have thwarted a massive Chinese spy network
The botnet managed to infiltrate sensitive organizations across the world. (WP $)
+ Elsewhere, police have broken into an encrypted criminal app. (440 Media)

4 X temporarily started working in Brazil again
Brazilian officials suspect it was a deliberate technical maneuver. (The Guardian)
+ X, which is banned in Brazil, insists the return was inadvertent. (FT $)

5 This startup wants to flog Greenland’s water to the world
But selling melting glaciers is… not a great look. (Wired $)
+ The radical intervention that might save the “doomsday” glacier. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Spare a thought for laid-off tech workers
It’s really tricky to pin down a new job these days. (WSJ $)
+ People are worried that AI will take everyone’s jobs. We’ve been here before. (MIT Technology Review)

7 How Reddit users are raising awareness of an unusual condition
Retrograde cricopharyngeus dysfunctionon, aka no-burp syndrome, is no joke. (Undark Magazine)

8 Netflix is combing Southeast Asia for its next viral hit
To replicate the success of Squid Game and One Piece. (Rest of World)

9 A new wave of engagement bait videos are deliberately confusing
The more confused you are, the more likely you are to keep watching. (The Atlantic $)
+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Mark Zuckerberg has invested in some serious bling
His new watch costs as much as a Cybertruck. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“It is natural that people will turn to this new technology to satisfy their fantasies.”

—Ana Ornelas, an erotic author and educator, tells Wired why current discussions around AI regulation exclude sex industry professionals’ perspectives.

The big story

Bringing the lofty ideas of pure math down to earth

April 2023

—Pradeep Niroula

Mathematics has long been presented as a sanctuary from confusion and doubt, a place to go in search of answers. Perhaps part of the mystique comes from the fact that biographies of mathematicians often paint them as otherworldly savants.

As a graduate student in physics, I have seen the work that goes into conducting delicate experiments, but the daily grind of mathematical discovery is a ritual altogether foreign to me. And this feeling is only reinforced by popular books on math, which often take the tone of a pastor dispensing sermons to the faithful.  

Luckily, there are ways to bring it back down to earth. Popular math books seek a fresher take on these old ideas, be it through baking recipes or hot-button political issues. My verdict: Why not? It’s worth a shot. Read the full story.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Take a look at the 50 New York Times’ recipes that have resonated with its readers to become instant classics ($)
+ Do you see green or blue? This test is pretty interesting.
+ Why The Matrix may be closer to fact than fiction than you may have previously believed.
+ Here’s what the pop bangers of the 17th century sounded like.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

There are more than 120 AI bills in Congress right now

More than 120 bills related to regulating artificial intelligence are currently floating around the US Congress. This flood of bills is indicative of the desperation Congress feels to keep up with the rapid pace of technological improvements. 

Because of the way Congress works, the majority of these bills will never make it into law. But simply taking a look at them all can give us insight into policymakers’ current preoccupations: where they think the dangers are, what each party is focusing on, and more broadly, what vision the US is pursuing when it comes to AI and how it should be regulated.

That’s why, with help from the Brennan Center for Justice, we’ve created a tracker with all the AI bills circulating in various committees in Congress right now, to see if there’s anything we can learn from this legislative smorgasbord. Read the full story.

—Scott J Mulligan

Here’s what I made of Snap’s new augmented-reality Spectacles

Snap has announced a new version of its Spectacles: AR glasses that could finally deliver on the promises that devices like Magic Leap, or HoloLens, or even Google Glass, made many years ago.

Our editor-in-chief Mat Honan got to try them out a couple of weeks ago. He found they packed a pretty impressive punch layering visual information and applications directly on their see-through lenses, making objects appear as if they are in the real world—if you don’t mind looking a little goofy, that is. Read Mat’s full thoughts here.

Google is funding an AI-powered satellite constellation that will spot wildfires faster

What’s happening: Early next year, Google and its partners plan to launch the first in a series of satellites that together would provide close-up, frequently refreshed images of wildfires around the world, offering data that could help firefighters battle blazes more rapidly, effectively, and safely.

Why it matters: The images and analysis will be provided free to fire agencies around the world, helping to improve understanding of where fires are, where they’re moving, and how hot they’re burning. The information could help agencies stamp out small fires before they turn into raging infernos, place limited firefighting resources where they’ll do the most good, and evacuate people along the safest paths. Read the full story.

—James Temple

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 California has passed three election deepfake laws
But only one will take effect in time for the presidential election in November. (NYT $)
+ The bills also protect actors from AI impersonation without their consent. (WP $)

2 How did thousands of Hezbollah pagers explode simultaneously?
The devices were probably intercepted by hackers during shipment. (WSJ $)
+ Here’s everything we know about the attack so far. (Vox)
+ Small lithium batteries alone don’t tend to cause this much damage. (404 Media)
+ Exploding comms devices are nothing new. (FT $)

3 Instagram has introduced new accounts specifically for teens
In response to increasing pressure over Meta’s minor protection policies. (BBC)
+ Parents will be given greater control over their activities. (The Guardian)
+ Here’s how to set up the new restricted accounts. (WP $)

4 Google has won its bid to overturn a €1.5 billion fine from the EU
But the court said it stands by the majority of the previous findings. (CNBC)
+ But the ruling can still be appealed in the Court of Justice. (Bloomberg $)
+ Meanwhile, Meta’s antitrust woes are escalating. (FT $)

5 SpaceX has been accused of breaking launch rules 
And the US Federal Aviation Administration wants to slap it with a hefty fine. (WP $)

6 Electric cars now outnumber petrol cars in Norway
It’s particularly impressive given the country’s history as an oil producer. (The Guardian)
+ Why full EVs, not hybrids, are the future. (Economist $)
+ Three frequently asked questions about EVs, answered. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Our understanding of the universe is still up in the air
What looked like a breakthrough in physics actually might not be at all. (New Scientist $)
+ Why is the universe so complex and beautiful? (MIT Technology Review)

8 Tech’s middle managers are having a tough time
They’re losing their jobs left, right and center. (Insider $)

9 YouTube astrology is booming in Pakistan
Amid economic and political turmoil, Pakistanis are seeking answers in the stars. (Rest of World)

10 Not everything bad is AI-generated
But what’s AI-generated is often bad. (NY Mag $)

Quote of the day

“I’d rather go back to school than work in an office again.”

—CJ Felli, a system development engineer for Amazon Web Services, is not happy about the company’s back-to-the-office directive, Quartz reports.

The big story

What’s next for the world’s fastest supercomputers

September 2023

When the Frontier supercomputer came online last year, it marked the dawn of so-called exascale computing, with machines that can execute an exaflop—or a quintillion (1018) floating point operations a second.

Since then, scientists have geared up to make more of these blazingly fast computers: several exascale machines are due to come online in the US and Europe in 2024.

But speed itself isn’t the endgame. Researchers hope to pursue previously unanswerable questions about nature—and to design new technologies in areas from transportation to medicine. Read the full story.

—Sophia Chen

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ These Ocean Photographer of the Year winning images are simply stunning ($)
+ Here’s where you’ll have the best chance of finding a fossilized shark tooth in the US.
+ Vans are back in style, as if they ever went out of it.
+ Potatoes are great every which way, but here’s how long to boil them for that perfect al dente bite.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Why OpenAI’s new model is such a big deal

Last week OpenAI released a new model called o1 (previously referred to under the code name “Strawberry” and, before that, Q*) that blows GPT-4o out of the water.

Unlike previous models that are well suited for language tasks like writing and editing, OpenAI o1 is focused on multistep “reasoning,” the type of process required for advanced mathematics, coding, or other STEM-based questions. The model is also trained to answer PhD-level questions in subjects ranging from astrophysics to organic chemistry.

The bulk of LLM progress until now has been language-driven, but in addition to getting lots of facts wrong, such LLMs have failed to demonstrate the types of skills required to solve important problems in fields like drug discovery, materials science, coding, or physics. OpenAI’s o1 is one of the first signs that LLMs might soon become genuinely helpful companions to human researchers in these fields. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

This designer creates magic from everyday materials

Back in 2012, designer and computer scientist Skylar Tibbits started working on 3D-printed materials that could change their shape or properties after being printed—a concept that Tibbits dubbed “4D printing,” where the fourth dimension is time.

Today, 4D printing is its own field—the subject of a professional society and thousands of papers, with researchers around the world looking into potential applications from self-adjusting biomedical devices to soft robotics.

But not long after 4D printing took off, Tibbits was already looking toward a new challenge: What other capabilities can we build into materials? And can we do that without printing? Read the full story.

—Anna Gibbs

This piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which celebrates 125 years of the magazine! If you don’t already, subscribe now to get 25% off future copies once they land.

A special preview of EmTech MIT: AI, Climate, and the new rules of business

Artificial intelligence and climate technologies are the two greatest forces impacting business decisions today. This year at EmTech MIT, our annual flagship conference, we examine the breakthroughs, concerns, and the near-future possibilities brought on by AI, as well as the climate technologies building the green economy.

Register here to join us at 12.30pm ET today for a LinkedIn event previewing everything you can expect from this year’s event.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 TikTok had a rough day in court

Federal judges questioned its argument that Congress lacks the authority to ban it. (NYT $)
+ If TikTok doesn’t break from its parent company, it’ll be banned on January 19 2025. (FT $)
+ There’s a good chance TikTok may have to escalate its fight to the Supreme Court. (Bloomberg $)
+ The depressing truth about TikTok’s impending ban. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Intel could receive up to $3 billion in chip grants
To manufacture chips for the US military. (Bloomberg $)
+ Intel’s contract manufacturing business has inked a deal with Amazon. (Reuters)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Apple’s new iOS 18 software is here
But Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI tools, is nowhere to be seen. (WSJ $)
+ The new software is much more customizable than previous versions. (Ars Technica)
+ Here are the best features worth paying attention to. (NYT $)

4 Donald Trump has launched a new cryptocurrency business
The venture looks an awful lot like a play to the crypto faithful. (CNN)
+ Trump doesn’t seem to know a great deal about crypto. (Reuters)
+ Opportunists are already taking advantage of Trump’s fans. (The Verge)

5 More Meta smartglasses are likely to be on their way
The company signed a 10-year extension deal with glasses maker EssilorLuxottica. (Reuters)

6 Working in a data center is like firefighting
Human workers are constantly on the lookout for technical issues. (WP $)

7 Googling one of art’s most famous paintings returned AI slop
Users searching for Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights were met with AI-generated garbage. (404 Media)
+ Why artists are becoming less scared of AI. (MIT Technology Review)

8 An Nvidia GPU purse can be yours for $1,024
Hype? What hype? (Insider $)
+ The company’s stranglehold on the chip industry is being closely watched. (IEEE Spectrum)

9 Can you tell blue and green apart?
A new viral test plays with our personal color perception. (The Guardian)  

10 The latest YouTube trend? 80s weather reports
Set to dreamy soundtracks. (Wired $)

Quote of the day

“The speech on TikTok is not Chinese speech. It is American speech.”

—Jeffrey Fisher, a lawyer arguing on behalf of TikTok content creators, argues that banning the app in the US could violate the rights of Americans, the BBC reports.

The big story

Psychedelics are having a moment and women could be the ones to benefit

August 2022

Psychedelics are having a moment. After decades of prohibition and vilification, they are increasingly being employed as therapeutics. Drugs like ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin mushrooms are being studied in clinical trials to treat depression, substance abuse, and a range of other maladies.

And as these long-taboo drugs stage a comeback in the scientific community, it’s possible they could be especially promising for women. Read the full story.

—Taylor Majewski

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ The artists who created these Star Wars matte paintings for the films’ futuristic backdrops were supremely talented.
+ Madrid really loves crisps (or potato chips, to the uninitiated)
+ #Restock videos are all the rage these days.
+ How to enjoy the great outdoors without getting lost.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Why we need an AI safety hotline

—Kevin Frazier is an assistant professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and senior research fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

In the past couple of years, regulators have been caught off guard again and again as tech companies compete to launch ever more advanced AI models. As it stands, it seems there’s little anyone can do to delay or prevent the release of a model that poses excessive risks.

Existing measures to mitigate AI risks aren’t enough to protect us, so we need new approaches. One could be a kind of AI safety hotline tasked with expert volunteers. Read more about how the hotline could work.

African farmers are using private satellite data to improve crop yields

In many developing countries, farming is impaired by lack of data. For centuries, farmers relied on native intelligence rooted in experience and hope.

Now, farmers in Africa are turning to technology to avoid cycles of heavy crop losses that could spell financial disaster. They’re partnering with EOS Data Analytics, a California-based provider of satellite imagery and data for precision farming, which allows them to track where or when specific spots needed attention on various farms—and even to anticipate weather warnings. Read the full story.

—Orji Sunday

This piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is celebrating 125 years of the magazine! If you don’t already, subscribe now to get 25% off future copies once they land.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 TikTok is heading to court today 
An appeals court will hear whether the app should be banned in the US. (The Verge)
+ The app is fighting the potential ban, which would kick in early next year. (NYT $)
+ The depressing truth behind US attempts to ban TikTok. (MIT Technology Review)

2 China has made a chipmaking equipment breakthrough
A new machine should lessen its reliance on suppliers sanctioned by the US. (Bloomberg $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

3 OpenAI’s newest AI models could be used to create bioweapons
The company itself has given its latest releases its highest safety warning to date. (FT $)
+ In theory, it could aid experts with reproducing a biological threat. (Vox)
+ To avoid AI doom, learn from nuclear safety. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Big Tech’s carbon footprint is likely way bigger than they say
Like, 662% bigger. (The Guardian)
+ Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Donald Trump is launching a new crypto business
He’s set to launch it during a livestream today. (NYT $)

6 SpaceX’s private space mission has touched down safety on Earth
The first commercial mission was a big success—and opened the doors for future non-government projects. (BBC)
+ The crew reached a higher altitude than any human has traveled in 50 years. (CNN)

7 We need to stop building in the ocean
It’s severely affecting the way marine life navigates. (The Atlantic $)

8 We’re still learning about the benefits of breast milk 
Its antimicrobial properties could help to treat cancer and other conditions. (Economist $)
+ Startups are racing to reproduce breast milk in the lab. (MIT Technology Review)

9 What the future of food holds
From robot chefs to healthier potatoes. (WSJ $)
+ Robot-packed meals are coming to the frozen-food aisle. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Meet Silicon Valley’s seriously pampered pets
Pet tech doesn’t come cheap. (The Information $)

Quote of the day

“Welcome back to planet Earth.”

—The host of the live SpaceX broadcast tracking the return of the company’s Polaris Dawn crew greets their homecoming after five days in orbit, the Washington Post reports.

The big story

The future of open source is still very much in flux

August 2023

When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn’t have known that the machine would ignite a revolution.

While the early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software, much to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at the university.

A few years later, Stallman released GNU, an operating system designed to be a free alternative to one of the dominant operating systems at the time: Unix. The free-software movement was born, with a simple premise: for the good of the world, all code should be open.

Forty years later, tech companies are making billions on proprietary software, and much of the technology around us is inscrutable. But while Stallman’s movement may look like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry. Read the full story.

—Rebecca Ackermann

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ The Hotel California solo series continues, this time with a very intense recorder edition (thanks Niall!)
+ Avocados should be extinct!? Say it ain’t so!
+ This quick and easy peach cobbler recipe looks like an absolute treat. 
+ Nothing but love for Moo Deng the tiny viral baby hippo.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Chatbots can persuade people to stop believing in conspiracy theories

The internet has made it easier than ever before to encounter and spread conspiracy theories. And while some are harmless, others can be deeply damaging, sowing discord and even leading to unnecessary deaths.

Now, researchers believe they’ve uncovered a new tool for combating false conspiracy theories: AI chatbots. Researchers from MIT Sloan and Cornell University found that chatting about a conspiracy theory with a large language model (LLM) reduced people’s belief in it by about 20%—even among participants who claimed that their beliefs were important to their identity

The findings could represent an important step forward in how we engage with and educate people who espouse baseless theories. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

Google’s new tool lets large language models fact-check their responses

The news: Google is releasing a tool called DataGemma that it hopes will help to reduce problems caused by AI ‘hallucinating’, or making incorrect claims. It uses two methods to help large language models fact-check their responses against reliable data and cite their sources more transparently to users. 

What next: If it works as hoped, it could be a real boon for Google’s plan to embed AI deeper into its search engine. But it comes with a host of caveats. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

Neuroscientists and architects are using this enormous laboratory to make buildings better

Have you ever found yourself lost in a building that felt impossible to navigate? Thoughtful building design should center on the people who will be using those buildings. But that’s no mean feat.

A design that works for some people might not work for others. People have different minds and bodies, and varying wants and needs. So how can we factor them all in?

To answer that question, neuroscientists and architects are joining forces at an enormous laboratory in East London—one that allows researchers to build simulated worlds. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and health newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI has released an AI model with ‘reasoning’ capabilities
It claims it’s a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. (The Verge)
+ It could prove particularly useful for coders and math tutors. (NYT $)
+ Why does AI being good at math matter? (MIT Technology Review)

2 Microsoft wants to lead the way in climate innovation
While simultaneously selling AI to fossil fuel companies. (The Atlantic $)
+ Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The FDA has approved Apple’s AirPods as hearing aids
Just two years after the body first approved over-the-counter aids. (WP $)
+ It could fundamentally shift how people access hearing-enhancing devices. (The Verge)

4 Parents aren’t using Meta’s child safety controls 
So claims Nick Clegg, the company’s global affairs chief. (The Guardian)
+ Many tech execs restrict their own childrens’ exposure to technology. (The Atlantic $)

5 How AI is turbo boosting legal action
Especially when it comes to mass litigation. (FT $)

6 Low-income Americans were targeted by false ads for free cash
Some victims had their health insurance plans changed without their consent. (WSJ $)

7 Inside the stratospheric rise of the ‘medical’ beverage
Promising us everything from glowier skin to increased energy. (Vox)

8 Japan’s police force is heading online
Cybercrime is booming, as criminal activity in the real world drops. (Bloomberg $)

9 AI can replicate your late loved ones’ handwriting
For some, it’s a touching reminder of someone they loved. (Ars Technica)
+ Technology that lets us “speak” to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? (MIT Technology Review)

10 Crypto creators are resorting to dangerous stunts for attention
Don’t try this at home. (Wired $)

Quote of the day

“You can’t have a conversation with James the AI bot. He’s not going to show up at events.”

—A former reporter for Garden Island, a local newspaper in Hawaii, dismisses the company’s decision to invest in new AI-generated presenters for its website, Wired reports.

The big story

AI hype is built on high test scores. Those tests are flawed.

August 2023

In the past few years, multiple researchers claim to have shown that large language models can pass cognitive tests designed for humans, from working through problems step by step, to guessing what other people are thinking.

These kinds of results are feeding a hype machine predicting that these machines will soon come for white-collar jobs. But there’s a problem: There’s little agreement on what those results really mean. Read the full story.
 
—William Douglas Heaven

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ It’s almost time for Chinese mooncake madness to celebrate the Moon Festival!
+ Pearl the Wonder Horse isn’t just a therapy animal—she’s also an accomplished keyboardist.
+ We love you Peter Dinklage!
+ Money for Nothing sounds even better on a lute.

The internet has made it easier than ever before to encounter and spread conspiracy theories. And while some are harmless, others can be deeply damaging, sowing discord and even leading to unnecessary deaths.

Now, researchers believe they’ve uncovered a new tool for combating false conspiracy theories: AI chatbots. Researchers from MIT Sloan and Cornell University found that chatting about a conspiracy theory with a large language model (LLM) reduced people’s belief in it by about 20%—even among participants who claimed that their beliefs were important to their identity. The research is published today in the journal Science.

The findings could represent an important step forward in how we engage with and educate people who espouse such baseless theories, says Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang, a postdoc fellow affiliated with the Psychology of Technology Institute who studies AI’s impacts on society.

“They show that with the help of large language models, we can—I wouldn’t say solve it, but we can at least mitigate this problem,” he says. “It points out a way to make society better.” 

Few interventions have been proven to change conspiracy theorists’ minds, says Thomas Costello, a research affiliate at MIT Sloan and the lead author of the study. Part of what makes it so hard is that different people tend to latch on to different parts of a theory. This means that while presenting certain bits of factual evidence may work on one believer, there’s no guarantee that it’ll prove effective on another.

That’s where AI models come in, he says. “They have access to a ton of information across diverse topics, and they’ve been trained on the internet. Because of that, they have the ability to tailor factual counterarguments to particular conspiracy theories that people believe.”

The team tested its method by asking 2,190 crowdsourced workers to participate in text conversations with GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI’s latest large language model.

Participants were asked to share details about a conspiracy theory they found credible, why they found it compelling, and any evidence they felt supported it. These answers were used to tailor responses from the chatbot, which the researchers had prompted to be as persuasive as possible.

Participants were also asked to indicate how confident they were that their conspiracy theory was true, on a scale from 0 (definitely false) to 100 (definitely true), and then rate how important the theory was to their understanding of the world. Afterwards, they entered into three rounds of conversation with the AI bot. The researchers chose three to make sure they could collect enough substantive dialogue.

After each conversation, participants were asked the same rating questions. The researchers followed up with all the participants 10 days after the experiment, and then two months later, to assess whether their views had changed following the conversation with the AI bot. The participants reported a 20% reduction of belief in their chosen conspiracy theory on average, suggesting that talking to the bot had fundamentally changed some people’s minds.

“Even in a lab setting, 20% is a large effect on changing people’s beliefs,” says Zhang. “It might be weaker in the real world, but even 10% or 5% would still be very substantial.”

The authors sought to safeguard against AI models’ tendency to make up information—known as hallucinating—by employing a professional fact-checker to evaluate the accuracy of 128 claims the AI had made. Of these, 99.2% were found to be true, while 0.8% were deemed misleading. None were found to be completely false. 

One explanation for this high degree of accuracy is that a lot has been written about conspiracy theories on the internet, making them very well represented in the model’s training data, says David G. Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who also worked on the project. The adaptable nature of GPT-4 Turbo means it could easily be connected to different platforms for users to interact with in the future, he adds.

“You could imagine just going to conspiracy forums and inviting people to do their own research by debating the chatbot,” he says. “Similarly, social media could be hooked up to LLMs to post corrective responses to people sharing conspiracy theories, or we could buy Google search ads against conspiracy-related search terms like ‘Deep State.’”

The research upended the authors’ preconceived notions about how receptive people were to solid evidence debunking not only conspiracy theories, but also other beliefs that are not rooted in good-quality information, says Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor at Cornell University who also worked on the project. 

“People were remarkably responsive to evidence. And that’s really important,” he says. “Evidence does matter.”

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine’s drone defense

Drones have come to define the brutal conflict in Ukraine that has now dragged on for more than two and a half years. And most rely on radio communications—a technology that Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov has obsessed over since childhood.

While Flash is now a civilian, the former officer has still taken it upon himself to inform his country’s defense in all matters related to radio. Once a month, he studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.

In this race for survival—as each side constantly tries to best the other, only to start all over again when the other inevitably catches up—Ukrainian soldiers need to develop creative solutions, and fast. As Ukraine’s wartime radio guru, Flash may just be one of their best hopes for doing that. Read the full story.

—Charlie Metcalfe

Meet 2024’s climate innovators under 35

One way to know where a field is going? Take a look at what the sharpest new innovators are working on.

Good news for all of us: MIT Technology Review’s list of 35 Innovators Under 35 just dropped. A decent number of the people who made the list are working in fields that touch climate and energy in one way or another. And our senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart noticed a few trends that might provide some hints about the future. Read the full story.

This year’s list is available exclusively to MIT Technology Review subscribers. If you’re not a subscriber already, you sign up here with a 25% discount on the usual price.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The first commercial spacewalk by private citizens is underway
And, thus far, it’s been a success. (CNN)
+ Take a look at the long and illustrious history of spacewalks. (BBC)

2 Silicon Valley is divided over California’s AI safety bill
Big Tech is waiting anxiously for the state’s governor to make a decision. (FT $)
+ What’s next for AI regulation? (MIT Technology Review)

3 Wildfires are raging across southern California
The state has weathered nearly three times as much acreage burn this year so far compared to the whole of 2023. (The Guardian)
+ Canada’s 2023 wildfires produced more emissions than fossil fuels in most countries. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Broken wind turbines have major repercussions
Multiple offshore wind projects have run into serious trouble. (NYT $)

5 The percentage of women in tech has hardly changed in 20 year
Women and people of color face an uphill battle to get hired. (WP $)
+ Why can’t tech fix its gender problem? (MIT Technology Review)

6 Google’s new app can turn your research into an AI podcast
Please don’t do this, though. (The Verge)

7 Human drivers keep crashing into Waymo robotaxis
The company has launched a new website to put the incidents into perspective.(Ars Technica)
+ What’s next for robotaxis in 2024. (MIT Technology Review)

8 This tiny SpaceX rival is poised to launch its first satellites
AST SpaceMobile’s star appears to be on the rise—but for how long?(Bloomberg $)

9 You’ve got a fax
Pagers, fax machines and dumbphones are all the rage these days. (WSJ $)

10 Have we reached peak emoji?
The little pictograms are an illustrative language, not an ideographic one. (The Atlantic $)

Quote of the day

“A beautiful world.”

—Billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman’s reaction as he saw Earth from space during the first privately funded spacewalk today, the BBC reports.

The big story

What does GPT-3 “know” about me?

August 2022

One of the biggest stories in tech is the rise of large language models that produce text that reads like a human might have written it.

These models’ power comes from being trained on troves of publicly available human-created text hoovered up from the internet. If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs.

Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review’s senior AI reporter, wondered what data these models might have on her—and how it could be misused. So she put OpenAI’s GPT-3 to the test. Read about what she found.

In this section yesterday we stated that Amazon had acquired iRobot. This was incorrect—the acquisition never completed. We apologize for the error.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ These photos of London taken on a Casio camera watch are a snapshot of bygone times.
+ If you’ve noticed elaborate painted nails making their way into your cookbooks, it’s part of a wider trend.
+ Painting Paint, now that’s meta.
+ Wow, enthusiastic skeletons are already limbering up for next month!

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Google says it’s made a quantum computing breakthrough that reduces errors

The news: Google researchers claim to have made a breakthrough in quantum error correction, one that could pave the way for quantum computers that finally live up to the technology’s promise.

Why it matters: One major challenge facing the field has been that quantum computers can store or manipulate information incorrectly, preventing them from executing algorithms that are long enough to be useful. 

The new research from Google Quantum AI and its academic collaborators demonstrates that they can add components to reduce these errors. Ultimately, it bolsters the idea that error correction is a viable strategy toward building a useful quantum computer. Read the full story.

—Sophia Chen

Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America’s libraries

—Chris Lewis is president and CEO of Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group that works to shape technology policy in the public interest.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, it didn’t matter if you didn’t have a computer or your parents lacked infinite money for tutors—you could get a lifetime’s education for free at the public library.

A ruling from the US Second Circuit against the Internet Archive and in favor of publisher Hachette has just thrown that promise of equality into doubt by limiting libraries’ access to digital lending. Read this to learn why.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI’s new reasoning AI model is coming
The Strawberry model is reportedly planned for release within a fortnight. (The Information $)+ It’s an area of research that Google DeepMind is also invested in. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Another human has contracted bird flu in the US
And worryingly, they don’t seem to have been in direct contact with animals. (Vox)
+ How worried should we be, really? (The Atlantic $)
+ What’s next for bird flu vaccines. (MIT Technology Review)

3 A US legal advisor coalition wants warning labels for social media 
The 42-strong attorney general group is urging Congress to take action. (WP $)
+ Australia is planning to introduce a minimum age limit for social media use. (BBC)
+ Should social media come with a health warning? (MIT Technology Review)

4 How 9/11 changed the internet
It shaped how we talk—and to some people’s distaste, joke—about national tragedies online. (Insider $)

5 Huawei has announced a triple-folding smartphone
The $2,800 Mate XT folds up like a pamphlet. (FT $)
+ If you want more memory, its price tag rises to an eye-watering $3,300. (Reuters)

6 Caroline Ellison is likely to receive a sentence soon
The key FTX case witness has pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges.(NY Mag $)
+ She’s seeking no prison time as a result of her cooperation in the trial. (Boston Globe $)

7 Satellites are at risk from “killer electrons”
Luckily, a secretive radio wave method could help safeguard them. (Economist $)

8 Researchers have created a cloud atlas of Mars
While some formations are similar to Earth’s, others are completely different. (New Scientist $)

9 Kamala Harris supporters are using Trump’s weirdest quotes against him
A new platform catalogs all of his strangest missives in real time. (Fast Company $)

10 The British are coming!
Britishcore is the latest tongue-in-cheek trend to grab Gen Z’s attention. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“Parents want their kids off their phones and on the footy field and so do I.”

—Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, explains the rationale behind his government’s plans to restrict social media access for teenagers and children, the Financial Times reports.

The big story

A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

December 2022

In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes—including a particularly revealing shot of a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sitting on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.

The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label data used to train artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups. The images speak to the growing practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms. They also reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of. Read the full story.

—Eileen Guo

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ What do astronauts and deep sea divers have in common? Their training is surprisingly similar.
+ Eggs, eggs eggs—who doesn’t love eggs?
+ Better gut health is something we should all be aiming for. Here’s where to start.
+ Single women of TikTok, we salute you.

Correction: The piece has been updated to remove a reference to Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot, which was never completed.

Robots perceive the world around them very differently from the way humans do. 

When we walk down the street, we know what we need to pay attention to—passing cars, potential dangers, obstacles in our way—and what we don’t, like pedestrians walking in the distance. Robots, on the other hand, treat all the information they receive about their surroundings with equal importance. Driverless cars, for example, have to continuously analyze data about things around them whether or not they are relevant. This keeps drivers and pedestrians safe, but it draws on a lot of energy and computing power. What if there’s a way to cut that down by teaching robots what they should prioritize and what they can safely ignore?

That’s the principle underpinning “lazy robotics,” a field of study championed by René van de Molengraft, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. He believes that teaching all kinds of robots to be “lazier” with their data could help pave the way for machines that are better at interacting with things in their real-world environments, including humans. Essentially, the more efficient a robot can be with information, the better.

Van de Molengraft’s lazy robotics is just one approach researchers and robotics companies are now taking as they train their robots to complete actions successfully, flexibly, and in the most efficient manner possible.

Teaching them to be smarter when they sift through the data they gather and then de-prioritize anything that’s safe to overlook will help make them safer and more reliable—a long-standing goal of the robotics community.

Simplifying tasks in this way is necessary if robots are to become more widely adopted, says Van de Molengraft, because their current energy usage won’t scale—it would be prohibitively expensive and harmful to the environment. “I think that the best robot is a lazy robot,” he says. “They should be lazy by default, just like we are.”

Learning to be lazier

Van de Molengraft has hit upon a fun way to test these efforts out: teaching robots to play soccer. He recently led his university’s autonomous robot soccer team, Tech United, to victory at RoboCup, an annual international robotics and AI competition that tests robots’ skills on the soccer field. Soccer is a tough challenge for robots, because both scoring and blocking goals require quick, controlled movements, strategic decision-making, and coordination. 

Learning to focus and tune out distractions around them, much as the best human soccer players do, will make them not only more energy efficient (especially for robots powered by batteries) but more likely to make smarter decisions in dynamic, fast-moving situations.

Tech United’s robots used several “lazy” tactics to give them an edge over their opponents during the RoboCup. One approach involved creating a “world model” of a soccer pitch that identifies and maps out its layout and line markings—things that remain the same throughout the game. This frees the battery-powered robots from constantly scanning their surroundings, which would waste precious power. Each robot also shares what its camera is capturing with its four teammates, creating a broader view of the pitch to help keep track of the fast-moving ball. 

Previously, the robots needed a precise, pre-coded trajectory to move around the pitch. Now Van de Molengraft and his team are experimenting with having them choose their own paths to a specified destination. This saves the energy needed to track a specific journey and helps the robots cope with obstacles they may encounter along the way.

The group also successfully taught the squad to execute “penetrating passes”—where a robot shoots toward an open region in the field and communicates to the best-positioned member of its team to receive it—and skills such as receiving or passing the ball within configurations such as triangles. Giving the robots access to world models built using data from the surrounding environment allows them to execute their skills anywhere on the pitch, instead of just in specific spots.

Beyond the soccer pitch

While soccer is a fun way to test how successful these robotics methods are, other researchers are also working on the problem of efficiency—and dealing with much higher stakes.

Making robots that work in warehouses better at prioritizing different data inputs is essential to ensuring that they can operate safely around humans and be relied upon to complete tasks, for example. If the machines can’t manage this, companies could end up with a delayed shipment, damaged goods, an injured human worker—or worse, says Chris Walti, the former head of Tesla’s robotics division. 

Walti left the company to set up his own firm after witnessing how challenging it was to get robots to simply move materials around. His startup, Mytra, designs fully autonomous machines that use computer vision and an AI reinforcement-learning system to give them awareness of other robots closest to them, and to help them reason and collaborate to complete tasks (like moving a broken pallet) in much more computationally efficient ways. 

The majority of mobile robots in warehouses today are controlled by a single central “brain” that dictates the paths they follow, meaning a robot has to wait for instructions before it can do anything. Not only is this approach difficult to scale, but it consumes a lot of central computing power and requires very dependable communication links.

Mytra believes it’s hit upon a significantly more efficient approach, which acknowledges that individual robots don’t really need to know what hundreds of other robots are doing on the other side of the warehouse. Its machine-learning system cuts down on this unnecessary data, and the computing power it would take to process it, by simulating the optimal route each robot can take through the warehouse to perform its task. This enables them to act much more autonomously. 

“In the context of soccer, being efficient allows you to score more goals. In the context of manufacturing, being efficient is even more important because it means a system operates more reliably,” he says. “By providing robots with the ability to to act and think autonomously and efficiently, you’re also optimizing the efficiency and the reliability of the broader operation.”

While simplifying the types of information that robots need to process is a major challenge, inroads are being made, says Daniel Polani, a professor from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK who specializes in replicating biological processes in artificial systems. He’s also a fan of the RoboCup challenge—in fact, he leads his university’s Bold Hearts robot soccer team, which made it to the second round of this year’s RoboCup’s humanoid league.

“Organisms try not to process information that they don’t need to because that processing is very expensive, in terms of metabolic energy,” he says. Polani is interested in applying these  lessons from biology to the vast networks that power robots to make them more efficient with their information. Reducing the amount of information a robot is allowed to process will just make it weaker depending on the nature of the task it’s been given, he says. Instead, they should learn to use the data they have in more intelligent ways.

Simplifying software

Amazon, which has more than 750,000 robots, the largest such fleet in the world, is also interested in using AI to help them make smarter, safer, and more efficient decisions. Amazon’s robots mostly fall into two categories: mobile robots that move stock, and robotic arms designed to handle objects. The AI systems that power these machines collect millions of data points every day to help train them to complete their tasks. For example, they must learn which item to grasp and move from a pile, or how to safely avoid human warehouse workers. These processes require a lot of computing power, which the new techniques can help minimize.

Generally, robotic arms and similar “manipulation” robots use machine learning to figure out how to identify objects, for example. Then they follow hard-coded rules or algorithms to decide how to act. With generative AI, these same robots can predict the outcome of an action before even attempting it, so they can choose the action most likely to succeed or determine the best possible approach to grasping an object that needs to be moved. 

These learning systems are much more scalable than traditional methods of training robots, and the combination of generative AI and massive data sets helps streamline the sequencing of a task and cut out layers of unnecessary analysis. That’s where the savings in computing power come in. “We can simplify the software by asking the models to do more,” says Michael Wolf, a principal scientist at Amazon Robotics. “We are entering a phase where we’re fundamentally rethinking how we build autonomy for our robotic systems.”

Achieving more by doing less

This year’s RoboCup competition may be over, but Van de Molengraft isn’t resting on his laurels after his team’s resounding success. “There’s still a lot of computational activities going on in each of the robots that are not per se necessary at each moment in time,” he says. He’s already starting work on new ways to make his robotic team even lazier to gain an edge on its rivals next year.  

Although current robots are still nowhere near able to match the energy efficiency of humans, he’s optimistic that researchers will continue to make headway and that we’ll start to see a lot more lazy robots that are better at their jobs. But it won’t happen overnight. “Increasing our robots’ awareness and understanding so that they can better perform their tasks, be it football or any other task in basically any domain in human-built environments—that’s a continuous work in progress,” he says.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Roblox is launching a generative AI that builds 3D environments in a snap

What’s new: Roblox has announced plans to roll out a generative AI tool that will let creators make whole 3D scenes just using text prompts. Users will also be able to modify scenes or expand their scope—say, to change a daytime scene to night or switch the desert for a forest.

How it works: Once it’s up and running, developers on the hugely popular online game platform will be able to simply write “Generate a race track in the desert,” for example, and the AI will spin one up. 

Why it’s a big deal: Although developers can already create similar scenes like this manually in the platform’s creator studio, Roblox claims its new generative AI model will make the changes happen in a fraction of the time. It also claims that it will give developers with minimal 3D art skills the ability to craft more compelling environments. Read the full story.

—Scott J Mulligan

Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity

—Ray Kurzweil is a technologist and futurist and the author, most recently, of The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. The views represented here are his own.

By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics will become a sprint.

But our destiny isn’t a hollow Jetsons future of gadgetry and pampered boredom. By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect.

This sounds fantastically utopian, but humans have made such a leap before. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived on a razor’s edge of precarity. While modern life can often feel like a rat race, to our paleolithic ancestors, we would seem to enjoy impossible abundance and freedom. But what will the next leap look like? Read the full story.

Ray Kurzweil will be speaking at our flagship EmTech MIT conference, sharing his latest predictions on artificial general intelligence, singularity, and the infinite possibilities of an AI-integrated world. 

Join us, either in-person at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge or via our virtual livestream, between September 30 and October 1. Even better—The Download readers get 30% off tickets with the code DOWNLOADM24!

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Apple is hoping AI will help it sell more iPhones 
Today’s keynote is likely to focus on AI smarts over big hardware updates. (Bloomberg $)
+ AI isn’t really a motivator for consumers to upgrade their handsets, though. (WSJ $)
+ Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Google is facing yet another monopoly trial
This time, it’s focusing on how the company dominates the online ad market. (WP $)
+ The US Department of Justice will issue other antitrust guidelines by December. (Reuters)

3 The jet stream appears to be shifting
And climate change is likely to be the driving factor. (New Scientist $)

4 China is going all in on cracking nuclear fusion
Startup Energy Singularity is fundraising to try and leapfrog Western rivals. (FT $)
+ This startup says its first fusion plant is five years away. Experts doubt it. (MIT Technology Review)

5 A growing number of European schools are banning smartphones
But parents and teachers don’t always agree. (The Guardian)
+ Between phones and AI, educators are caught between a rock and a hard place. (The Information $)
+ Watermarking AI text could help teachers—but it’s not infallible. (Vox)

6 Pakistan’s internet firewall is disrupting its startups
They’re struggling to raise funds amid the restrictions. (Rest of World)

7 The Arctic was a little-known testbed for military research
The Cold War birthed a range of bizarre projects in the region. (Undark Magazine)
+ Russia has been testing its intelligence operations there too. (New Yorker $)

8 Inside the race to retrieve discarded bombs from the ocean
The explosives the allies dumped following the World Wars are still dangerous. (The Atlantic $)

9 We could harness gravitational waves to detect alien ships
The technology exists, we’re just learning how best to use it. (Wired $)

10 How to improve how driverless cars “see” in the dark
Using a bit of inspiration from the human eye. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ The big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“Everyone is dealing with a sea of sameness.”

—Govind Balakrishnan, senior vice-president of creative platform Adobe Express, laments the growing trend for jobseekers to use the same AI tools to write their applications to the Financial Times.

The big story

The flawed logic of rushing out extreme climate solutions

April 2023

Early in 2022, entrepreneur Luke Iseman says, he released a pair of sulfur dioxide–filled weather balloons from Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, in the hope that they’d burst miles above Earth.

It was a trivial act in itself, effectively a tiny, DIY act of solar geoengineering, the controversial proposal that the world could counteract climate change by releasing particles that reflect more sunlight back into space.

Entrepreneurs like Iseman invoke the stark dangers of climate change to explain why they do what they do—even if they don’t know how effective their interventions are. But experts say that urgency doesn’t create a social license to ignore the underlying dangers or leapfrog the scientific process. Read the full story.

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)+ Life is full of pesky little tasks. These tips can help to make tackling them that bit easier.
+ The Eagles’ Don Felder and Joe Walsh would be so proud.
+ Bad news for Titanic fans: Jack and Rose’s famous railing is no more.
+ Congratulations to 10-year old Karin Tabira, Japan’s youngest expert in preparing deadly pufferfish!

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

How plants could mine metals from the soil

Nickel may not grow on trees—but there’s a chance it could someday be mined using plants. Many plants naturally soak up metal and concentrate it in their tissues. The US government is now spending $9.9 million funding research on how to use that trait for plant-based mining, or phytomining. 

It could be a good new way to source increasingly in-demand metals like nickel, crucial for the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles. But for now, the goal is just to better understand which plants could help with mining and determine how researchers can tweak them to get our hands on all the critical metals we’ll need in the future. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

The year is 2149 and…

—An excerpt from a short story written for us by novelist Sean Michaels, which envisions what life will look like 125 years from now.

The year is 2149 and people mostly live their lives “on rails.” That’s what they call living according to the meticulous instructions of software. Software knows most things about you—what causes you anxiety, what raises your endorphin levels, everything you’ve ever searched for, everywhere you’ve been.

Software understands everything that has led to this instant and it predicts every moment that will follow. There was a time when everybody kept their data to themselves, but the truth is, it works better to combine it all. So they poured it all together, all the data—the Big Merge. Everything into a giant basin, a Federal Reserve of information—a vault, or really a massively distributed cloud. It is very handy. It shows you the best route.

Very occasionally, people step off the rails. Instead of following their suggested itinerary, they turn the software off. They take a deep, clear, uncertain breath and luxuriate in this freedom. Of course, some people believe that this too is contained within the logic in the vault. That there are invisible rails beside the visible ones; that no one can step off the map. Read the rest of the story here.

This piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is celebrating 125 years of the magazine! If you don’t already, subscribe now to get 25% off future copies once they land.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Telegram will start to moderate private chats
Prior to its CEO’s arrest, they were shielded from moderation. (The Verge)
+ Pavel Durov called the platform’s openness to criminal exploitation ‘growing pains.’ (NYT $)
+ He’s threatened to pull the platform from countries that oppose its values. (FT $)

2 Google is under investigation in the UK
Antitrust officials believe it may be unfairly favoring its own ad tech services. (WSJ $)
+ Google disagrees with their interpretations of the sector. (Bloomberg $)+ The probe started all the way back in 2022. (TechCrunch)

3 Amazon’s Alexa is picking political sides
Which, predictably, has sparked a wave of right-wing conspiracy theories. (WP $)

4 It’s high time we welcomed the first nuclear clock
Unlike atomic clocks, it wouldn’t lose even a second over time. (Quanta Magazine)
+ It could have the additional benefit of speeding up the internet, too. (Vice)
+ ‘Quantum squeezing’ is improving timekeeping precision. (MIT Technology Review)

5 An AI solution to the ‘cocktail party problem’ has been used in court
It uses AI to filter out background sounds, much like the human brain. (BBC)
+ Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Japan has a plan to stage a tech leader comeback
This time it’s working with, rather than against, the US. (NYT $)

7 How climate change is impacting creatures’ eggs
They may not be able to adapt quickly enough to cope with extreme weather. (Time $)

8 It’s cheaper to rent Nvidia chips in China than in the US
Which demonstrates America’s export restrictions aren’t having the desired effect. (FT $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Why aren’t there more electric school buses?
Cleaner, greener buses make sense. But the grid isn’t equipped to deal with them. (Vox)
+ Electric three-wheelers are on the rise in the Philippines. (Rest of World)
+ How 5-minute battery swaps could get more EVs on the road. (MIT Technology Review)

10 The Boeing Starliner is set to return to Earth
But its two-astronaut crew will remain on the ISS. (NYT $)
+ The test flight has been disappointing, to say the least. (Ars Technica) 

Quote of the day

“It’s holding her captive.”

Fiona, a Brooklyn-based 11-year-old, describes her younger sister Margot’s obsessive iPad use to Vox.

The big story

The future of urban housing is energy-efficient refrigerators

June 2022

The aging apartments under the purview of the New York City Housing Authority don’t scream innovation. The largest landlord in the city, housing nearly 1 in 16 New Yorkers, NYCHA has seen its buildings literally crumble after decades of neglect. It would require at least $40 billion to return the buildings to a state of good repair.

Despite the scale of the challenge, NYCHA is hoping to fix them. It has launched a Clean Heat for All Challenge which asks manufacturers to develop low-cost, easy-to-install heat-pump technologies for building retrofits. The stakes for the agency, the winning company, and for society itself could be huge—and good for the planet. Read the full story.

—Patrick Sisson

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ It’s time to rearrange your coats for fall—and to donate the old ones you don’t wear any more.
+ Imperfect typography is where it’s at.
+ TapeDeck is a seriously cool resource for lovers of cassettes from years gone by.
+ If you’ve heard any howls of outrage from the UK this morning, this controversial new tea ranking is to blame.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Maybe you will be able to live past 122

How long can humans live? This is a good time to ask the question. The longevity scene is having a moment, thanks to a combination of scientific advances, public interest, and an unprecedented level of investment. A few key areas of research suggest that we might be able to push human life spans further, and potentially reverse at least some signs of aging.

Researchers can’t even agree on what the exact mechanisms of aging are and which they should be targeting. Debates continue to rage over how long it’s possible for humans to live—and whether there is a limit at all.

But it looks likely that something will be developed in the coming decades that will help us live longer, in better health. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This piece is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is celebrating 125 years of the magazine! It’s set to go live tomorrow, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get hold of future copies once they land.

AI and the future of sex

Pornography raises so many questions. What is obscene? What is ethical or safe to watch? We don’t have to consume or even support it, but porn still demands answers. The question now is: What is “real” porn? 

What if porn is wholly created by an algorithm? In that case, whether it’s obscene, ethical, or safe becomes secondary to What does it mean for porn to be “real”—and what will the answer demand from all of us? Read the full story.

—Leo Herrera

A skeptic’s guide to humanoid-robot videos

We are living in “humanoid robot summer” right now, if you didn’t know. Seemingly every week brings a new moody, futuristic video featuring a humanoid robot staring intensely (and sometimes unnervingly) into the camera, jumping around, or sorting things into piles. Sometimes they even speak.

But what do they show, exactly? James O’Donnell, our AI and hardware reporter, has watched dozens of them this year, and frequently oscillates between being impressed, scared, and bored. Read his guide to what you should, and crucially shouldn’t, be excited by.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Telegram’s founder was arrested as part of a bigger investigation
Authorities are looking into the vast quantities of criminal activity on the platform. (The Guardian)
+ Pavel Durov has a famously hands-off approach to moderation. (NYT $)
+ Telegram is the only major platform that fails to prohibit illegal material in private chats. (WP $)

2 Amazon is poised to launch a new and improved Alexa
But you’ll have to pay to use it. (WP $)

3 China’s chip material export restrictions are biting in the West

Prices of scarce essential minerals are rocketing in Europe. (FT $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Facebook will resist future moderation pressure from the US government 
Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets not speaking out more about the Biden administration’s efforts to force the platform to censor covid content. (WSJ $)
+ He won’t contribute to supporting electoral infrastructure, either. (FT $)

5 Upstate New York is posed to become a quantum computing hub
If Nvidia co-founder Curtis Priem gets his way, that is. (The Guardian)
+ PsiQuantum plans to build the biggest quantum computing facility in the US. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Scientific fraud has a staggering death toll
Falsified data costs lives. Should its authors face criminal consequences? (Vox)

7 Tesla’s rivals are still unable to use its supercharger network
Despite Elon Musk’s promises that they would 12 months ago. (NYT $) 
+ Why EV charging needs more than Tesla. (MIT Technology Review)

8 The US is doubling down on sewer surveillance
In a bid to track the spread of illicit prescription drugs. (The Atlantic $)
+ How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets. (MIT Technology Review)

9 This audio security startup claims it can identify an AI spam call
Pindrop Security traced the origin of the Joe Biden audio deepfake earlier this year. (Bloomberg $)
+ Meta has created a way to watermark AI-generated speech. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Spotify is rife with fake bands
Their proliferation will make it even tougher for human artists to make a living. (Slate $)

Quote of the day

“I could always be wrong. I have been wrong before. And I think every astrologer has been wrong before.”

—Social media astrologer Amy Tripp tells Wired about her prediction that Donald Trump will win the forthcoming US Presidential election.

The big story

The open-source AI boom is built on Big Tech’s handouts. How long will it last?

May 2023

In May 2023 a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech’s grip on AI.

New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers and app developers can study, build on, and modify—are dropping like candy from a piñata. These are smaller, cheaper versions of the best-in-class AI models created by the big firms that (almost) match them in performance—and they’re shared for free.

In many ways, that’s a good thing. AI won’t thrive if just a few mega-rich companies get to gatekeep this technology or decide how it is used. But this open-source boom is precarious, and if Big Tech decides to shut up shop, a boomtown could become a backwater. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Happy Oasis reunion day to all those who celebrate!
+ If you’re heading into the great outdoors for the last time this summer, here’s how to make the most of camping.
+ The Internet Archive is a pretty amazing resource: did you know you can use it to play arcade games?
+ There’s drama unfolding in your back garden, you just need to know where to look.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution

Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world—and making an edited baby is fully illegal in most countries surveyed by legal scholars. But advancing technology could render the embryo issue moot.

New ways of adding CRISPR, the revolutionary gene editing tool, to the bodies of people already born could let them easily receive changes as well. It’s possible that in 125 years, many people will be the beneficiaries of multiple rare, but useful, gene mutations currently found in only small segments of the population. These could protect us against common diseases and infections, but eventually they could also yield improvements in other traits, such as height, metabolism, or even cognition. 

But humanity won’t necessarily do things the right way. Some groups will probably obtain the health benefits before others, and commercial interests could eventually take the trend in unhelpful directions.Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

This piece is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is celebrating 125 years of the magazine! It’s set to go live on Wednesday August 28, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

A new system lets robots sense human touch without artificial skin

The news: Even the most capable robots aren’t great at sensing human touch. But that may change, thanks to robots that can now sense and interpret touch without being covered in high-tech artificial skin. It’s a significant step toward robots that can interact more intuitively with humans. 

Why it matters: A system like this could provide a cheaper and simpler way of providing not only a sense of touch, but also a new way to communicate with robots. That could be particularly significant for giving larger robots, like humanoids, a more comprehensive sense of touch. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

We finally have a definition for open-source AI

Open-source AI is everywhere right now. The problem is, no one agrees on what open-source AI actually is. Now, we may finally have an answer.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the self-appointed arbiters of what it means to be open source, has released a new definition for the term open-source AI, which it hopes will help lawmakers to develop regulations to protect consumers from AI risks. Read what the group has decided what constitutes open-source AI.

—Rhiannon Williams & James O’Donnell

Want to understand the future of technology? Take a look at this one obscure metal.

You may have never heard of it before. But neodymium is a rare earth metal that’s used today in all sorts of devices, from speakers to wind turbines. And it’s likely to become even more crucial in the future.

The world is well on its way to adapting to conditions that are a lot more neodymium-centric. But at the same time, efforts are already underway to build technologies that wouldn’t need neodymium at all. If companies are able to work out an alternative, it could totally flip all our problems, as well as efforts to solve them, upside down. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all the last climate technologies. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

How we could turn plastic waste into food

The problems with plastic production and disposal are well known, and many governments and experts agree that solving them will require reducing production. Some countries and US states have introduced policies to encourage recycling too.

But there’s a new idea to deal with plastic that’s being studied by US government agency DARPA: turning it into food for humans. Read the full story.

—Sara Talpos

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The second Neuralink implant in a human seems to be a success  
The recipient is using the device to play video games and design software. (WSJ $)
+ The first person to receive one had experienced issues with the implant’s wires. (Reuters)
+ Several more people could receive the implants by the end of the year. (Bloomberg $)
+ Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces. (MIT Technology Review)

2 US voters aren’t fans of AI campaigning tools
Robocalls and synthetic videos are being rejected as creepy. (NYT $)
+ Donald Trump is a real fan of flattering AI images of himself. (The Atlantic $)
+ Three technology trends shaping 2024’s elections. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The UK has approved the first drug to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s
But Lecanemab won’t be made available for free on its national health service. (BBC)

4 A judge ordered X to reveal its shareholders
A Saudi Prince, former CEO Jack Dorsey, and a fund linked to Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs are among the named investors. (WP $)
+ The court filing is part of a lawsuit filed by former Twitter workers. (Bloomberg $)

5 China’s chip imports have hit record levels
Despite the US and its allies’ attempts to limit the country’s access to its tech. (Bloomberg $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

6 AI is coming up with new ideas to improve AI
Its ideas aren’t wildly creative, but they are impressive nonetheless. (Wired $)

7 Thousands of pancreases are missing in the US
The donor organs were never implanted into anyone. (Vox)
+ A new AI-based risk prediction system could help catch deadly pancreatic cancer cases earlier. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Would you eat butter made out of CO2?
Startup Savor claims its approach is much more climate-friendly than traditional methods. (Fast Company $)

9 YouTube has a new solution for dealing with hacked accounts
But an AI bot is hardly a replacement for actual human assistance. (The Verge)

10 Hustle bros are making vast sums from their Gen Z fans
The financial advice they offer is ethically and legally dubious, though. (FT $)
+ Teens are pitting Kamala Harris and Donald Trump against each other in TikTok battles. (Rest of World)

Quote of the day

 “The seeds of a revolution in governance have been planted, and they’re already beginning to sprout.”

—Victor Miller, a mayoral candidate in Wyoming who proposed letting an AI bot run the local government, remains optimistic despite decisively losing his race, the Guardian reports.

The big story

How AI is helping historians better understand our past

April 2023

Historians have started using machine learning to examine historical documents, including astronomical tables like those produced in Venice and other early modern cities.

Proponents claim that the application of modern computer science to the past helps draw connections across a broader swath of the historical record than would otherwise be possible, correcting distortions that come from analyzing history one document at a time.

But it introduces distortions of its own, including the risk that machine learning will slip bias or outright falsifications into the historical record. Read the full story.

—Moira Donovan

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ These extreme close-up pictures of nature are really quite something.
+ Naughty naughty—it turns out the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded epic Megalopolis featured false disparaging quotes about the director’s previous work.
+ Are you a Gen Z artist?
+ There’s more Star Wars spin offs than you can shake a stick at these days. So what’s next?

Open-source AI is everywhere right now. The problem is, no one agrees on what it actually is. Now we may finally have an answer. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the self-appointed arbiters of what it means to be open source, has released a new definition, which it hopes will help lawmakers develop regulations to protect consumers from AI risks. 

Though OSI has published much about what constitutes open-source technology in other fields, this marks its first attempt to define the term for AI models. It asked a 70-person group of researchers, lawyers, policymakers, and activists, as well as representatives from big tech companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon, to come up with the working definition. 

According to the group, an open-source AI system can be used for any purpose without securing permission, and researchers should be able to inspect its components and study how the system works.

It should also be possible to modify the system for any purpose—including to change its output—and to share it with others to use, with or without modifications, for any purpose. In addition, the standard attempts to define a level of transparency for a given model’s training data, source code, and weights. 

The previous lack of an open-source standard presented a problem. Although we know that the decisions of OpenAI and Anthropic to keep their models, data sets, and algorithms secret makes their AI closed source, some experts argue that Meta and Google’s freely accessible models, which are open to anyone to inspect and adapt, aren’t truly open source either, because of licenses that restrict what users can do with the models and because the training data sets aren’t made public. Meta, Google, and OpenAI have been contacted for their response to the new definition but did not reply before publication.

“Companies have been known to misuse the term when marketing their models,” says Avijit Ghosh, an applied policy researcher at Hugging Face, a platform for building and sharing AI models. Describing models as open source may cause them to be perceived as more trustworthy, even if researchers aren’t able to independently investigate whether they really are open source.

Ayah Bdeir, a senior advisor to Mozilla and a participant in OSI’s process, says certain parts of the open-source definition were relatively easy to agree upon, including the need to reveal model weights (the parameters that help determine how an AI model generates an output). Other parts of the deliberations were more contentious, particularly the question of how public training data should be.

The lack of transparency about where training data comes from has led to innumerable lawsuits against big AI companies, from makers of large language models like OpenAI to music generators like Suno, which do not disclose much about their training sets beyond saying they contain “publicly accessible information.” In response, some advocates say that open-source models should disclose all their training sets, a standard that Bdeir says would be difficult to enforce because of issues like copyright and data ownership. 

Ultimately, the new definition requires that open-source models provide information about the training data to the extent that “a skilled person can recreate a substantially equivalent system using the same or similar data.” It’s not a blanket requirement to share all training data sets, but it also goes further than what many proprietary models or even ostensibly open-source models do today. It’s a compromise.

“Insisting on an ideologically pristine kind of gold standard that actually will not effectively be met by anybody ends up backfiring,” Bdeir says. She adds that OSI is planning some sort of enforcement mechanism, which will flag models that are described as open source but do not meet its definition. It also plans to release a list of AI models that do meet the new definition. Though none are confirmed, the handful of models that Bdeir told MIT Technology Review are expected to land on the list are relatively small names, including Pythia by Eleuther, OLMo by Ai2, and models by the open-source collective LLM360.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources

For nearly as long as we’ve extracted materials from our planet, we’ve been trying to predict how long they will be able to meet our demand. How much can we pump from a well, or wrest from a mine, before we need to reconsider what we’re building and how? 

We’re in the middle of a potentially transformative moment. Metals discovered barely a century ago now underpin the technologies we’re relying on for cleaner energy, and not having enough of them could slow progress. 

Take neodymium, one of the rare earth metals. It’s used in cryogenic coolers to reach ultra-low temperatures needed for devices like superconductors and in high-powered magnets that power everything from smartphones to wind turbines. And very soon, demand for it could outstrip supply. What happens then? And what does it reveal about issues across wider supply chains? Read our story to find out.

—Casey Crownhart

This piece is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is celebrating 125 years of the magazine! It’s set to go live on Wednesday August 28, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Google will face a trial claiming that it misled Chrome users 
The lawsuit alleges that the browser collected user data without their permission. (WP $)
+ The case was originally dismissed in 2022, but was reversed on appeal. (The Verge)

2 OpenAI will let companies customize its most powerful model
Businesses can fine-tune GPT-4o to include their own data for the first time. (Bloomberg $)
+ OpenAI has also hashed out a deal with media giant Condé Nast. (Wired $)
+ How to fine-tune AI for prosperity. (MIT Technology Review)

3 CrowdStrike has had a rough month
The cyber security firm has accused its rivals of making ‘misguided’ attacks in the wake of its colossal global IT outage. (FT $)
+ The outage was caused by a botched update. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Waymo is making 100,000 robotaxi trips a week
That’s double the amount of journeys it was making in May. (NBC News)
+ What’s next for robotaxis. (MIT Technology Review)

5 A law that protects tech giants is being used against them
Section 230 shields tech firms from legal liability. A Massachusetts professor is testing its limits. (NYT $)

6 The hype around hydrogen continues to build
Particularly regarding ‘gold’ hydrogen, which doesn’t require energy to produce. (Wired $)
+ But producing green hydrogen is easier said than done. (FT $)
+ Hydrogen could be used for nearly everything. It probably shouldn’t be. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Taiwan is putting its fish farms to work
They’re doubling up as solar plants, creating a new aquavoltaics facility. (IEEE Spectrum) 

8 China’s fast fashion giants are feuding again
Shein has accused Temu of ripping off its designs, an accusation that major brands have long leveled against Shein itself. (404 Media)
+ Shein’s lawsuit comes as Temu is attempting to infiltrate the US. (The Register)
+ The pair have a long, litigious history of suing each other. (MIT Technology Review)

9 How to make food from plastic
No, really. (Undark Magazine)
+ Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again. (MIT Technology Review)

10 China is going wild for a Ming dynasty epic video game
Players need a good knowledge of Journey to the West to progress. (Reuters)
+ Its creators are hoping it’ll prove a hit with Western audiences too. (NYT $)

Quote of the day

“If we take our clothes off when in our communities, then it has to be shown in the same way on the internet.”

—Chirley Pankara, a doctor in anthropology at the University of São Paulo and an Indigenous activist, says social media’s anti-nudity policies censor Indigenous practices, Rest of World reports.

The big story

The messy quest to replace drugs with electricity

May 2024

In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor’s office. Research into how the nervous system—the highway that carries electrical messages between the brain and the body— controls the immune response was gaining traction.

And that had opened the door to the possibility of hacking into the body’s circuitry and thereby controlling a host of chronic diseases, as if the immune system were as reprogrammable as a computer.

To do that you’d need a new class of implant: an “electroceutical.” These devices would replace drugs. No more messy side effects. And no more guessing whether a drug would work differently for you and someone else. In the 10 years or so since, around a billion dollars has accreted around the effort. Despite that, electroceuticals have still not taken off as hoped. But could that be about to change? Read our story.

—Sally Adee

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Ditch the calorie counting and apply sun cream around your eyes: here’s how to live well these days.
+ Emily in Paris is back, and its shooting locations are as dreamy as ever.
+ You can’t tickle yourself, no matter how hard you try.
+ This tasty-looking food has been upcycled.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

How to fine-tune AI for prosperity

Predictions abound on how the growing list of generative AI models will transform the way we work and organize our lives, providing instant advice on everything from financial investments to where to spend your next vacation.

But for economists, the most critical question around our obsession with AI is how the fledgling technology will (or won’t) boost overall productivity, and if it does, how long it will take. Can the technology lead to renewed prosperity after years of stagnant economic growth? Read the full story.

—David Rotman

Fighting for a future beyond the climate crisis

When it comes to climate breakdown and the extinction crisis, the question often asked is: How can we have hope? 

But maybe hope is the wrong emotion to focus on. Instead, we need shock and awe in the face of the majesty and fragility of nature, humility in the face of the vastness of the transformations our kind has set in motion—a bristling realization of imminent peril. Read the full story.

—Lydia Millet

This piece is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is celebrating 125 years of the magazine! It’s set to go live on Wednesday August 28, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

Why you’re about to see a lot more drones in the sky

For decades, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has restricted people’s ability to fly drones in shared airspaces or dense neighborhoods. That’s made it hard to deliver futuristic ideas like drones delivering our packages.

But that’s changing. The agency recently granted Amazon’s Prime Air program approval to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight in parts of Texas, and also granted similar waivers to hundreds of police departments around the country.

However, there’s an even bigger change coming in less than a month. It promises to be the most significant drone decision in decades, and one that will decide just how many drones we all can expect to see and hear buzzing above the US on a daily basis. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 US officials confirmed Iran hacked Donald Trump’s campaign  
The hackers also attempted to infiltrate the Democrat campaign. (The Guardian)
+ They tricked victims into sharing sensitive information via ‘social engineering.’ (FT $)
+ Officials believe Iran is trying to sow discord ahead of the presidential election. (AP)

2 AI is helping to personalize treatment for Parkinson’s
Individualized algorithms tailor the amount of electrical stimulation patients receive. (NYT $)
+ The first clinical trial of the technology appears to be promising. (FT $)
+ Here’s how personalized brain stimulation could treat depression. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Power generation in the US is at its highest point in 21 years
Surprise surprise, it’s because of AI. (Bloomberg $)
+ Locals in India claim Microsoft’s new data center is dumping waste nearby. (Rest of World)
+ AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change. (MIT Technology Review)

4 The EU is probing Chinese subsidies and imports
It covers everything from EVs to solar panels. (Reuters)

5 A rocket exploded during a test launch in the UK
And it’s not immediately clear why. (BBC)

6 Deadly lightning strikes are on the rise
Rising global temperatures are fuelling more frequent dangerous storms. (Wired $)

7 Even the most resilient coral reefs are struggling with climate change
A tough Caribbean reef is reaching its limits. (Vox)
+ The race is on to save coral reefs—by freezing them. (MIT Technology Review)

8 AI-enabled cheating is getting worse
Universities need a robust plan to fight it—and fast. (The Atlantic $)
+ ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it. (MIT Technology Review)

9 This startup uses AI to create new episodes of South Park
It’s becoming the latest way to keep fandoms paying for their favorite media. (The Information $)

10 Would you meet up with a stranger for breakfast?
An app is matching diners seeking deep conversations over eggs and bacon. (WP $)

Quote of the day

“It’s very hard to have a democratic society if people can’t believe the things that they see and hear with their own eyes.”

—Robert Weissman, co-president of non-profit Public Citizen, tells the Verge about the dangers of Donald Trump sharing fake AI-generated images, including one of Taylor Swift endorsing him. 

The big story

How climate vulnerability and the digital divide are linked

June 2023

Walking around low-income neighborhoods throughout the US, Monica Sanders has noticed a pattern. The adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University measures Wi-Fi speeds as part of a project drawing connections between a host of indicators at the intersection of internet availability, environmental risk, and historical racial inequity.

Sanders has found that a lack of internet access mirrors other inequities. In neighborhoods shaped by racism and insufficient infrastructure investment, residents can face disproportionate risk from climate change, affecting everything from flood vulnerability to the ability to get disaster warnings. And she wants to empower them to tackle whatever next comes their way. Read the full story.

—Colleen Hagerty

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ It’s never too late—you can become an athlete at any age.
+ Glassblowing will never not be fascinating.
+ It’s not just you, toilet roll really is getting smaller.
+  Legendary producer Aphex Twin has a surprising side hustle as a wedding DJ.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age

There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands grabbing at the cool grass. It was taken on a digital camera in 2013, when she was almost one, but now lives on Google Photos. 

But what if, one day, Google ceased to function? What if I lost my treasured photos forever? For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.

The endeavor raises complex questions. What is important to us? How and why do we decide what to keep—and what do we let go? And how will future generations make sense of what we’re able to save? Read the full story.

—Niall Firth

Niall’s story is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is celebrating 125 years of the magazine! It’s set to go live on Wednesday August 28, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 X is ceasing operations in Brazil
The company is locked in a legal battle with the country’s Supreme Court Justice. (TechCrunch)
+ Users in Brazil will still be able to access the platform, though. (Reuters)
+ X alternatives are just a bit…lacking. (The Guardian)

2 Far right influencers are unhappy with Donald Trump’s campaign
They’ve accused his team of watering down his persona and policies. (WP $)
+ The FBI is increasingly cautious about investigating far right groups. (New Yorker $)

3 Startups are struggling in the US
Especially if they’re not focusing fully on AI. (FT $)
+ Commercializing AI isn’t as simple as many people make out, though. (Vox)

4 A superconducting wire has set a new record
It can apparently carry 50% as much current as the previous record-holding wire. (IEEE Spectrum)

5 Waymo’s robotaxis are keeping San Francisco residents up at night
They just keep honking, even after a rapidly-deployed fix. (The Verge)
+ Amazon’s delivery drones are pretty noisy too. (Insider $)
+ What’s next for robotaxis in 2024. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Worldcoin is still running into trouble
Jurisdictions across the world are concerned by Sam Altman’s data-grabbing project. (WSJ $)
+ Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Your guts are teaming with viruses
But we’re not sure how many, or what they’re doing there. (Knowable Magazine)
+ How bacteria-fighting viruses could go mainstream. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Are the Ray-Ban Meta glasses cool now?
Mark Zuckerberg certainly thinks so. (The Information $)
+ Their launch back in 2021 was marred by privacy concerns. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Tarot readers are sick of Instagram scammers
I guess they didn’t see it coming? (The Guardian) 

10 TikTok’s favorite restaurant is entirely fictional
Its cast of characters delights millions of fans. (NBC News)
+ Chinese social media users are skillfully parodying AI video goofs. (Ars Technica)

Quote of the day

“It’s like asking about the risks of replacing a car with a big cardboard cutout of a car. Sure, it looks like a car, but the ‘risk’ is that you no longer have a car.”

—Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, compares a chatbot running a city—which could become a reality in Wyoming’s capital city—to driving an imaginary car, the Washington Post reports.

The big story

Alina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab.

June 2021

Alina Chan started asking questions in March 2020. She was chatting with friends on Facebook about the virus then spreading out of China. She thought it was strange that no one had found any infected animal. She wondered why no one was admitting another possibility, which to her seemed very obvious: the outbreak might have been due to a lab accident.

Chan is a postdoc in a gene therapy lab at the Broad Institute, a prestigious research institute affiliated with both Harvard and MIT. Throughout 2020, Chan relentlessly stoked scientific argument, and wasn’t afraid to pit her brain against the best virologists in the world. Her persistence even helped change some researchers’ minds. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ I don’t know how many walnuts I could crush with my elbow in 30 seconds, but I do know it wouldn’t be this many.
+ Stop buying poor quality clothing: these tips can help you decide whether a garment’s worth your cash.
+ An important investigation into how many times Pitbull has used his catchphrase ‘dale.’
+ Let’s road trip!

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

What the future holds for those born today

Happy birthday, baby.

You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your parents listen in on your tiny heartbeat, track your gestation on an app, and post your sonogram on social media. Well before you were born, you were known to the algorithm.

In the future, everyone thinks, computers will get smaller and more plentiful still. But the biggest change in your lifetime will be the rise of intelligent agents. Computing will be more responsive, more intimate, less confined to any one platform. It will be less like a tool, and more like a companion. It will learn from you and also be your guide.

Your arrival coincided with the 125th anniversary of this magazine. With a bit of luck and the right genes, you might see the next 125 years. How will you and the next generation of machines grow up together? We asked more than a dozen experts to imagine your joint future. Read what they prophesied for your future.

—Kara Platoni

Kara’s story is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is celebrating 125 years of the magazine! It’s set to go live on Wednesday August 28, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little

A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death. 

His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain. 

Jean Hébert, a new hire with the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health, is expected to lead a major new initiative around “functional brain tissue replacement,” the idea of adding youthful tissue to people’s brains. 

The brain renewal concept could have applications such as treating stroke victims, who lose areas of brain function. But Hébert, a biologist at the Albert Einstein school of medicine, has most often proposed total brain replacement, along with replacing other parts of our anatomy, as the only plausible means of avoiding death from old age.

The strategy is not widely accepted, even among researchers in the aging field. But Hébert’s ideas appear to have gotten a huge endorsement from the US government. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

What’s next for drones

Drones have been a mainstay technology among militaries, hobbyists, and first responders alike for more than a decade. No longer limited to small quadcopters with insufficient battery life, drones are aiding search and rescue efforts, reshaping wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and delivering time-sensitive packages of medical supplies. And billions of dollars are being plowed into building the next generation of fully autonomous systems. 

These developments raise a number of questions: Are drones safe enough to be flown in dense neighborhoods and cities? Is it a violation of people’s privacy for police to fly drones overhead at an event or protest? Who decides what level of drone autonomy is acceptable in a war zone?

Those questions are no longer hypothetical. Advancements in drone technology and sensors, falling prices, and easing regulations are making drones cheaper, faster, and more capable than ever. Here’s a look at four of the biggest changes coming to drone technology in the near future.

—James O’Donnell

This story is from MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, which looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

Aging hits us in our 40s and 60s. But well-being doesn’t have to fall off a cliff.

—Jessica Hamzelou

You might feel like you’re on a slow, gradual decline, but, at the molecular level, you’re likely to be hit by two waves of changes, according to researchers at Stanford University. The first one comes in your 40s. Eek.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds. And midlife needn’t involve falling off a cliff in terms of your well-being. Let’s explore why.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

Check out the new MIT Technology Review app

MIT Technology Review’s new app brings our trusted journalism and expert insights right to your fingertips, ensuring you’re always at the forefront of breakthrough innovations.

Our redesigned app provides a user-friendly interface with the ability to save favorite articles and search trending topics—and explore all our exclusive technology coverage along with our trending daily newsletters. Check it out!

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 California lawmakers have watered down the state’s AI safety bill
The changes make it more difficult for the state’s attorney general to sue AI firms. (TechCrunch)
+ The open source community is still concerned it’ll stifle innovation. (NYT $)

2 Mpox has been detected in Pakistan
Shortly after a case of the new variant was confirmed in Sweden. (Reuters)
+ The new mpox strain is far deadlier than its predecessor. (Wired $)
+ Covid cases are on the rise too. (Vox)

3 The world can’t kick its fossil fuel habit
And AI data centers are partly to blame. (WSJ $)
+ If your power bill is on the rise, you’re not alone. (Vox)
+ AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Ozempic patients are hacking their injection pens
While most are trying to save money, others are managing side effects. (The Atlantic $)
+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)

5 Election influence campaigns are rife on X
Elon Musk’s war on bots seems to have had little effect. (Rest of World)
+ Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Why deepfake detection tools fail
They’re easily fooled by software tweaks and edits. (WP $)
+ Google is finally taking action to curb non-consensual deepfakes. (MIT Technology Review)

7 What’s next for psychedelic medicine?
The FDA’s rejection of MDMA as treatment for PTSD is bad news for startup Lykos Therapeutics. (Wired $)
+ Why the FDA’s advisors decided against approving it. (MIT Technology Review)

8 US states are clamping down on tiny Japanese cars
The imported Kei vehicles are dwarfed by SUVs, which authorities argue is dangerous. (Ars Technica)

9 TikTok influencers are embracing a new demure mindset
It’s all down to creator Jools Lebron’s tongue-in-cheek clips. (The Guardian)

10 Magic: The Gathering is facing an AI reckoning
The card game’s distinctive artwork is ripe for AI aping. (Slate $)
+ This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“You drop out and you die immediately, or you partner with them and you probably just die slowly, because eventually they’re not going to need you either.”

—Joe Ragazzo, publisher of the news site Talking Points Memo, tells Bloomberg about the tricky choice publishers are facing between offering their content up to AI firms, or disappearing from Google search altogether.

The big story

The great chip crisis threatens the promise of Moore’s Law

June 2021

The world is facing an economically devastating shortage of microchips.

Production has also slowed for smartphones, laptops, video-game consoles, TVs, and even smart appliances, all because of the lack of cheap microchips. Their use is so essential and so widespread that some observers think the chip crisis could threaten the global economic recovery from the pandemic.

The spirit of Moore’s Law—the expectation that cheap, powerful chips will always be readily available—is now being threatened by something far more mundane: inflexible supply chains. Read the full story.

—Jeremy Hsu

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Today in pointless news: this man plugged 444 consoles into a single TV.
+ If you’ve ever wondered what happens to all those tennis balls once Wimbledon is over, they’re repurposed into homes for harvest mice
+ Happy birthday to the one and only queen of pop—66 today.
+ Wait—young people don’t wear sneakers any more!?

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

DHS plans to collect biometric data from migrant children “down to the infant”

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to collect and analyze photos of the faces of migrant children at the border in a bid to improve facial recognition technology, MIT Technology Review can reveal.

The technology has traditionally not been applied to children, largely because training data sets of real children’s faces are few and far between, and consist of either low-quality images drawn from the internet or small sample sizes with little diversity. Such limitations reflect the significant sensitivities regarding privacy and consent when it comes to minors. 

In practice, the new DHS plan could effectively solve that problem. But, beyond concerns about privacy, transparency, and accountability, some experts also worry about testing and developing new technologies using data from a population that has little recourse to provide—or withhold—consent. Read the full story.

—Eileen Guo

What Japan’s “megaquake” warning really tells us

On August 8, at 16:42 local time, a magnitude-7.1 earthquake shook southern Japan. The temblor, originating off the shores of mainland island of Kyūshū, was felt by nearly a million people across the region, and initially, the threat of a tsunami emerged. But only a diminutive wave swept ashore, buildings remained upright, and nobody died. The crisis was over as quickly as it began.

But then, something new happened. The Japan Meteorological Agency, a government organization, issued a ‘megaquake advisory’ for the first time. It was in part issued because it is possible that the magnitude-7.1 quake is a foreshock – a precursory quake – to a far larger one, a tsunami-making monster that could kill a quarter of a million people.

The good news, for now, is that scientists think it is very unlikely that that magnitude-7.1 quake is a prelude to a cataclysm. But the slim possibility remains that it was a foreshock to something considerably worse. Read the full story.

—Robin George Andrews

This story is part of MIT Technology Review Explains: our series helping you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here.

The US government is still spending big on climate

Friday marks two years since the US signed the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law. In that time we’ve seen an influx of investment from the federal government and private businesses alike. 

The government has already spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and there’s much more to come. And this money is starting to make a big difference in the climate tech sector. But where is it all going? Read our story to find out.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter covering climate and energy technologies. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Mpox is spreading rapidly across African countries
The World Health Organization has declared it a global health emergency for the second time in two years. (NYT $)
+ Cases and deaths are rising across east and central African countries. (Vox)
+ This type of mpox, known as Clade 1, is far deadlier than the previous version. (BBC)

2 A brain implant helped a man with ALS to speak again
Years after the disease robbed him of that ability. (Reuters)
+ An ALS patient set a record for communicating via a brain implant. (MIT Technology Review)

3 X’s AI image generator appears to have few filters
It’ll generate pictures of Barack Obama doing cocaine, for example. (NY Mag $)
+ It does, however, refuse to generate fully nude images. (The Guardian)
+ Text-to-image AI models can be tricked into generating disturbing images. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Big Tech’s energy usage is skyrocketing
But how huge firms disclose their emissions is a bone of contention. (FT $)
+ Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Meta has shut down a major misinformation tracking tool
Less than three months before the US election. (NPR)+ Meta’s justification? CrowdTangle was too difficult to maintain. (Bloomberg $)

6 Apple has started work on a tabletop robot
Its former car team has pivoted to building a smart home command center. (Bloomberg $)

7 Climate change is a gift to harmful invasive plants
Sleeper species can thrive in warmer temperatures. (Economist $)

8 The problem with slapping logos on prostheses
Some wearers say it feels more like a product than a part of their body. (The Atlantic $)
+ These prosthetics break the mold with third thumbs, spikes, and superhero skins. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Mark Zuckerberg has commissioned a giant sculpture of his wife
He’s continuing in the Roman tradition, apparently. (The Guardian)

10 ChatGPT randomly started chatting to English users in Welsh
O diar! (That’s Welsh for ‘oh dear.’) (FT $)

Quote of the day

“The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing.”

—Judge James Donato, who is presiding over the Epic v Google legal case, tells Google’s lawyer to expect harsh punishment when he makes his final ruling in the next few weeks, the Verge reports.

The big story

The search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter’s icy moon Europa

February 2024

Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, is nothing like ours. Its surface is a vast saltwater ocean, encased in a blanket of cracked ice, one that seems to occasionally break open and spew watery plumes into the moon’s thin atmosphere.

For these reasons, Europa captivates planetary scientists. All that water and energy—and hints of elements essential for building organic molecules —point to another extraordinary possibility. Jupiter’s big, bright moon could host life.

And they may eventually get some answers. Later this year, NASA plans to launch Europa Clipper, the largest-­ever craft designed to visit another planet. The $5 billion mission, scheduled to reach Jupiter in 2030, will spend four years analyzing this moon to determine whether it could support life. Read the full story.

—Stephen Ornes

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Start your day the right way with some sweet little wolf pups.
+ Happy 30th anniversary to Cotton Eye Joe, may you be a staple of good times for another three decades.
+ Minecraft has released a raft of bath bombs!
+ Terrible news: Paris 2024 could be break dancing’s only appearance at the Olympics (spare a thought for Ray Gun).