This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.What Africa needs to do to become a major AI playerAfrica is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies. But researchers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for several reasons, including a relatively young and increasingly well-educated population, a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI startups, and lots of potential consumers.However, ambitious efforts to develop AI tools that answer the needs of Africans face numerous hurdles. The biggest are inadequate funding and poor infrastructure. Limited internet access and a scarcity of domestic data centers also mean that developers might not be able to deploy cutting-edge AI capabilities. Complicating this further is a lack of overarching policies or strategies for harnessing AIs immense benefitsand regulating its downsides.Taken together, researchers worry, these issues will hold Africas AI sector back and hamper its efforts to pave its own pathway in the global AI race. Read the full story.Abdullahi TsanniScience and technology stories in the age of TrumpMat HonanIve spent most of this year being pretty convinced that Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States. Even so, like most people, I was completely surprised by the scope of his victory. This level of victory will certainly provide the political capital to usher in a broad sweep of policy changes.Some of these changes will be well outside our lane as a publication. But very many of President-elect Trumps stated policy goals will have direct impacts on science and technology.So I thought I would share some of my remarks from our edit meeting on Wednesday morning, when we woke up to find out that the world had indeed changed. Read the full story.This story is from The Debrief, the weekly newsletter from our editor in chief Mat Honan. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Friday.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Canada has recorded its first known bird flu case in a humanOfficials are investigating how the teenager was exposed to the virus. (NPR)+ Canada insists that the risk to the public remains low. (Reuters)+ Why virologists are getting increasingly nervous about bird flu. (MIT Technology Review)2 How MAGA became a rallying call for young menThe Republicans online strategy tapped into the desires of disillusioned Gen Z men. (WP $)+ Elon Musk is assembling a list of favorable would-be Trump advisors. (FT $)3 Trumps victory is a win for the US defense industryPalmer Luckeys Anduril is anticipating a lucrative next four years. (Insider $)+ Heres what Luckey has to say about the Pentagons future of mixed reality. (MIT Technology Review)+ Traditional weapons are being given AI upgrades. (Wired $)4 This year is highly likely to be the hottest on recordThis weeks Cop29 climate summit will thrash out future policies. (The Guardian)+ A little-understood contributor to the weather? Microplastics. (Wired $)+ Trumps win is a tragic loss for climate progress. (MIT Technology Review)5 Ukraine is scrambling to repair its power stationsWorkers are dismantling plants to repair other stations hit by Russian attacks. (WSJ $)+ Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraines drone defense. (MIT Technology Review)6 We need better ways to evaluate LLMsTech giants are coming up with better methods of measuring these systems. (FT $)+ The improvements in the tech behind ChatGPT appear to be slowing. (The Information $)+ AI hype is built on high test scores. Those tests are flawed. (MIT Technology Review)7 FTX is suing crypto exchange BinanceIt claims Sam Bankman-Fried fraudulently transferred close to $1.8 billion to Binance in 2021. (Bloomberg $)+ Meanwhile, bitcoin is surging to new record heights. (Reuters)8 What we know about tech and lonelinessWhile theres little evidence tech directly makes us lonely, theres a strong correlation between the two. (NYT $)9 Whats next for space policy in the USIf one persons interested in the cosmos, its Elon Musk. (Ars Technica)10 Could you save the Earth from a killer asteroid?Its a game thats part strategy, part luck. (New Scientist $)+ Earth is probably safe from a killer asteroid for 1,000 years. (MIT Technology Review)Quote of the dayConflict of interest seems rather quaint.Gita Johar, a professor at Columbia Business School, tells the Guardian about Donald Trump and Elon Musks openly transactional relationship.The big storyQuartz, cobalt, and the waste we leave behindMay 2024It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized ethereal world, ruled by digital startups, artificial intelligence, and financial services.Yet there is little evidence that we have decoupled our economy from its churning hunger for resources. We are still reliant on the products of geological processes like coal and quartz, a mineral thats a rich source of the silicon used to build computer chips, to power our world.Three recent books aim to reconnect readers with the physical reality that underpins the global economy. Each one fills in dark secrets about the places, processes, and lived realities that make the economy tick, and reveals just how tragic a toll the materials we rely on take for humans and the environment. Read the full story.Matthew PonsfordWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Oscars buzz has already begun, and this years early contenders are an interesting bunch.+ This sweet art project shows how toys age with love + Who doesnt love pretzels? Heres how to make sure they end up with the perfect fluffy interior and a glossy, chewy crust.+ These images of plankton are really quite something.

Kessel Okinga-Koumu paced around a crowded hallway. It was her first time presenting at the Deep Learning Indaba, she told the crowd gathered to hear her, filled with researchers from Africas machine-learning community. The annual weeklong conference (Indaba is a Zulu word for gathering), was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University in Dakar, Senegal. It attracted over 700 attendees to hear aboutand debatethe potential of Africa-centric AI and how its being deployed in agriculture, education, health care, and other critical sectors of the continents economy.A 28-year-old computer science student at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, Okinga-Koumu spoke about how shes tackling a common problem: the lack of lab equipment at her university. Lecturers have long been forced to use chalkboards or printed 2D representations of equipment to simulate practical lessons that need microscopes, centrifuges, or other expensive tools. In some cases, they even ask students to draw the equipment during practical lessons, she lamented.Okinga-Koumu pulled a phone from the pocket of her blue jeans and opened a prototype web app shes built. Using VR and AI features, the app allows students to simulate using the necessary lab equipmentexploring 3D models of the tools in a real-world setting, like a classroom or lab. Students could have detailed VR of lab equipment, making their hands-on experience more effective, she said.Established in 2017, the Deep Learning Indaba now has chapters in 47 of the 55 African nations and aims to boost AI development across the continent by providing training and resources to African AI researchers like Okinga-Koumu. Africa is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies, but organizers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for several reasons, including a relatively young and increasingly well-educated population, a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI startups, and lots of potential consumers.The building and ownership of AI solutions tailored to local contexts is crucial for equitable development, says Shakir Mohamed, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and cofounder of the organization sponsoring the conference. Africa, more than other continents in the world, can address specific challenges with AI and will benefit immensely from its young talent, he says: There is amazing expertise everywhere across the continent.However, researchers ambitious efforts to develop AI tools that answer the needs of Africans face numerous hurdles. The biggest are inadequate funding and poor infrastructure. Not only is it very expensive to build AI systems, but research to provide AI training data in original African languages has been hamstrung by poor financing of linguistics departments at many African universities and the fact that citizens increasingly dont speak or write local languages themselves. Limited internet access and a scarcity of domestic data centers also mean that developers might not be able to deploy cutting-edge AI capabilities.DEEP LEARNING INDABA 2024Complicating this further is a lack of overarching policies or strategies for harnessing AIs immense benefitsand regulating its downsides. While there are various draft policy documents, researchers are in conflict over a continent-wide strategy. And they disagree about which policies would most benefit Africa, not the wealthy Western governments and corporations that have often funded technological innovation.Taken together, researchers worry, these issues will hold Africas AI sector back and hamper its efforts to pave its own pathway in the global AI race.On the cusp of changeAfricas researchers are already making the most of generative AIs impressive capabilities. In South Africa, for instance, to help address the HIV epidemic, scientists have designed an app called Your Choice, powered by an LLM-based chatbot that interacts with people to obtain their sexual history without stigma or discrimination. In Kenya, farmers are using AI apps to diagnose diseases in crops and increase productivity. And in Nigeria, Awarri, a newly minted AI startup, is trying to build the countrys first large language model, with the endorsement of the government, so that Nigerian languages can be integrated into AI tools.The Deep Learning Indaba is another sign of how Africas AI research scene is starting to flourish. At the Dakar meeting, researchers presented 150 posters and 62 papers. Of those, 30 will be published in top-tier journals, according to Mohamed.Meanwhile, an analysis of 1,646 publications in AI between 2013 and 2022 found a significant increase in publications from Africa. And Masakhane, a cousin organization to Deep Learning Indaba that pushes for natural-language-processing research in African languages, has released over 400 open-source models and 20 African-language data sets since it was founded in 2018.These metrics speak a lot to the capacity building thats happening, says Kathleen Siminyu, a computer scientist from Kenya, who researches NLP tools for her native Kiswahili. Were starting to see a critical mass of people having basic foundational skills. They then go on to specialize.She adds: Its like a wave that cannot be stopped.Khadija Ba, a Senegalese entrepreneur and investor at the pan-African VC fund P1 Ventures who was at this years conference, says that she sees African AI startups as particularly attractive because their local approaches have potential to be scaled for the global market. African startups often build solutions in the absence of robust infrastructure, yet these innovations work efficiently, making them adaptable to other regions facing similar challenges, she says.In recent years, funding in Africas tech ecosystem has picked up: VC investment totaled $4.5 billion last year, more than double what it was just five years ago, according to a report by the African Private Capital Association. And this October, Google announced a $5.8 million commitment to support AI training initiatives in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. But researchers say local funding remains sluggish. Take the Google-backed fund rolled out, also in October, in Nigeria, Africas most populous country. It will pay out $6,000 each to 10 AI startupsnot even enough to purchase the equipment needed to power their systems.Lilian Wanzare, a lecturer and NLP researcher at Maseno University in Kisumu, Kenya, bridles at African governments lackadaisical support for local AI initiatives and complains as well that the government charges exorbitant fees for access to publicly generated data, hindering data sharing and collaboration. [We] researchers are just blocked, she says. The government is saying theyre willing to support us, but the structures have not been put in place for us.Language barriersResearchers who want to make Africa-centric AI dont face just insufficient local investment and inaccessible data. There are major linguistic challenges, too.During one discussion at the Indaba, Ife Adebara, a Nigerian computational linguist, posed a question: How many people can write a bachelors thesis in their native African language?Zero hands went up.Then the audience disintegrated into laughter.Africans want AI to speak their local languages, but many Africans cannot speak and write in these languages themselves, Adebara said.Although Africa accounts for one-third of all languages in the world, many oral languages are slowly disappearing, their population of native speakers declining. And LLMs developed by Western-based tech companies fail to serve African languages; they dont understand locally relevant context and culture.For Adebara and others researching NLP tools, the lack of people who have the ability to read and write in African languages poses a major hurdle to development of bespoke AI-enabled technologies. Without literacy in our local languages, the future of AI in Africa is not as bright as we think, she says.On top of all that, theres little machine-readable data for African languages. One reason is that linguistic departments in public universities are poorly funded, Adebara says, limiting linguists participation in work that could create such data and benefit AI development.This year, she and her colleagues established EqualyzAI, a for-profit company seeking to preserve African languages through digital technology. They have built voice tools and AI models, covering about 517 African languages.Lelapa AI, a software company thats building data sets and NLP tools for African languages, is also trying to address these language-specific challenges. Its cofounders met in 2017 at the first Deep Learning Indaba and launched the company in 2022. In 2023, it released its first AI tool, Vulavula, a speech-to-text program that recognizes several languages spoken in South Africa.This year, Lelapa AI released InkubaLM, a first-of-its-kind small language model that currently supports a range of African languages: IsiXhosa, Yoruba, Swahili, IsiZulu, and Hausa. InkubaLM can answer questions and perform tasks like English translation and sentiment analysis. In tests, it performed as well as some larger models. But its still in early stages. The hope is that InkubaLM will someday power Vulavula, says Jade Abbott, cofounder and chief operating officer of Lelapa AI.Its the first iteration of us really expressing our long-term vision of what we want, and where we see African AI in the future, Abbott says. What were really building is a small language model that punches above its weight.InkubaLM is trained on two open-source data sets with 1.9 billion tokens, built and curated by Masakhane and other African developers who worked with real people in local communities. They paid native speakers of languages to attend writing workshops to create data for their model.Fundamentally, this approach will always be better, says Wanzare, because its informed by people who represent the language and culture.A clash over strategyAnother issue that came up again and again at the Indaba was that Africas AI scene lacks the sort of regulation and support from governments that you find elsewhere in the worldin Europe, the US, China, and, increasingly, the Middle East.Of the 55 African nations, only sevenSenegal, Egypt, Mauritius, Rwanda, Algeria, Nigeria, and Beninhave developed their own formal AI strategies. And many of those are still in the early stages.A major point of tension at the Indaba, though, was the regulatory framework that will govern the approach to AI across the entire continent. In March, the African Union Development Agency published a white paper, developed over a three-year period, that lays out this strategy. The 200-page document includes recommendations for industry codes and practices, standards to assess and benchmark AI systems, and a blueprint of AI regulations for African nations to adopt. The hope is that it will be endorsed by the heads of African governments in February 2025 and eventually passed by the African Union.But in July, the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, another African governing body that wields more power than the development agency, released a rival continental AI strategya 66-page document that diverges from the initial white paper.Its unclear whats behind the second strategy, but Seydina Ndiaye, a program director at the Cheikh Hamidou Kane Digital University in Dakar who helped draft the development agencys white paper, claims it was drafted by a tech lobbyist from Switzerland. The commissions strategy calls for African Union member states to declare AI a national priority, promote AI startups, and develop regulatory frameworks to address safety and security challenges. But Ndiaye expressed concerns that the document does not reflect the perspectives, aspirations, knowledge, and work of grassroots African AI communities. Its a copy-paste of whats going on outside the continent, he says.Vukosi Marivate, a computer scientist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa who helped found the Deep Learning Indaba and is known as an advocate for the African machine-learning movement, expressed fury over this turn of events at the conference. These are things we shouldnt accept, he declared. The room full of data wonks, linguists, and international funders brimmed with frustration. But Marivate encouraged the group to forge ahead with building AI that benefits Africans: We dont have to wait for the rules to act right, he said.Barbara Glover, a program manager for the African Union Development Agency, acknowledges that AI researchers are angry and frustrated. Theres been a push to harmonize the two continental AI strategies, but she says the process has been fractious: That engagement didnt go as envisioned. Her agency plans to keep its own version of the continental AI strategy, Glover says, adding that it was developed by African experts rather than outsiders. We are capable, as Africans, of driving our own AI agenda, she says.DEEP LEARNING INDABA 2024This all speaks to a broader tension over foreign influence in the African AI scene, one that goes beyond any single strategic document. Mirroring the skepticism toward the African Union Commission strategy, critics say the Deep Learning Indaba is tainted by its reliance on funding from big foreign tech companies; roughly 50% of its $500,000 annual budget comes from international donors and the rest from corporations like Google DeepMind, Apple, Open AI, and Meta. They argue that this cash could pollute the Indabas activities and influence the topics and speakers chosen for discussion.But Mohamed, the Indaba cofounder who is a researcher at Google DeepMind, says that almost all that goes back to our beneficiaries across the continent, and the organization helps connect them to training opportunities in tech companies. He says it benefits from some of its cofounders ties with these companies but that they do not set the agenda.Ndiaye says that the funding is necessary to keep the conference going. But we need to have more African governments involved, he says.To Timnit Gebru, founder and executive director at the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which supports equitable AI research in Africa, the angst about foreign funding for AI development comes down to skepticism of exploitative, profit-driven international tech companies. Africans [need] to do something different and not replicate the same issues were fighting against, Gebru says. She warns about the pressure to adopt AI for everything in Africa, adding that theres a lot of push from international development organizations to use AI as an antidote for all Africas challenges.Siminyu, who is also a researcher at DAIR, agrees with that view. She hopes that African governments will fund and work with people in Africa to build AI tools that reach underrepresented communitiestools that can be used in positive ways and in a context that works for Africans. We should be afforded the dignity of having AI tools in a way that others do, she says.

Rather than analyzing the news this week, I thought Id lift the hood a bit on how we make it.Ive spent most of this year being pretty convinced that Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States. Even so, like most people, I was completely surprised by the scope of his victory. By taking the lions share not just in the Electoral College but also the popular vote, coupled with the wins in the Senate (and, as I write this, seemingly the House) and ongoing control of the courts, Trump has done far more than simply eke out a win. This level of victory will certainly provide the political capital to usher in a broad sweep of policy changes.Some of these changes will be well outside our lane as a publication. But very many of President-elect Trumps stated policy goals will have direct impacts on science and technology. Some of the proposed changes would have profound effects on the industries and innovations weve covered regularly, and for years. When he talks about his intention toend EV subsidies, hit the brakes on FTC enforcement actions on Big Tech, ease the rules on crypto, or impose a 60 percent tariff on goods from China, these are squarely in our strike zone and we would be remiss not to explore the policies and their impact in detail.And so I thought I would share some of my remarks from our edit meeting on Wednesday morning, when we woke up to find out that the world had indeed changed. I think its helpful for our audience if we are transparent and upfront about how we intend to operate, especially over the next several months that will likely be, well, chaotic.This is a moment when our jobs are more important than ever. There will be so much noise and heat out there in the coming weeks and months, and maybe even years. The next six months in particular will be a confusing time for a lot of people. We should strive to be the signal in that noise.We have extremely important stories to write about the role of science and technology in the new administration. There are obvious stories for us to take on in regards to climate, energy, vaccines, womens health, IVF, food safety, chips, China, and Im sure a lot more, that people are going to have all sorts of questions about. Lets start by making a list of questions we have ourselves. Some of the people and technologies we cover will be ascendant in all sorts of ways. We should interrogate that power. Its important that we take care in those stories not to be speculative or presumptive. To always have the facts buttoned up. To speak the truth and be unassailable in doing so.Do we drop everything and only cover this? No. But it will certainly be a massive story that affects nearly all others.This election will be a transformative moment for society and the world. Trump didnt just win, he won a mandate. And hes going to change the country and the global order as a result. The next few weeks will see so much speculation as to what it all means. So much fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There is an enormous amount of bullshit headed down the line. People will be hungry for sources they can trust. We should be there for that. Lets leverage our credibility, not squander it.We are not the resistance. We just want to tell the truth. So lets take a breath, and then go out there and do our jobs.I like to tell our reporters and editors that our coverage should be free from either hype or cynicism. I think thats especially true now.Im also very interested to hear from our readers: What questions do you have? What are the policy changes or staffing decisions you are curious about? Please drop me a line atmat.honan@technologyreview.comIm eager to hear from you.If someone forwarded you this edition of The Debrief, you cansubscribe here.Now read the rest of The DebriefThe NewsPalmer Luckey, who was ousted from Facebook over his support for the last Trump administration and went into defense contracting, is poised to grow in influence under a second administration. He recently talked to MIT Technology Review about how the Pentagon is using mixed reality. What does Donald Trumps relationship with Elon Musk mean for the global EV industry? The Biden administration was perceived as hostile to crypto. The industry can likely expect friendlier waters under Trump Some counter-programming: Life seeking robots could punch through Europas icy surface And for one more big take thats not related to the election: AI vs quantum. AI could solve some of the most interesting scientific problems before big quantum computers become a realityThe ChatEvery week Ill talk to one of MIT Technology Reviews reporters or editors to find out more about what theyve been working on. This week, I chatted with Melissa Heikkil about her story on how ChatGPT search paves the way for AI agents.Mat: Melissa, OpenAI rolled out web search for ChatGPT last week. It seems pretty cool. But you got at a really interesting bigger picture point about it paving the way for agents. What does that mean?Melissa: Microsoft tried to chip away at Googles search monopoly with Bing, and that didnt really work. Its unlikely OpenAI will be able to make much difference either. Their best bet is try to get users used to a new way of finding information and browsing the web through virtual assistants that can do complex tasks. Tech companies call these agents. ChatGPTs usefulness is limited by the fact that it cant access the internet and doesnt have the most up to date information. By integrating a really powerful search engine into the chatbot, suddenly you have a tool that can help you plan things and find information in a far more comprehensive and immersive way than traditional search, and this is a key feature of the next generation of AI assistants.Mat: What will agents be able to do?Melissa: AI agents can complete complex tasks autonomously and the vision is that they will work as a human assistant would book your flights, reschedule your meetings, help with research, you name it. But I wouldnt get too excited yet. The cutting-edge of AI tech can retrieve information and generate stuff, but it still lacks the reasoning and long-term planning skills to be really useful. AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude also cant interact with computer interfaces, like clicking at stuff, very well. They also need to become a lot more reliable and stop making stuff up, which is still a massive problem with AI. So were still a long way away from the vision becoming reality! I wrote anexplainer on agentsa little while ago with more details.Mat: Is search as we know it going away? Are we just moving to a world of agents that not only answer questions but also accomplish tasks?Melissa: Its really hard to say. We are so used to using online search, and its surprisingly hard to change peoples behaviors. Unless agents become super reliable and powerful, I dont think search is going to go away.Mat: By the way, I know you are in the UK. Did you hear we had an election over here in the US?Melissa: LOLThe RecommendationIm just back from a family vacation in New York City, where I was in town to run the marathon. (I get to point this out for like one or two more weeks before the bragging gets tedious, I think.) While there, we went to see The Outsiders. Chat, it was incredible. (Which maybe should go without saying given that it won the Tony for best musical.) But wow. I loved the book and the movie as a kid. But this hit me on an entirely other level. Im not really a cries-at-movies (or especially at musicals) kind of person but I was wiping my eyes for much of the second act. So were very many people sitting around me. Anyway. If youre in New York, or if it comes to your city, go see it. And until then, the soundtrack is pretty amazing on its own. (Heres a great example.)

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Trumps win is a tragic loss for climate progressJames TempleDonald Trumps decisive victory is a stunning setback for the fight against climate change.The Republican president-elects return to the White House means the US is going to squander precious momentum, unraveling hard-won policy progress that was just beginning to pay off, all for the second time in less than a decade.It comes at a moment when the world cant afford to waste time, with nations far off track from any emissions trajectories that would keep our ecosystems stable and our communities safe.Trump could push the globe into even more dangerous terrain, by defanging President Joe Bidens signature climate laws, exacerbating the dangers of heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts, and famine and increase deaths and disease from air pollution. And this time round, I fear it will be far worse. Read the full story.The US is about to make a sharp turn on climate policyThe past four years have seen the US take climate action seriously, working with the international community and pumping money into solutions. Now, were facing a period where things are going to be very different. This is what the next four years will mean for the climate fight. Read the full story.Casey CrownhartThis story is from The Spark, a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. If you want to stay up-to-date with all the latest goings-on in climate and energy, sign up.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Tech leaders are lining up to congratulate Donald TrumpIn a bid to placate the famously volatile President-elect. (FT $)+ Many are seeking to rebuild bridges that have fractured since his last tenure. (CNBC)+ Particularly Jeff Bezos, who has had a fractious relationship with Trump. (NY Mag $)+ Expect less regulation, more trade upheaval, and a whole lot more Elon Musk. (WP $)2 Election deniers have gone mysteriously silentIts almost as if their claims of fraud were baseless in the first place. (NYT $)+ It looks like influencer marketing campaigns really did change minds. (Wired $)3 How Elon Musk is likely to slash US government spendingHe has a long history of strategic cost-cutting in his own businesses. (WSJ $)+ His other ventures are on course for favorable government treatment. (Reuters)+ Its easy to forget that Musk claims to have voted Democrat in 2020 and 2016. (WP $)4 Google could be spared being broken upTrump has expressed skepticism about the antitrust proposal. (Reuters)+ Its far from the only reverse-ferret were likely to see. (Economist $)5 How progressive groups are planning for a future under TrumpAlliances are meeting today to form networks of resources. (Fast Company $)6 Australia wants to ban under-16s from accessing social mediaBut its not clear how it could be enforced. (The Guardian)+ The proposed law could come into power as soon as next year. (BBC)+ Roblox has made sweeping changes to its child safety policies. (Bloomberg $)+ Child online safety laws will actually hurt kids, critics say. (MIT Technology Review)7 It looks like OpenAI just paid $10 million for a urlWhy ChatGPT when you could just chat.com? (The Verge)+ How ChatGPT search paves the way for AI agents. (MIT Technology Review)8 Women in the US are exploring swearing off men altogetherSocial media interest in a Korean movement advocating for a man-free life is soaring. (WP $)9 Gen Z cant get enough of manifestingTikTok is teaching them how to will their way to a better life. (Insider $)10 Tattoo artists are divided over whether they should use AIAI-assisted designs have been accused of lacking soul. (WSJ $)Quote of the dayDont worry, I wont judge much. Maybe just an eye roll here and there.Lily, a sarcastic AI teenage avatar and star of language learning app Duolingo, greets analysts tuning into the companys earning call, Insider reports.The big storyThe great commercial takeover of low-Earth orbitApril 2024NASA designed the International Space Station to fly for 20 years. It has lasted six years longer than that, though it is showing its age, and NASA is currently studying how to safely destroy the space laboratory by around 2030.The ISS never really became what some had hoped: a launching point for an expanding human presence in the solar system. But it did enable fundamental research on materials and medicine, and it helped us start to understand how space affects the human body.To build on that work, NASA has partnered with private companies to develop new, commercial space stations for research, manufacturing, and tourism. If they are successful, these companies will bring about a new era of space exploration: private rockets flying to private destinations. Theyre already planning to do it around the moon. One day, Mars could follow. Read the full story.David W. BrownWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Who doesnt love a smeared makeup look?+ Time to snuggle up: its officially Nora Ephron season. + Walking backwardsdont knock it til youve tried it. Its surprisingly good for you.+ Feeling stressed? Heres how to calm your mind in times of trouble.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Why AI could eat quantum computings lunchTech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that theyll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics.But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computings purported home turf might not be so safe after all. Read the full story.Edd GentWhats next for reproductive rights in the USThis week, it wasnt just the future president of the US that was on the ballot. Ten states also voted on abortion rights.Two years ago, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a legal decision that protected the right to abortion. Since then, abortion bans have been enacted in multiple states, and millions of people in the US have lost access to local clinics.Now, some states are voting to extend and protect access to abortion. Missouri, a state that has long restricted access, even voted to overturn its ban. But its not all good news for proponents of reproductive rights. Read the full story.Jessica HamzelouThis story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Black Americans received racist texts threatening them with slaverySome of the messages claim to be from Trump supporters or the Trump administration. (WP $)+ What Trumps last tenure as president can teach us about whats coming. (New Yorker $)+ The January 6 rioters are hoping for early pardons and release. (Wired $)2 China is shoring up its economy to the tune of $1.4 trillionIts bracing itself for increased trade tensions with a Trump-governed US. (FT $)+ The countrys chip industry has a plan too. (Reuters)+ Were witnessing the return of Trumponomics. (Economist $)+ Heres how the tech markets have reacted to his reelection. (Insider $)3 How crypto came out on topTrump is all in, even if he previously dismissed it as a scam. (Bloomberg $)+ Enthusiasts are hoping for less regulation and more favorable legislation. (Time $)4 A weight-loss drug contributed to the death of a nurse in the UKSusan McGowan took two doses of Mounjaro in the weeks before her death. (BBC)+ Its the first known death to be officially linked to the drug in the UK. (The Guardian)5 An academics lawsuit against Meta has been dismissedEthan Zuckerman wanted protection against the firm for building an unfollowing tool. (NYT $)6 How the Republicans won onlineThe right-wing influencer ecosystem is extremely powerful and effective. (The Atlantic $)+ The left doesnt really have an equivalent network. (Vox)+ X users are considering leaving the platform in protest (again.) (Slate $)7 What does the future of Americas public health look like?Noted conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer RFK Jr could be in charge soon. (NY Mag $)+ Letting Kennedy go wild on health is not a great sign. (Forbes $)+ His war on fluoride in drinking water is already underway. (Politico)8 An AI-created portrait of Alan Turing has sold for $1 millionJust why? (The Guardian)+ Why artists are becoming less scared of AI. (MIT Technology Review)9 How to harness energy from spaceA relay system of transmitters could help to ping it back to Earth. (IEEE Spectrum)+ The quest to figure out farming on Mars. (MIT Technology Review)10 AI-generated videos are not interestingThats according to the arbiters of what is and isnt interesting over at Reddit. (404 Media)+ Whats next for generative video. (MIT Technology Review)Quote of the dayThats petty, right? How much does one piece of fruit per day cost?A former Intel employee reacts to the news the embattled company is planning to restore its free coffee privileges for its staffbut not free fruit, Insider reports.The big storyRecapturing early internet whimsy with HTMLDecember 2023Websites werent always slick digital experiences.There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls of text on a colored background. In the 2000s, before Squarespace and social media, websites were manifestations of individualitybuilt from scratch using HTML, by users who had some knowledge of code.Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. And the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aestheticsits about celebrating the human touch in digital experiences. Read the full story.Tiffany NgWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Sandwiches through the ages is a pretty great subject for a book.+ Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon are getting the band back together! (kind of)+ Instant mashed potatoes have a bad reputation. But it doesnt have to be this way.+ Heres what an actual robot apocalypse would look like (thanks Will!)

Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that theyll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics.Those expectations have been especially high in physics and chemistry, where the weird effects of quantum mechanics come into play. In theory, this is where quantum computers could have a huge advantage over conventional machines.But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computings purported home turf might not be so safe after all.The scale and complexity of quantum systems that can be simulated using AI is advancing rapidly, says Giuseppe Carleo, a professor of computational physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). Last month, he coauthored a paper published in Science showing that neural-network-based approaches are rapidly becoming the leading technique for modeling materials with strong quantum properties. Meta also recently unveiled an AI model trained on a massive new data set of materials that has jumped to the top of a leaderboard for machine-learning approaches to material discovery.Given the pace of recent advances, a growing number of researchers are now asking whether AI could solve a substantial chunk of the most interesting problems in chemistry and materials science before large-scale quantum computers become a reality.The existence of these new contenders in machine learning is a serious hit to the potential applications of quantum computers, says Carleo In my opinion, these companies will find out sooner or later that their investments are not justified.Exponential problemsThe promise of quantum computers lies in their potential to carry out certain calculations much faster than conventional computers. Realizing this promise will require much larger quantum processors than we have today. The biggest devices have just crossed the thousand-qubit mark, but achieving an undeniable advantage over classical computers will likely require tens of thousands, if not millions. Once that hardware is available, though, a handful of quantum algorithms, like the encryption-cracking Shors algorithm, have the potential to solve problems exponentially faster than classical algorithms can.But for many quantum algorithms with more obvious commercial applications, like searching databases, solving optimization problems, or powering AI, the speed advantage is more modest. And last year, a paper coauthored by Microsofts head of quantum computing, Matthias Troyer, showed that these theoretical advantages disappear if you account for the fact that quantum hardware operates orders of magnitude slower than modern computer chips. The difficulty of getting large amounts of classical data in and out of a quantum computer is also a major barrier.So Troyer and his colleagues concluded that quantum computers should instead focus on problems in chemistry and materials science that require simulation of systems where quantum effects dominate. A computer that operates along the same quantum principles as these systems should, in theory, have a natural advantage here. In fact, this has been a driving idea behind quantum computing ever since the renowned physicist Richard Feynman first proposed the idea.The rules of quantum mechanics govern many things with huge practical and commercial value, like proteins, drugs, and materials. Their properties are determined by the interactions of their constituent particles, in particular their electronsand simulating these interactions in a computer should make it possible to predict what kinds of characteristics a molecule will exhibit. This could prove invaluable for discovering things like new medicines or more efficient battery chemistries, for example.But the intuition-defying rules of quantum mechanicsin particular, the phenomenon of entanglement, which allows the quantum states of distant particles to become intrinsically linkedcan make these interactions incredibly complex. Precisely tracking them requires complicated math that gets exponentially tougher the more particles are involved. That can make simulating large quantum systems intractable on classical machines.This is where quantum computers could shine. Because they also operate on quantum principles, they are able to represent quantum states much more efficiently than is possible on classical machines. They could also take advantage of quantum effects to speed up their calculations.But not all quantum systems are the same. Their complexity is determined by the extent to which their particles interact, or correlate, with each other. In systems where these interactions are strong, tracking all these relationships can quickly explode the number of calculations required to model the system. But in most that are of practical interest to chemists and materials scientists, correlation is weak, says Carleo. That means their particles dont affect each others behavior significantly, which makes the systems far simpler to model.The upshot, says Carleo, is that quantum computers are unlikely to provide any advantage for most problems in chemistry and materials science. Classical tools that can accurately model weakly correlated systems already exist, the most prominent being density functional theory (DFT). The insight behind DFT is that all you need to understand a systems key properties is its electron density, a measure of how its electrons are distributed in space. This makes for much simpler computation but can still provide accurate results for weakly correlated systems.Simulating large systems using these approaches requires considerable computing power. But in recent years theres been an explosion of research using DFT to generate data on chemicals, biomolecules, and materialsdata that can be used to train neural networks. These AI models learn patterns in the data that allow them to predict what properties a particular chemical structure is likely to have, but they are orders of magnitude cheaper to run than conventional DFT calculations.This has dramatically expanded the size of systems that can be modeledto as many as 100,000 atoms at a timeand how long simulations can run, says Alexandre Tkatchenko, a physics professor at the University of Luxembourg. Its wonderful. You can really do most of chemistry, he says.Olexandr Isayev, a chemistry professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says these techniques are already being widely applied by companies in chemistry and life sciences. And for researchers, previously out of reach problems such as optimizing chemical reactions, developing new battery materials, and understanding protein binding are finally becoming tractable.As with most AI applications, the biggest bottleneck is data, says Isayev. Metas recently released materials data set was made up of DFT calculations on 118 million molecules. A model trained on this data achieved state-of-the-art performance, but creating the training material took vast computing resources, well beyond whats accessible to most research teams. That means fulfilling the full promise of this approach will require massive investment.Modeling a weakly correlated system using DFT is not an exponentially scaling problem, though. This suggests that with more data and computing resources, AI-based classical approaches could simulate even the largest of these systems, says Tkatchenko. Given that quantum computers powerful enough to compete are likely still decades away, he adds, AIs current trajectory suggests it could reach important milestones, such as precisely simulating how drugs bind to a protein, much sooner.Strong correlationsWhen it comes to simulating strongly correlated quantum systemsones whose particles interact a lotmethods like DFT quickly run out of steam. While more exotic, these systems include materials with potentially transformative capabilities, like high-temperature superconductivity or ultra-precise sensing. But even here, AI is making significant strides.In 2017, EPFLs Carleo and Microsofts Troyer published a seminal paper in Science showing that neural networks could model strongly correlated quantum systems. The approach doesnt learn from data in the classical sense. Instead, Carleo says, it is similar to DeepMinds AlphaZero model, which mastered the games of Go, chess, and shogi using nothing more than the rules of each game and the ability to play itself.In this case, the rules of the game are provided by Schrdingers equation, which can precisely describe a systems quantum state, or wave function. The model plays against itself by arranging particles in a certain configuration and then measuring the systems energy level. The goal is to reach the lowest energy configuration (known as the ground state), which determines the systems properties. The model repeats this process until energy levels stop falling, indicating that the ground stateor something close to ithas been reached.The power of these models is their ability to compress information, says Carleo. The wave function is a very complicated mathematical object, he says. What has been shown by several papers now is that [the neural network] is able to capture the complexity of this object in a way that can be handled by a classical machine.Since the 2017 paper, the approach has been extended to a wide range of strongly correlated systems, says Carleo, and results have been impressive. The Science paper he published with colleagues last month put leading classical simulation techniques to the test on a variety of tricky quantum simulation problems, with the goal of creating a benchmark to judge advances in both classical and quantum approaches. Carleo says that neural-network-based techniques are now the best approach for simulating many of the most complex quantum systems they tested. Machine learning is really taking the lead in many of these problems, he says.These techniques are catching the eye of some big players in the tech industry. In August, researchers at DeepMind showed in a paper in Science that they could accurately model excited states in quantum systems, which could one day help predict the behavior of things like solar cells, sensors, and lasers. Scientists at Microsoft Research have also developed an open-source software suite to help more researchers use neural networks for simulation.One of the main advantages of the approach is that it piggybacks on massive investments in AI software and hardware, says Filippo Vicentini, a professor of AI and condensed-matter physics at cole Polytechnique in France, who was also a coauthor on the Science benchmarking paper: Being able to leverage these kinds of technological advancements gives us a huge edge.There is a caveat: Because the ground states are effectively found through trial and error rather than explicit calculations, they are only approximations. But this is also why the approach could make progress on what has looked like an intractable problem, says Juan Carrasquilla, a researcher at ETH Zurich, and another coauthor on the Science benchmarking paper.If you want to precisely track all the interactions in a strongly correlated system, the number of calculations you need to do rises exponentially with the systems size. But if youre happy with an answer that is just good enough, theres plenty of scope for taking shortcuts.Perhaps theres no hope to capture it exactly, says Carrasquilla. But theres hope to capture enough information that we capture all the aspects that physicists care about. And if we do that, its basically indistinguishable from a true solution.And while strongly correlated systems are generally too hard to simulate classically, there are notable instances where this isnt the case. That includes some systems that are relevant for modeling high-temperature superconductors, according to a 2023 paper in Nature Communications.Because of the exponential complexity, you can always find problems for which you cant find a shortcut, says Frank Noe, research manager at Microsoft Research, who has led much of the companys work in this area. But I think the number of systems for which you cant find a good shortcut will just become much smaller.No magic bulletsHowever, Stefanie Czischek, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, says it can be hard to predict what problems neural networks can feasibly solve. For some complex systems they do incredibly well, but then on other seemingly simple ones, computational costs balloon unexpectedly. We dont really know their limitations, she says. No one really knows yet what are the conditions that make it hard to represent systems using these neural networks.Meanwhile, there have also been significant advances in other classical quantum simulation techniques, says Antoine Georges, director of the Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute in New York, who also contributed to the recent Science benchmarking paper. They are all successful in their own right, and they are also very complementary, he says. So I dont think these machine-learning methods are just going to completely put all the other methods out of business.Quantum computers will also have their niche, says Martin Roetteler, senior director of quantum solutions at IonQ, which is developing quantum computers built from trapped ions. While he agrees that classical approaches will likely be sufficient for simulating weakly correlated systems, hes confident that some large, strongly correlated systems will be beyond their reach. The exponential is going to bite you, he says. There are cases with strongly correlated systems that we cannot treat classically. Im strongly convinced that thats the case.In contrast, he says, a future fault-tolerant quantum computer with many more qubits than todays devices will be able to simulate such systems. This could help find new catalysts or improve understanding of metabolic processes in the bodyan area of interest to the pharmaceutical industry.Neural networks are likely to increase the scope of problems that can be solved, says Jay Gambetta, who leads IBMs quantum computing efforts, but hes unconvinced theyll solve the hardest challenges businesses are interested in.Thats why many different companies that essentially have chemistry as their requirement are still investigating quantumbecause they know exactly where these approximation methods break down, he says.Gambetta also rejects the idea that the technologies are rivals. He says the future of computing is likely to involve a hybrid of the two approaches, with quantum and classical subroutines working together to solve problems. I dont think theyre in competition. I think they actually add to each other, he says.But Scott Aaronson, who directs the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas, says machine-learning approaches are directly competing against quantum computers in areas like quantum chemistry and condensed-matter physics. He predicts that a combination of machine learning and quantum simulations will outperform purely classical approaches in many cases, but that wont become clear until larger, more reliable quantum computers are available.From the very beginning, Ive treated quantum computing as first and foremost a scientific quest, with any industrial applications as icing on the cake, he says. So if quantum simulation turns out to beat classical machine learning only rarely, I wont be quite as crestfallen as some of my colleagues.One area where quantum computers look likely to have a clear advantage is in simulating how complex quantum systems evolve over time, says EPFLs Carleo. This could provide invaluable insights for scientists in fields like statistical mechanics and high-energy physics, but it seems unlikely to lead to practical uses in the near term. These are more niche applications that, in my opinion, do not justify the massive investments and the massive hype, Carleo adds.Nonetheless, the experts MIT Technology Review spoke to said a lack of commercial applications is not a reason to stop pursuing quantum computing, which could lead to fundamental scientific breakthroughs in the long run. Science is like a set of nested boxesyou solve one problem and you find five other problems, says Vicentini. The complexity of the things we study will increase over time, so we will always need more powerful tools.

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Reviewsweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here.Earlier this week, Americans cast their votes in a seminal presidential election. But it wasnt just the future president of the US that was on the ballot. Ten states also voted on abortion rights.Two years ago, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a legal decision that protected the right to abortion. Since then, abortion bans have been enacted in multiple states, and millions of people in the US have lost access to local clinics.Now, some states are voting to extend and protect access to abortion. This week, seven states voted in support of such measures. And voters in Missouri, a state that has long restricted access, have voted to overturn its ban.Its not all good news for proponents of reproductive rightssome states voted against abortion access. And questions remain over the impact of a second term under former president Donald Trump, who is set to return to the post in January.Roe v. Wade, the legal decision that enshrined a constitutional right to abortion in the US in 1973, guaranteed the right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability, which is generally considered to be around 24 weeks of pregnancy. It was overturned by the US Supreme Court in the summer of 2022.Within 100 days of the decision, 13 states had enacted total bans on abortion from the moment of conception. Clinics in these states could no longer offer abortions. Other states also restricted abortion access. In that 100-day period, 66 of the 79 clinics across 15 states stopped offering abortion services, and 26 closed completely, according to research by the Guttmacher Institute.The political backlash to the decision was intense. This week, abortion was on the ballot in 10 states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. And seven of them voted in support of abortion access.The impact of these votes will vary by state. Abortion was already legal in Maryland, for example. But the new measures should make it more difficult for lawmakers to restrict reproductive rights in the future. In Arizona, abortions after 15 weeks had been banned since 2022. There, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that will guarantee access to abortion until fetal viability.Missouri was the first state to enact an abortion ban once Roe v. Wade was overturned. The states current Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act prohibits doctors from performing abortions unless there is a medical emergency. It has no exceptions for rape or incest. This week, the state voted to overturn that ban and protect access to abortion up to fetal viability.Not all states voted in support of reproductive rights. Amendments to expand access failed to garner enough support in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Florida. In Florida, for example, where abortions after six weeks of pregnancy are banned, an amendment to protect access until fetal viability got 57% of the vote, falling just short of the 60% the state required for it to pass.Its hard to predict how reproductive rights will fare over the course of a second Trump term. Trump himself has been inconsistent on the issue. During his first term, he installed members of the Supreme Court who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. During his most recent campaign he said that decisions on reproductive rights should be left to individual states.Trump, himself a Florida resident, has refused to comment on how he voted in the states recent ballot question on abortion rights. When asked, he said that the reporter who posed the question should just stop talking about that, according to the Associated Press.State decisions can affect reproductive rights beyond abortion access. Just look at Alabama. In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law. Embryos are routinely cryopreserved in the course of in vitro fertilization treatment, and the ruling was considered likely to significantly restrict access to IVF in the state. (In March, the state passed another law protecting clinics from legal repercussions should they damage or destroy embryos during IVF procedures, but the status of embryos remains unchanged.)The fertility treatment became a hot topic during this years campaign. In October, Trump bizarrely referred to himself as the father of IVF. That title is usually reserved for Robert Edwards, the British researcher who won the 2010 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for developing the technology in the 1970s.Whatever is in store for reproductive rights in the US in the coming months and years, all weve seen so far suggests that its likely to be a bumpy ride.Now read the rest of The CheckupRead more from MIT Technology Reviews archiveMy colleague Rhiannon Williams reported on the immediate aftermath of the decision that reversed Roe v. Wade when it was announced a couple of years ago.The Alabama Supreme Court ruling on embryos could also affect the development of technologies designed to serve as artificial wombs, as Antonio Regalado explained at the time.Other technologies are set to change the way we have babies. Some, which could lead to the creation of children with four parents or none at all, stand to transform our understanding of parenthood.Weve also reported on attempts to create embryo-like structures using stem cells. These structures look like embryos but are created without eggs or sperm. Theres a wild race afoot to make these more like the real thing. But both scientific and ethical questions remain over how far we canandshould go.My colleagues have been exploring what the US election outcome might mean for climate policies. Senior climate editor James Temple writes that Trumps victory is a stunning setback for climate change. And senior reporter Casey Crownhart explains how efforts including a trio of laws implemented by the Biden administration, which massively increased climate funding, could be undone.From around the webDonald Trump has said hell let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. go wild on health. Heres where the former environmental lawyer and independent candidatewho has no medical or public health degreesstands on vaccines, fluoride, and the Affordable Care Act. (New York Times)Bird flu has been detected in pigs on a farm in Oregon. Its a worrying development that virologists were dreading. (The Conversation)And, in case you need it, heres some lighter reading:Scientists are sequencing the DNA of tiny marine plankton for the first time. (Come for the story of the scientific expedition; stay for the beautiful images of jellies and sea sapphires.) (The Guardian)Dolphins are known to communicate with whistles and clicks. But scientists were surprised to find a highly vocal solitary dolphin in the Baltic Sea. They think the animal is engaging in dolphin self-talk. (Bioacoustics)How much do you know about baby animals? Test your knowledge in this quiz. (National Geographic)

At long last, NASAs Europa Clipper mission is on its way. After overcoming financial and technological hurdles, the $5 billion mission launched on October 14 from Floridas Kennedy Space Center. It is now en route to its target: Jupiters ice-covered moon Europa, whose frozen shell almost certainly conceals a warm saltwater ocean. When the spacecraft gets there, it will conduct dozens of close flybys in order to determine what that ocean is like and, crucially, where it might be hospitable to life.Europa Clipper is still years away from its destinationit is not slated to reach the Jupiter system until 2030. But that hasnt stopped engineers and scientists from working on what would come next if the results are promising: a mission capable of finding evidence of life itself.This would likely have three parts: a lander, an autonomous ice-thawing robot, and some sort of self-navigating submersible. Indeed, several groups from multiple countries already have working prototypes of ice-diving robots and smart submersibles that they are set to test in Earths own frigid landscapes, from Alaska to Antarctica, in the next few yearsBut Earths oceans are pale simulacra of Europas extreme environment. To plumb the ocean of this Jovian moon, engineers must work out a way to get missions to survive a never-ending rain of radiation that fries electronic circuits. They must also plow through an ice shell thats at least twice as thick as Mount Everest is tall.There are a lot of hard problems that push up right against the limits of whats possible, says Richard Camilli, an expert on autonomous robotic systems at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutions Deep Submergence Laboratory. But youve got to start somewhere, and Earths seas will be a vital testing ground.Were doing something nobody has done before, says Sebastian Meckel, a researcher at the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, Germany, who is helping to develop one such futuristic Europan submersible. If the field tests prove successful, the descendants of these aquatic explorers could very well be those that uncover the first evidence of extraterrestrial life.Hellish descentThe hunt for signs of extraterrestrial biology has predominantly taken place on Mars, our dusty, diminutive planetary neighbor. Looking for life in an icy ocean world is a whole new kettle of (alien) fish, but exobiologists think its certainly worth the effort. On Mars, scientists hope to find microscopic evidence of past life on, or just under, its dry and frozen surface. But on Europa, which has a wealth of liquid water (kept warm by Jupiter, whose intense gravity generates plenty of internal friction and heat there), it is possible that microbial critters, and perhaps even more advanced small aquatic animals, may be present in the here and now.The bad news is that Europa is one of the most hostile environments in the solar systemat least, for anything above its concealed ocean.When NASAs Clipper mission arrives in 2030, it will be confronted by an endless storm of high-energy particles being whipped about by Jupiters immense and intense magnetic field, largely raining down onto Europa itself. Its enough to kill a regular person within a few seconds, says Camilli. No human will be present on Europa, but that radiation is so extreme that it can frazzle most electronic circuits. This poses a major hazard for Europa Clipper, which is why its doing only quick flybys of the moon as its orbit around Jupiter periodically dips close.Clipper has an impressive collection of remote sensing tools that will allow it to survey the oceans physical and chemical properties, even though it will never touch the moon itself. But almost all scientists expect that uncovering evidence of biological activity will require something to pierce through the ice shell and swim about in the ocean.An illustration of two Europa exploration concepts from NASA. An ice-melting probe called PRIME sits on the surface of the moon, with small wedge-shaped SWIM robots deployed below.NASA/JPL-CALTECHThe good news is that any Europan life-hunting mission has a great technological legacy to build upon. Over the years, scientists have developed and deployed robotic subs that have uncovered a cornucopia of strange life and bizarre geology dwelling in the deep. These include remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), which are often tethered to a surface vessel and are piloted by a person atop the waves, and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which freely traverse the seas by themselves before reporting back to the surface.Hopeful Europa explorers usually cite an AUV as their best optionsomething that a lander can drop off and let loose in those alien waters that will then return and share its data so it can be beamed back to Earth. The whole idea is very exciting and cool, says Bill Chadwick, a research professor at Oregon State Universitys Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon. But on a technical level, he adds, it seems incredibly daunting.Presuming that a life-finding robotic mission is sufficiently radiation-proof and can land and sit safely on Europas surface, it would then encounter the colossal obstacle that is Europas ice shell, estimated to be 10 to 15 miles thick. Something is going to have to drill or melt its way through all that before reaching the ocean, a process that will likely take several years. And theres no guarantee that the ice is going to be static as youre going through, says Camilli. Thanks to gravitational tugs from Jupiter, and the internal heat they generate, Europa is a geologically tumultuous world, with ice constantly fragmenting, convulsing and even erupting on its surface. How do you deal with that?Europas lack of an atmosphere is also an issue. Say your robot does reach the ocean below all that ice. Thats great, but if the thawed tunnel isnt sealed shut behind the robot, then the higher pressure of the oceanic depths will come up against a vacuum high above. If you drill through and you dont have some kind of pressure control, you can get the equivalent of a blowout, like an oil well, says Camilliand your robot could get rudely blasted into space.Even if you manage to pass through that gauntlet, you must then make sure the diver maintains a link with the surface lander, and with Earth. What would be worse than finally finding life somewhere else and not being able to tell anyone about it? says Morgan Cable, a research scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).Pioneering probesWhat these divers will do when they breach Europas ocean almost doesnt matter at this stage. The scientific analysis is currently secondary to the primary problem: Can robots actually get through that ice shell and survive the journey?A simple way to start is with a cryobota melt probe that can gradually thaw its way through the shell, pulled down by gravity. Thats the idea behind NASAs Probe using Radioisotopes for Icy Moons Exploration, or PRIME. As the name suggests, this cryobot would use the heat from the radioactive decay of an element like plutonium-238 to melt ice. If you know the thickness of the ice shell, you know exactly how many tablespoons of radioactive matter to bring aboard.Once it gets through the ice, the cryobot could unfurl a suite of scientific investigation tools, or perhaps deploy an independent submersible that could work in tandem with the cryobotall while making sure none of that radioactive matter contaminates the ocean. NASAs Sensing with Independent Micro-Swimmers project, for example, has sketched out plans to deploy a school of wedge-shaped robotsa fleet of sleuths that would work together to survey the depths before reporting back to base.These concepts remain hypothetical. To get an idea of whats technically possible, several teams are building and field-testing their own prototype ice divers.One of the furthest-along efforts is the Ocean Worlds Reconnaissance and Characterization of Astrobiological Analogs project, or ORCAA, led by JPL. After some preliminary fieldwork, the group is now ready for prime time; next year, a team will set up camp on Alaskas expansive Juneau Icefield and deploy an eight-foot tall, two-inch wide cryobot. Its goal will be to get through 1,000 feet of ice, through a glasslike upper layer, down into ancient ices, and ultimately into a subglacial lake.ORCAA team members stand by a lake on top of a glacier during Alaska fieldwork. NASA/JPL-CALTECHThis cryobot wont be powered by radioactive matter. I dont see NASA and the Department of Energy being game for that yet, says Samuel Howell, an ocean worlds scientist at JPL and the ORCAA principal investigator. Instead, it will be electrically heated (with power delivered via a tether to the surface), and that heat will pump warm water out in front of the cryobot, melting the ice and allowing it to migrate downward.The cryobot will be permanently tethered to the surface, using that link to communicate its rudimentary scientific data and return samples of water back to a team of scientists at base camp atop the ice. Those scientists will act as if they are an astrobiology suite of instruments similar to what might eventually be fitted on a cryobot sent to Europa.The 2025 field experiment has all the pieces of a cryobot mission, says Howell. Were just duct-taping them together and trying to see what breaks.Space scientists and marine engineers are also teaming up at Germanys Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) to forge their own underwater explorer. Under the auspices of the Technologies forRapidIcePenetration and SubglacialLakeExploration project, or TRIPLE, they are developing an ice-thawing cryobot, an astrobiological laboratory suite, and an AUV designed to be used in Earths seas and Europas ocean.Their cryobot is somewhat like the one ORCAA is using; its an electrically heated thawing machine tethered to the surface. But onboard MARUMs ice shuttle will be a remarkably small AUV, just 20 inches long and four inches wide. The team plans to deploy both on the Antarctic ice shelf, near the Neumayer III station, in the spring of 2026.Germanys Center for Marine Environmental Sciences is developing a small AUV that it plans to deploy in Antarctica in 2026.MARUM CENTER FOR MARINE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF BREMEN.From a surface station, the ice shuttle will thaw its way down through the ice shell, aiming to reach the bitingly cold water hundreds of feet below. Once it does so, a hatch will open and the tiny AUV will be dropped off to swim about (on a probably preprogrammed route), wirelessly communicating with the ice shuttle throughout. It will take a sample of the water, return to the ice shuttle, dock with it, and recharge its batteries. For the field test, the ice shuttle, which will have some rudimentary scientific tools, will return the water sample back to the surface for analysis; for the space mission itself, the idea is that an array of instruments onboard the shuttle will examine that water.As with ORCAA, the scientific aspect of this is not paramount. What were focusing on now is form and function, says project member Ralf Bachmayer, a marine robotics researcher at MARUM. Can their prototype Europan explorer get down to the hidden waters, deploy a scout, and return to base intact?Bachmayer cant wait to find out. For engineers, its a dream come true to work on this project, he says.Swarms and serpentsA submersible-like AUV isnt the only way scientists are thinking of investigating icy oceanic moons. JPLs Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, or EELS, involves a working, wriggling, serpentine robot inspired by the desire to crawl through the vents of Saturns own water-laden moon, Enceladus. The robotic snake has already been field-tested; it recently navigated through the icy crevasses and moulins of the Athabasca Glacier in Alberta, Canada.Although an AUV-like cryobot mission is likely to be the first explorer of an icy oceanic moon, a crazy idea like a robotic snake could work, says Cable, the science lead for EELS. She hopes the project is opening the eyes of scientists and engineers alike to new possibilities when it comes to accessing the hard-to-reach, and often most scientifically compelling, places of planetary environments.It might be that well need such creative, and perhaps unexpected, designs to find our way to Europas ocean. Space agencies exploring the solar system have achieved remarkable things, but NASA has never flown an aqueous instrument before, says Howell.But one day, thanks to this work, it mightand, just maybe, one of them will find life blooming in Europas watery shadows.Robin George Andrews is an award-winning science journalist and doctor of volcanoes based in London. He regularly writes about the Earth, space, and planetary sciences, and is the author of two critically acclaimed books: Super Volcanoes (2021) and How To Kill An Asteroid (October 2024).

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Life-seeking, ice-melting robots could punch through Europas icy shellAt long last, NASAs Europa Clipper mission is on its way. It launched on October 14 and is now en route to its target: Jupiters ice-covered moon Europa, whose frozen shell almost certainly conceals a warm saltwater ocean. When the spacecraft gets there, it will conduct dozens of close flybys in order to determine what that ocean is like and, crucially, where it might be hospitable to life.Europa Clipper is still years away from its destinationit is not slated to reach the Jupiter system until 2030. But that hasnt stopped engineers and scientists from working on what would come next if the results are promising: a mission capable of finding evidence of life itself. Read the full story. Robin George AndrewsGMOs could reboot chestnut treesLiving as long as a thousand years, the American chestnut tree once dominated parts of the Eastern forest canopy, with many Native American nations relying on them for food. But by 1950, the tree had largely succumbed to a fungal blight probably introduced by Japanese chestnuts.As recently as last year, it seemed the 35-year effort to revive the American chestnut might grind to a halt. Now, American Castanea, a new biotech startup, has created more than 2,500 transgenic chestnut seedlings likely the first genetically modified trees to be considered for federal regulatory approval as a tool for ecological restoration. Read the full story.Anya KamenetzThis piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is all about the weird and wonderful world of food. If you dont already, subscribe to receive future copies once they land.MIT Technology Review Narrated: Why Congos most famous national park is betting big on cryptoIn an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin mine. But some are wondering what crypto has to do with conservation.This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast. In partnership with News Over Audio, well be making a selection of our stories available, each one read by a professional voice actor. Youll be able to listen to them on the go or download them to listen to offline.Were 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 its released.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Donald Trump has won the US Presidential electionHes the first president with a criminal conviction and two impeachments under his belt. (WP $)+ The crypto industry is rejoicing at the news as bitcoin leapt to a record high. (NYT $)+ In fact, a blockchain entrepreneur won the Ohio Senate race. (CNBC)+ What comes next is anyones guess. (The Atlantic $)2 Trumps victory is music to Elon Musks earsHes been promised a new role as head of a new Department of Government Efficiency. (FT $)+ Musk is being sued over his $1 million giveaways during the election campaign. (Reuters)+ The billionaire used X as his own personal megaphone to stir up dissent. (The Atlantic $)3 Abortion rights are now under further threatParticularly pills sent by mail. (Vox)+ Trumps approach to discussing abortion has been decidedly mixed. (Bloomberg $)4 Trump could be TikToks last hope for survival in the USNow hes stopped threatening to ban it, that is. (The Information $)5 Perplexity is approaching a $9 billion valuationThanks to the companys fourth round of funding this year. (WSJ $)+ Microsoft has reportedly expressed interest in acquiring the AI search startup. (The Information $)6 The iPhone could be Apples last major cash cowIts acknowledged that its other devices may never reach the same heady heights. (FT $)+ Nvidia has overtaken Apple as the worlds largest company. (Bloomberg $)7 The Mozilla Foundation is getting rid of its advocacy divisionThe team prioritized fighting for a free and open web. (TechCrunch)8 China plans to slam a spacecraft into an asteroidFollowing in the footsteps of Americas successful 2022 mission. (Economist $)+ Watch the moment NASAs DART spacecraft crashed into an asteroid. (MIT Technology Review)9 The Vaticans anime mascot has been co opted into AI pornThat didnt take long. (404 Media)10 Gigantic XXL TVs are the gift of the seasonIts cheaper than ever to fit your home out with a jumbotron screen. (CNN)Quote of the dayThis is what happens when you mess with the crypto army.Crypto twin Cameron Winklevoss celebrates the victory of blockchain entrepreneur Bernie Moreno, new Senator-elect for Ohio, in a post on X.The big storyHow covid conspiracies led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialismAugust 2024Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that party drugs were an important factor in AIDS. His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him.Speaking to the biggest podcast audience in the world, the two men were promoting dangerous and false ideasideas that were in fact debunked and thoroughly disproved decades ago.These comments and others like them add up to a small but unmistakable resurgence in AIDS denialisma false collection of theories arguing either that HIV doesnt cause AIDS or that theres no such thing as HIV at all.These claims had largely fallen out of favor until the coronavirus arrived. But, following the pandemic, a renewed suspicion of public health figures and agencies is giving new life to ideas that had long ago been pushed to the margins. Read the full story.Anna MerlanWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Full Moon Matinee is an amazing crime drama resource on YouTube: complete with some excellent acting courtesy of its host.+ This is your sign to pick a name and cheer on random strangers during a marathon. I guarantee youll make their day!+ Theres no wrong way to bake a sweet potato, but some ways are better than others.+ Are you a screen creeper? I know I am.

The worlds first barcode, designed in 1948, took more than 25 years to make it out of the lab and onto a retail package. Since then, the barcode has done much more than make grocery checkouts fasterit has remade our understanding of how physical objects can be identified and tracked, creating a new pace and set of expectations for the speed and reliability of modern commerce.Nearly eighty years later, a new iteration of that technology, which encodes data in two dimensions, is poised to take the stage. Todays 2D barcode is not only out of the lab but open to a world of possibility, says Carrie Wilkie, senior vice president of standards and technology at GS1 US.2D barcodes encode substantially more information than their 1D counterparts. This enables them to link physical objects to a wide array of digital resources. For consumers, 2D barcodes can provide a wealth of product information, from food allergens, expiration dates, and safety recalls to detailed medication use instructions, coupons, and product offers. For businesses, 2D barcodes can enhance operational efficiencies, create traceability at the lot or item level, and drive new forms of customer engagement.DOWNLOAD THE REPORTAn array of 2D barcode types supports the information needs of a variety of industries. The GS1 DataMatrix, for example, is used on medication or medical devices, encoding expiration dates, batch and lot numbers, and FDA National Drug Codes. The QR Code is familiar to consumers who have used one to open a website from their phone. Adding a GS1 Digital Link URI to a QR Code enables it to serve two purposes: as both a traditional barcode for supply chain operations, enabling tracking throughout the supply chain and price lookup at checkout, and also as a consumer-facing link to digital information, like expiry dates and serial numbers.Regardless of type, however, all 2D barcodes require a business ecosystem backed by data. To capture new value from advanced barcodes, organizations must supply and manage clean, accurate, and interoperable data around their products and materials. For 2D barcodes to deliver on their potential, businesses will need to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers and commit to common data standards across the value chain.Driving the demand for 2D barcodesShifting to 2D barcodesand enabling the data ecosystems behind themwill require investment by business. Consumer engagement, compliance, and sustainability are among the many factors driving this transition.Real-time consumer engagement: Todays customers want to feel connected to the brands they interact with and purchase from. Information is a key element of that engagement and empowerment. When I think about customer satisfaction, says Leslie Hand, group vice president for IDC Retail Insights, Im thinking about how I can provide more information that allows them to make better decisions about their own lives and the things they buy.2D barcodes can help by connecting consumers to online content in real time. If, by using a 2D barcode, you have the capability to connect to a consumer in a specific region, or a specific store, and you have the ability to provide information to that consumer about the specific product in their hand, that can be a really powerful consumer engagement tool, says Dan Hardy, director of customer operations for HanesBrands, Inc. 2D barcodes can bring brand and product connectivity directly to an individual consumer, and create an interaction that supports your brand message at an individual consumer/product level.Download the full report.This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Reviews editorial staff.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Reviews weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.Voters have elected Donald Trump to a second term in the White House.In the days leading up to the election, I kept thinking about what four years means for climate change right now. Were at a critical moment that requires decisive action to rapidly slash greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, transportation, industry, and the rest of the economy if were going to achieve our climate goals.The past four years have seen the US take climate action seriously, working with the international community and pumping money into solutions. Now, were facing a period where things are going to be very different. A Trump presidency will have impacts far beyond climate, but for the sake of this newsletter, well stay focused on what four years means in the climate fight as we start to make sense of this next chapter.Joe Biden arguably did more to combat climate change than any other American president. One of his first actions in office was rejoining the Paris climate accordTrump pulled out of the international agreement to fight climate change during his first term in office. Biden then quickly set a new national goal to cut US carbon emissions in half, relative to their peak, by 2030.The Environmental Protection Agency rolled out rules for power plants to slash pollution that harms both human health and the climate. The agency also announced new regulations for vehicle emissions to push the country toward EVs.And the cornerstone of the Biden years has been unprecedented climate investment. A trio of lawsthe Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Actpumped hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and research, much of it on climate.Now, this ship is about to make a quick turn. Donald Trump has regularly dismissed the threat of climate change and promised throughout the campaign to counter some of Bidens key moves.We can expect to see a dramatic shift in how the US talks about climate on the international stage. Trump has vowed to once again withdraw from the Paris agreement. Things are going to be weird at the annual global climate talks that kick off next week.We can also expect to see efforts to undo some of Bidens key climate actions, most centrally the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague James Temple covered earlier this year.What, exactly, Trump can do will depend on whether Republicans take control of both houses of Congress. A clean sweep would open up more lanes for targeting legislation passed under Biden. (As of sending this email, Republicans have secured enough seats to control the Senate, but the House is uncertain and could be for days or even weeks.)I dont think the rug will be entirely pulled out from under the IRAportions of the investment from the law are beginning to pay off, and the majority of the money has gone to Republican districts. But there will certainly be challenges to pieces, especially the EV tax credits, which Trump has been laser-focused on during the campaign.This all adds up to a very different course on climate than what many had hoped we might see for the rest of this decade.A Trump presidency could add 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere by 2030 over what was expected from a second Biden term, according to an analysis published in April by the website Carbon Brief (this was before Biden dropped out of the race). That projection sees emissions under Trump dropping by 28% below the peak by the end of the decadenowhere near the 50% target set by Biden at the beginning of his term.The US, which is currently the worlds second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter and has added more climate pollution to the atmosphere than any other nation, is now very unlikely to hit Bidens 2030 goal. Thats basically the final nail in the coffin for efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 C (2.7 F) over preindustrial levels.In the days, weeks, and years ahead well be coveringwhat this change will mean for efforts to combat climate change and to protect the most vulnerable from the dangerous world were marching towardindeed, already living in. Stay tuned for more from us.Now read the rest of The SparkRelated readingTrump wants to unravel Bidens landmark climate law. Read our coverage from earlier this year to see whats most at risk.Its been two years since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, ushering in hundreds of billions of dollars in climate investment. Read more about the key provisions in this newsletter from August.MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTYAnother thingJennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the tech could be a major tool to help address climate change and deal with the growing risks of our changing world.The hope is that CRISPRs ability to chop out specific pieces of DNA will make it faster and easier to produce climate-resilient crops and livestock, while avoiding the pitfalls of previous attempts to tweak the genomes of plants and animals. Read the full story from my colleague James Temple.Keeping up with climateStartup Redoxblox is building a technology thats not exactly a thermal battery, but its not not a thermal battery either. The company raised just over $30 million to build its systems, which store energy in both heat and chemical bonds. (Heatmap)Its been a weird fall in the US Northeasta rare drought has brought a string of wildfires, and New York City is seeing calls to conserve water. (New York Times)Its been bumpy skies this week for electric-plane startups. Beta Technologies raised over $300 million in funding, while Lilium may be filing for insolvency soon. (Canary Media) The runway for futuristic electric planes is still a long one. (MIT Technology Review)Metas plan to build a nuclear-powered AI data center has been derailed by a rare species of bee living on land earmarked for the project. (Financial Times)The atmospheric concentration of methanea powerful greenhouse gashas been mysteriously climbing since 2007, and that growth nearly doubled in 2020. Now scientists may have finally figured out the culprits: microbes in wetlands that are getting warmer and wetter. (Washington Post)Greenhouse-gas emissions from the European Union fell by 8% in 2023. The drop is thanks to efforts to shut down coal-fired power plants and generate more electricity from renewables like solar and wind. (The Guardian)Four electric school buses could help officials figure out how to charge future bus fleets. A project in Brooklyn will aim to use onsite renewables and smart charging to control the costs and grid stress of EV charging depots. (Canary Media)

Donald Trumps decisive victory is a stunning setback for climate change.The Republican President-elects return to the White House means the country is going to squander precious momentum, unraveling hard-won policy progress that was just beginning to pay off, all for the second time in less than a decade.It comes at a moment when the world cant afford to waste time, with nations far off track from any greenhouse gas emissions trajectories that would keep our ecosystems stable and our communities safe. Under the policies in place today, the planet is already set to warm by more than 3C in the coming decades.Trump could push the globe into even more dangerous terrain, by defanging President Joe Bidens signature climate laws. In fact, a second Trump administration could boost greenhouse gas emissions by four billion tons through 2030 alone, according to an earlier analysis by Carbon Brief, a well regarded climate news and data site. That will exacerbate the dangers of heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts, and famine, as well as increase deaths and disease from air pollution, inflicting some $900 million in climate damages around the world, Carbon Brief found.I started as the climate editor at MIT Technology Review just as Trump came into office the last time. Much of the early job entailed covering his systematic unraveling of the modest climate policy and progress that President Barack Obama had managed to achieve. I fear it will be far worse this time, as Trump ambles into office feeling empowered and aggrieved, and ready to test the rule of law and crack down on dissent.This time hell be staffed all the more by loyalists and idealogues, who have already made plans to force out civil servants with expertise and experience across federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Hell be backed by a Supreme Court that he moved well to the right, and which has already undercut landmark environmental doctrines and the powers of federal regulatory agencies.This time the setbacks will sting more, too, because the US did finally manage to pass real, substantive climate policy, through the slimmest of congressional margins. The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated massive amounts of government funding to accelerate the shift to low-emissions industries and rebuild the US manufacturing base around a clean energy economy.Trump has made clear he will strive to repeal as many of these provisions as he can, tempered perhaps only by Republicans who recognize that these laws are producing revenue and jobs in their districts. Meanwhile, throughout the prolonged presidential campaign, Trump or his surrogates pledged to boost oil and gas production, eliminate federal support for electric vehicles, end power plant pollution rules, and remove the US from the Paris climate agreement yet again. Each of those goals stand in direct opposition to the deep, rapid emissions cuts now necessary toprevent the planet from tipping past higher and higher temperatures.Project 2025, considered a blueprint for the early days of a second Trump administration despite his insistence to the contrary, calls for dismantling or downsizing federal institutions including the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Any success in doing so threatens to cripple the nations ability to forecast, track, or respond to storms, floods, and fires, similar to those that have devastated communities in recent months.Observers Ive spoken to fear the Trump administration will also revert the Department of Energy, which under Biden had evolved its mission toward developing low-emissions technologies, back to the primary task of helping companies dig up more fossil fuels.The US election could create global ripples as well, and very soon. US negotiators will meet with their counterparts at the annual UN climate conference that kicks off next week. With Trump set to move back into the White House in January, they will have little credibility or leverage to nudge other nations to step up their commitments to reduce emissions.But those are just some of the direct ways that a second Trump administration will enfeeble the nations ability to drive down emissions, and counter the growing dangers of climate change. He also has considerable power to stall the economy and sow international chaos amid a moment of escalating conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.Trumps eagerness to enact tariffs, slash government spending, and deport major portions of the workforce may stunt growth, drive up inflation, and chill investment. All of that would make it far more difficult for companies to raise the capital and purchase the components needed to build anything in the US, whether wind turbines, solar farms, and seawalls, or buildings, bridges, and data centers.President-elect Donald Trump speaks at an election night event in West Palm Beach, Florida. WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGESHis clumsy handling of the economy and international affairs may also help China extend its dominance in producing and selling the components of the energy transition, including batteries, EVs, and solar panels, to customers around the globe.If one job of a commentator is to find some perspective in difficult moments, I admit Im mostly failing in this one.The best I can do is to say that there will be some meaningful lines of defense. For now at least, state leaders and legislatures can continue to enact and implement stronger climate rules. Other nations could step up their efforts to cut emissions and assert themselves as global leaders on climate.The private industry will likely continue to invest in and build businesses in climate tech and clean energy, since solar, wind, batteries and EVs have proven themselves as competitive industries. And technological progress can occur no matter who is sitting in the round room on Pennsylvania Avenue, as researchers continue striving to develop cleaner, cheaper ways of producing our energy, food, and goods.By any measure, the job of addressing climate change is now much harder. Nothing, however, has changed about the stakes.Our world doesnt end if we surpass 2 C, 2.5 C, or even 3 C, but it will steadily become a more dangerous and erratic place. Every tenth of a degree remains worth fighting forwhether in two, four, or a dozen years from nowbecause every bit of warming that nations pull together to prevent eases future suffering somewhere.So as the shock wears off and the despair begins to lift, the core task before us remains the same: to push for progress, whenever, wherever, and however we can.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.OpenAIs Olivier Godement, head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, are on a whistle-stop tour around the world. Last week, I sat down with the pair in London before DevDay, the companys annual developer conference. Londons DevDay is the first one for the company outside San Francisco. Godement and Huet are heading to Singapore next.Its been a busy few weeks for the company. In London, OpenAI announced updates to its newRealtime API platform, which allows developers to build voice features into their applications. The company is rolling out new voices and a function that lets developers generate prompts, which will allow them to build apps and more helpful voice assistants more quickly. Meanwhile for consumers, OpenAI announced it was launchingChatGPT search, which allows users to search the internet using the chatbot.Read more here.Both developments pave the way for the next big thing in AI: agents.These are AI assistants that can complete complex chains of tasks, such as booking flights. (You can read my explainer on agents here.)Fast-forward a few yearsevery human on Earth, every business, has an agent. That agent knows you extremely well. It knows your preferences, Godement says. The agent will have access to your emails, apps, and calendars and will act like a chief of staff, interacting with each of these tools and even working on long-term problems, such as writing a paper on a particular topic, he says.OpenAIs strategy is to both build agents itself and allow developers to use its software to build their own agents, says Godement. Voice will play an important role in what agents will look and feel like.At the moment most of the apps are chat based which is cool, but not suitable for all use cases. There are some use cases where youre not typing, not even looking at the screen, and so voice essentially has a much better modality for that, he says.But there are two big hurdles that need to be overcome before agents can become a reality, Godement says.The first is reasoning.Building AI agents requires us to be able to trust that they will be able to complete complex tasks and do the right things, says Huet. Thats where OpenAI reasoning feature comes in.Introducedin OpenAIs o1 model last month, it uses reinforcement learning to teach the model how to process information using chain of thought. Giving the model more time to generate answers allows it to recognize and correct mistakes, break down problems into smaller ones, and try different approaches to answering questions, Godement says.But OpenAIs claims about reasoning should be taken with a pinch of salt, says Chirag Shah, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. Large language models are not exhibiting true reasoning. Its most likely that they have picked up what looks like logic from something theyve seen in their training data.These models sometimes seem to be really amazing at reasoning, but its just like theyre really good at pretending, and it only takes a little bit of picking at them to break them, he says.There is still much more work to be done, Godement admits. In the short term, AI models such as o1 need to be much more reliable, faster, and cheaper. In the long term, the company needs to apply its chain-of-thought technique to a wider pool of use cases. OpenAI has focused on science, coding, and math. Now it wants to address other fields, such as law, accounting, and economics, he says.Second on the to-do list is the ability to connect different tools, Godement says.An AI models capabilities will be limited if it has to rely on its training data alone. It needs to be able to surf the web and look for up-to-date information. ChatGPT search is one powerful way OpenAIs new tools can now do that.These tools need to be able not only to retrieve information but to take actions in the real world. Competitor Anthropic announced a new feature where its Claude chatbot can use a computerby interacting with its interface to click on things, for example. This is an important feature for agents if they are going to be able to execute tasks like booking flights. Godement says o1 can sort of use tools, though not very reliably, and that research on tool use is a promising development.In the next year, Godemont says, he expects the adoption of AI for customer support and other assistant-based tasks to grow.However, he says that it can be hard to predict how people will adopt and use OpenAIs technology.Frankly, looking back every year, Im surprised by use cases that popped up that I did not even anticipate, he says. I expect there will be quite a few surprises that you know none of us could predict.Now read the rest of The AlgorithmDeeper LearningThis AI-generated version of Minecraft may represent the future of real-time video generationWhen you walk around in a version of the video game Minecraft from the AI companies Decart and Etched, it feels a little off. Sure, you can move forward, cut down a tree, and lay down a dirt block, just like in the real thing. If you turn around, though, the dirt block you just placed may have morphed into a totally new environment. That doesnt happen in Minecraft. But this new version is entirely AI-generated, so its prone to hallucinations. Not a single line of code was written.Ready, set, go:This version of Minecraft is generated in real time, using a technique known as next-frame prediction. The AI companies behind it did this by training their model, Oasis, on millions of hours of Minecraft game play and recordings of the corresponding actions a user would take in the game. The AI is able to sort out the physics, environments, and controls of Minecraft from this data alone.Read more fromScott J. Mulligan.Bits and BytesAI search could break the webAt its best, AI search can better infer a users intent, amplify quality content, and synthesize information from diverse sources. But if AI search becomes our primary portal to the web, it threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy, argues Benjamin Brooks, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, who used to lead public policy for Stability AI. (MIT Technology Review)AI will add to the e-waste problem. Heres what we can do about it.Equipment used to train and run generative AI models could produce up to 5 million tons of e-waste by 2030, a relatively small but significant fraction of the global total. (MIT Technology Review)How an interview with a dead luminary exposed the pitfalls of AIA state-funded radio station in Poland fired its on-air talent and brought in AI-generated presenters. But the experiment caused an outcry and was stopped when tone of them interviewed a dead Nobel laureate. (The New York Times)Meta says yes, please, to more AI-generated slopIn Metas latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said were likely to seea whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way. Zuckerberg added that he thinks thats going to be just very exciting.(404 Media)

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.What do jumping spiders find sexy? How DIY tech is offering insights into the animal mind.Studying the minds of other animals comes with a challenge that human psychologists dont usually face: Your subjects cant tell you what theyre thinking.To get answers from animals, scientists need to come up with creative experiments to learn why they behave the way they do. Sometimes this requires designing and building experimental equipment from scratch.These contraptions can range from ingeniously simple to incredibly complex, but all of them are tailored to help answer questions about the lives and minds of specific species. Do honeybees need a good nights sleep? What do jumping spiders find sexy? Do falcons like puzzles? For queries like these, off-the-shelf gear simply wont do. Check out these contraptions custom-built by scientists to help them understand the lives and minds of the animals they study.Betsy MasonThis piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is all about the weird and wonderful world of food. If you dont already, subscribe to receive future copies once they land.How ChatGPT search paves the way for AI agentsIts been a busy few weeks for OpenAI. Alongside updates to its new Realtime API platform, which will allow developers to build apps and voice assistants more quickly, it recently launched ChatGPT search, which allows users to search the internet using the chatbot.Both developments pave the way for the next big thing in AI: agents. These AI assistants can complete complex chains of tasks, such as booking flights. OpenAIs strategy is to both build agents itself and allow developers to use its software to build their own agents, and voice will play an important role in what agents will look and feel like.Melissa Heikkil, our senior AI reporter, sat down with Olivier Godement, OpenAIs head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, last week to hear more about the two big hurdles that need to be overcome before agents can become a reality. Read the full story.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-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 America is heading to the pollsHeres how Harris and Trump will attempt to lead the US to tech supremacy. (The Information $)+ The Stop the Steal election denial movement is preparing to contest the vote. (WP $)+ The muddy final polls suggest its still all to play for. (Vox)2 Abortion rights are on the 2024 ballotA lack of access to basic health care has led to the deaths of at least four women. (NY Mag $)+ Nine states will decide whether to guarantee their residents abortion access. (Fortune)+ If Trump wins he could ban abortion nationwide, even without Congress. (Politico)3 Inside New Yorks election day wargamesTech, business and policy leaders gathered to thrash out potential risks. (WSJ $)+ Violence runs throughout all aspects of this election cycle. (FT $)4 Elon Musks false and misleading X election posts have billions of viewsIn fact, theyve been viewed twice as much as all Xs political ads this year. (CNN)+ Musks decision to hitch himself to Trump may end up backfiring, though. (FT $)5 Meta will permit the US military to use its AI modelsIts an interesting update to its previous policy, which explicitly banned its use for military purposes. (NYT $)+ Facebook has kept a low profile during the election cycle. (The Atlantic $)+ Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review)6 The hidden danger of pirated softwareIts not just viruses you should be worried about. (404 Media)7 Apple is weighing up expanding into smart glassesWhere Meta leads, Apple may follow. (Bloomberg $)+ The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. Its the AI. (MIT Technology Review)8 Indias lithium plans may have been a bit too ambitiousReports of a major lithium reserve appear to have been massively overblown.(Rest of World)+ Some countries are ending support for EVs. Is it too soon? (MIT Technology Review)9 Your air fryer could be surveilling youHousehold appliances are now mostly smart, and stuffed with trackers. (The Guardian)10 How to stay sane during election weekFocus on what you can control, and try to let go of what you cant. (WP $)+ Heres how election gurus are planning to cope in the days ahead. (The Atlantic $)+ How to log off. (MIT Technology Review)Quote of the dayWere in kind of the throw spaghetti at the wall moment of politics and AI, where this intersection allows people to try new things for propaganda.Rachel Tobac, chief executive of ethical hacking company SocialProof Security, tells the Washington Post why a deepfake video of Martin Luther King endorsing Donald Trump is being shared online in the closing hours of the presidential race.The big storyThe hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rushDecember 2023Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisiscasualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimers.Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who dont live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share.Theyve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost. But theyre having to navigate an ethical minefield in order to do so. Read the full story.Jessica HamzelouWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Move over Moo DengHaggis the baby pygmy hippo is the latest internet star!+ To celebrate the life of the late, great Quincy Jones, check out this sensational interview in which he spills the beans on everything from the Beatles musical shortcomings to who shot Kennedy. Thank you for the music, Quincy.+ The color of the season? Sage green, apparently.+ Dinosaurs are everywhere, you just need to look for them.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate changeJennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions.The grand hope is that CRISPRs ability to precisely remove specific parts of the DNA within the existing genomes of plants and animals will help avoid many of the pitfalls of earlier adaptation techniques. But there are still considerable obstacles.Last month, Doudna sat down with MIT Technology Review on the sidelines of the Climate & Agriculture Summit at the University of California, Berkeley. Read what she has to say about the future of genetic editing.James TempleJob title of the future: Digital forest rangerWhen Martin Roth began his career as a forest ranger in the 1980s, his job was to care for the forest in a way that would ensure continuity for decades, even centuries. Now, with climate change, its more about planning for an uncertain future.Roth uses the 3,000 acres of forest along the northeastern shore of Lake Constance in Germany as a testing ground for high-tech solutions to protect nature, earning him the moniker digital forest ranger (Digitalfrster) in the German forestry community. Read the full story.Kaja erugaThis piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is all about the weird and wonderful world of food. If you dont already, subscribe to receive future copies once they land.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Election deniers are already mobilizing on TelegramPoll watchers are poised to dispute votes in Democratic areas, no evidence required. (NYT $)+ TikTok is revealing a major gender divide between the candidates campaigns. (WP $)+ Elon Musk is acting like hes on the ballot himself. (WSJ $)2 Vote-counting staffers are preparing for violent attacksTheyve been trained on how to de-escalate potentially dangerous situations. (The Atlantic $)+ It could be a long, agonizing wait for the final results to be declared. (NY Mag $)+ Elon Musks PAC canvassers are speaking up about their time doorknocking. (Wired $)3 Perplexity wants to prove its trustworthy enough to track election resultsIts a major test for the AI search engine, to say the least. (TechCrunch)+ AI-generated search results are often unreliable and open to manipulation. (The Guardian)+ AI search could break the web. (MIT Technology Review)4 The 2024 Presidential campaign has been super surrealFrom falling out of a coconut tree, to unfounded claims of pet eating. (New Yorker $)5 This AI supercomputer is funded by OzempicThe financial success of the weight-loss drug made it possible to build Gefion, Denmarks colossal new machine. (WSJ $)+ Quantum computing is taking on its biggest challenge: noise. (MIT Technology Review)6 Big Tech is doubling down on its AI spendingTech giants are continuing to sink huge sums into AI development, even if its not making returns yet. (Bloomberg $)+ How to fine-tune AI for prosperity. (MIT Technology Review)7 Metas nuclear-powered data center has a bee in its bonnet A rare species of bee is living on the proposed building site. (FT $)8 Touchscreens are out, physical controls are back inButtons and conventional knobs just get the job done. (IEEE Spectrum)9 Have you checked your privilege lately?Social medias latest wheeze is reminding you how lucky you are. (The Guardian)10 This simple tool will fix your leaky privacy settingsUnfortunately, it also comes with a price. (WP $)Quote of the dayId rather work and risk my life to work than stay at home.Waleed Iky, a marketing entrepreneur living in Gaza, explains to the Guardian why he continues to travel to a coworking space with fellow freelancers amid warfare.The big storyWhatever happened to DNA computing?October 2021For more than five decades, engineers have shrunk silicon-based transistors over and over again, creating progressively smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient computers in the process. But the long technological winning streakand the miniaturization that has enabled it cant last forever.What could this successor technology be? There has been no shortage of alternative computing approaches proposed over the last 50 years. Read about five of the most memorable ones.Lakshmi ChandrasekaranWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ May these travel posters brighten up your Monday.+ Think you havent got time to exercise? Think againthese workouts take two minutes, no equipment or gym membership needed.+ Uh oh, this Hobbit-o-meter seems to be broken.+ Would you live inside a wind turbine?

Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions.The potential is huge, says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her role in the discovery. There is a coming revolution right now with CRISPR.Last month, the Innovation Genomics Institute (IGI), which Doudna founded, hosted the Climate & Agriculture Summit at the University of California, Berkeley, where speakers highlighted the role that genome editing can play in addressing the rising dangers of climate change. Doudna sat down for a brief interview with MIT Technology Review on the sidelines of the closed-door event.She and her coauthors published their landmark paper on the technique in Science 12 years ago, demonstrating that a bacterial immune system could be programmed to locate and snip out specific sections of DNA. The earliest patients have begun receiving the first approved medical treatment created with the genomic scissors, a gene therapy for sickle-cell diseaseand a growing list of foods created with CRISPR are slowly reaching grocery store shelves.Many more CRISPR-edited plants and animals are on the way, and a number of them were altered to promote traits that could help them survive or thrive in conditions fueled by climate change, beginning to fulfill one long-standing promise of genetic engineering. That includes the offspring of two cattle that Acceligen, a Minnesota-based precision breeding business, edited to have shorter coats better suited to hotter temperatures. In 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration determined that meat and other products from those cattle pose low risk to people, animals, the food supply, and the environment and can be marketed for sale to American consumers.Other companies are harnessing CRISPR to develop corn with shorter, stronger stalks that could reduce the loss of crops to increasingly powerful storms; novel cover crops that can help sequester more carbon dioxide and produce biofuels; and animals that could resist zoonotic diseases that climate change may be helping to spread, including avian influenza.For its part, IGI is working to develop rice that can withstand drier conditions, as well as crops that may suck up and store away more carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas driving climate change.Older genetic modification techniques, which involve moving genes from one organism into another, have already delivered agricultural blockbusters, including crops that are resistant to herbicides and corn, potatoes, and soybeans with enhanced protections against pests. The use of such tools to alter crops sparked fears that so-called Frankenfoods would worsen allergies and cause diseases in humans, though these health worries were widely overblown.The grand hope is that CRISPRs ability to precisely remove specific parts of the DNA within the existing genomes of plants and animals will make it faster and easier to create climate-resilient crops and livestock, avoiding many of the pitfalls of earlier breeding and editing techniques. The added promise is that the resulting products may prove more appealing to the public, since they often wont carry DNA from other organismsand wont be labeled as bioengineered. (CRISPR can, however, be used to create such transgenic plants and animals as well.)Its very exciting to see these products coming out, because they have real-world impacts that are incredibly important, especially as were dealing with the changing climate and with our expanding population, says Doudna, a biochemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley.But there are still considerable obstacles to developing and commercializing transformative new crops and animals, as well as limits to how much the tool may help farmers and communities in regions that become excessively hot, dry, or wet in the coming decades.The coming CRISPRed foodsIn recent years, the US Department of Agriculture has loosened its rules on governing and labeling genetically modified foods in ways that clear the path for many CRISPR alterations.The department still often oversees and requires disclosures for transgenic plants and animals. But it determined that it will not regulate foods when genome-editing tools like CRISPR are used to make a single modification that could have otherwise been produced through conventional breeding over longer time periods.Were simply providing a trait that could have occurred naturally, Doudna says of the regulatory distinction. Its just that we accelerated that process with CRISPR.The USDA has confirmed to companies or research groups that several dozen crops developed through the use of CRISPR would be exempt from regulation, according to a review of public documents by MIT Technology Review.Harnessing CRISPR and similar technologies will be crucial to feed a growing global population without dramatically expanding the land, fertilizer, and other resources dedicated to farming, says Chavonda Jacobs-Young, the USDAs chief scientist. Jacobs-Young appeared on stage at the UC Berkeley conference and also spoke with MIT Technology Review.We need high-tech tools, she says. Thats going to be an important key to us helping make sure that we have a safe, abundant, delicious and affordable food supply.Chavonda Jacobs-Young, the USDAs chief scientist, and UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna, the UC Berkeley professor who co-developed CRISPR, spoke at the Innovation Genomics Institutes Climate & Agriculture Summit.GLENN RAMIT/INNOVATIVE GENOMICS INSTITUTEConventional breeding methodswhich include cross-breeding varieties of plants and animals or using radiation or chemicals to create mutationsis a messy process. It can create numerous changes throughout the genome that arent necessarily beneficial, requiring significant trial and error to tease out improvements.The exciting thing with CRISPR for gene editing is you can make changes exactly where you want them, says Emma Kovak, senior food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. Its absolutely huge in terms of saving time and money.As powerful and precise as CRISPR is, however, it still takes considerable work to target the right part of the genome, to evaluate whether any changes provide the hoped-for benefitsand, crucially, to ensure that any edits dont come at the cost of overall plant health or food safety.But improved gene-editing tools have also helped to revive and accelerate research to better understand the complex genomes of plants, which are often several times longer than the human genome. This work is helping scientists identify the genes responsible for relevant traits and the changes that could deliver improvements.Doudna says well see many more crops altered to bolster resilience to climate change as the research in this field progresses.In the future, as we uncover more and more of those fundamental genetics of traits, then CRISPR can come in as a very practical application for creating the kinds of plants that will deal with these oncoming challenges, she says.Practical plants and polite cowsIGIs efforts to develop a type of rice that could be more drought tolerant than standard varieties highlight both the promise and challenges ahead.Several research groups have used CRISPR to disable a gene that influences the number of tiny pores in the plants leaves. These pores, known as stomata, allow rice to take in carbon dioxide, emit oxygen, and release water as a means of controlling temperature. The hope is that with fewer stomata, the plants could preserve more water in order to survive and grow in drier conditions.But its proved to be a tricky balancing act. Earlier research efforts knocked out the so-called STOMAGEN gene. That eliminated as much as 80% of pores, which certainly reduced water loss. But it also undermined the plants ability to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, both of which are critical to photosynthesis.IGI researchers zeroed in on a different gene, EPFL10, which had a less dramatic effect, reducing the number of pores by about 20%. According to research that the group published, this tweak helped the plants preserve water but didnt affect its ability to regulate temperatures or exchange gases.It takes plant breeding to the next level, Doudna says of CRISPR. We can adjust the numbers of those pores by dialing up or down certain genes to the levels that actually support plant growth [and] allow farmers to produce rice of the quality and with the yields that they need, but without the loss of water.The organization is also exploring ways that CRISPR could address climate change more directly. That includesa research program aimed at reducing the methane that cattle belch out, which is the primary source of greenhouse-gas emissions related to livestock.IGI is working with researchers at the University of California, Davis, and elsewhere to explore whether CRISPR and other emerging tools could be used to alter microbes in the stomachs of cattle in ways that would reduce their production of the powerful greenhouse gas.A number of research groups and startups are working to reduce those emissions through feed additives, often derived from a type of seaweed. But the hope is that changes to the microbiome of cows could be permanent and inheritable, says Brad Ringeisen, executive director of the IGI.If we succeed, it could potentially be something that could be applicable to nearly every cow in the world, he says.Labeling and safetyKovak says there are still plenty of challenges that could hold up the development of CRISPR-edited animals and plants, including the continuing regulatory obstacles facing products where foreign DNA is introduced or more complicated edits are made. So could the ongoing battles over the intellectual rights to the tool and the variants of it that are emerging, and the costs or burdens that companies must bear to make use of the technology.Doudna herself has been at the center of a messy, bitter, and twisting dispute with the Broad Institute over ownership of the key CRISPR patents. (The Broad is affiliated with MIT, which owns MIT Technology Review.) Each group has secured numerous patents in various countries for certain aspects and varieties of the tool.The continuing legal battles have created complexity and uncertainty for companies hoping to harness CRISPR to develop commercial products.Doudna has founded or cofounded several startups, including Caribou Biosciences, which has sublicensed access to certain CRISPR patents for uses including agriculture. She didnt respond to a follow-up question on this issue before press time.While we have seen a lot of progress in a relatively short time, having the various CRISPR patents controlled by a few entities has at times slowed or stopped some agricultural products from hitting the market, the IGIs Ringeisen said in an email response.But he adds that theres been ongoing progress on discovering and using related gene-editing tools that arent already tied up in patents.Meanwhile, natural-food retailers, skeptics of genetically modified organisms, and others have harshly criticized the USDAs stance on governing and labeling genetically altered foods. They assert that altered crops have had harmful environmental consequences and that the rules dont provide consumers with the transparency they need to make informed choices about the foods they buy and consume.Doudna stresses that it is crucial to use CRISPR and similar tools cautiously. But she says the US has struck the right balance in its approach to regulation and labeling.Its really informed. It really is based on science, she says. Rather than looking at how that plant or crop was created, the question is, What is the final product?She says the IGI has strived to act as a voice of reason on these issues, helping to counter fears and misunderstandings by providing scientific information about how CRISPR can be used to treat human diseases, help farmers adapt to climate change, or address other threats in peoples lives.From the very beginning, of course, it was clear that this was going to be a powerful tool that could be misunderstood and could be misused, she says. But it also has tremendous potential to help us tackle a lot of these challenges.

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Reviewsweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here.Over the past month or so, Ive been working on a story about exosomes. You might have seen them advertisedtheyre being touted as a hot new beauty treatment, a fountain of youth, and generally a cure-all therapy for a whole host of ailments.Any cell biologist, though, will tell you what exosomes really are: tiny little blobs that bud off from cells and contain a mixture of proteins and other components. Were not entirely clear what those components are or what they do, despite the promises made by medspas and cosmetic clinics charging thousands of dollars for exosome therapies. As one recipient of an exosome treatment told me, I feel like its a little bit of health marketing bullshit.But there is some very exciting scientific research underway to better understand exactly what exosomes do. Scientists are exploring not only how these tiny particles might help cells communicate, but also how they might be used to diagnose or treat diseases. One company is trying to use exosomes to deliver drugs to the brains of people with rare neurological disorders.It might take longer for these kinds of exosome applications to get to the clinic, but when they do, at least theyll be evidence based.Exosomes are a type of extracellular vesicle. This is a scientific way of saying they are basically little packages that bud off from cells. They were once thought to contain cellular garbage, but now scientists believe they convey important signals between cells and tissues.Exactly what those signals are is still being figured out. The contents of exosomes from cancer cells will probably be somewhat different to those from healthy cells, for example.Because of that, many scientists hope that exosomes could one day be used to help us diagnose diseases. In theory, you could isolate exosomes from a blood sample, examine their contents, and figure out what might be going on in a persons cells. Exosomes might provide clues as to how stressed or close to death a cell is. They might indicate the presence of a tumor.Raghu Kalluri, a cancer biologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, is one of the researchers exploring this possibility. I believe that exosomes are likely providing a forensic fingerprint of what the cells are undergoing, he says.But understanding these signals wont be straightforward. Exosomes from cancer cells might send signals to surrounding cells in order to subjugate them into helping the cancer grow, says Kalluri. Cells around a tumor might also send distress signals, alerting the immune system to fight back against it. Theres definitely a role for these exosomes in cancer progression and metastasis, he says. Precisely what [that role is] is an active area of research right now.Exosomes could also be useful for delivering drug treatments. After all, they are essentially little packages of proteins and other matter that can be shuttled between cells. Why not fill them with a medicine and use them to target specific regions of the body?Because exosomes are made in our bodies, they are less likely to be seen as foreign and rejected by our immune systems. And the outer layer of an exosome can serve as a protective coat, shielding the drug from being degraded until it reaches its destination, says James Edgar, who studies exosomes at the University of Cambridge. Its a really attractive method for drug delivery, he says.Dave Carter is one scientist working on it. Carter and his colleagues at Evox Therapeutics in Oxford, UK, are engineering cells to produce compounds that might help treat rare neurological diseases. These compounds could then be released from the cells in exosomes.In their research, Carter and his colleagues can change almost everything about the exosomes they study. They can alter their contents, loading them with proteins or viruses or even gene-editing therapies. They can tweak the proteins on their surfaces to make them target different cells and tissues. They can control how long exosomes stay in an animals circulation.I always used to love playing with Lego, he adds. I feel like Im playing with Lego when Im working with exosomes.Others are hopeful that exosomes themselves hold some kind of therapeutic value. Some hope that exosomes derived from stem cells, for example, might have some regenerative capacity.Ke Cheng at Columbia University in New York is interested in the idea of using exosomes to treat heart and lung conditions. Several preliminary studies suggest that exosomes from heart and stem cells might help animals like mice and pigs recover from heart injuries, such as those caused by a heart attack.There are certainly plenty of clinical trials of exosomes underway. When I searched for exosomes on clinicaltrials.gov, I got over 400 results. These are early-stage trials, howeverand are of variable quality.Still, its an exciting time for exosome research. Its a growing field I think we will see a lot of exciting science in the next five years, says Cheng. Im very optimistic.Now read the rest of The CheckupRead more from MIT Technology Reviews archiveYou can read the piece about the costly exosome treatments being sold in aesthetic clinics and medspas in my longer piece, which was published earlier this week.It can be difficult to establish credibility in a medical field when youre being undercut by clinics selling unapproved treatments and individuals making outlandish claims. Just ask the doctors and scientists trying to legitimize longevity medicine.Some treatments can take off culturally without the backing of rigorous evidence, only to go up in flames when the trial results come in. We saw this earlier this year, when FDA advisors rejected the use of MDMA (or ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) owing to significant confounders in the trials.For some people, unproven treatments might represent a last hope for survival. In those cases, how do we balance access to experimental medicine with the need to protect people who are vulnerable?Stem cells from human embryos promised to launch a medical revolution in which ailing organs and tissues might be repaired when they were isolated just over 25 years ago. So why havent they?From around the webHaving a disability shouldnt prevent you from getting married. But thats exactly the conundrum facing some people in the US, as this heartbreaking short documentary shows. (STAT)A Neuralink rival says its eye implant restored vision in blind people. Science Corporations retinal implant enabled some legally blind individuals to read from a book, play cards, and fill out crossword puzzles. (Wired)Women in Texas are dying after doctors delay treating them for miscarriages. Doctors treating Josseli Barnica waited 40 hours for the heart of her fetus to stop beating, despite the fact that miscarriage was inevitable. Her husband says doctors worried that it would be a crime to give her an abortion. She died of a preventable infection three days later. (ProPublica)Between 30% and 50% of twins share a secret language or mode of communication, a phenomenon known as cryptophasia. The Youlden twins call theirs Umeri. (BBC Future)Can a machine express fear? Try your hand at creating AI-generated images frightening enough to spook the machine as part of a project to explore how machines might express humanlike emotions. It is Halloween, after all. (Spook the Machine)

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.OpenAI has brought a new web search tool to ChatGPTThe news: ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a users queries. Previously it was restricted to generating answers from its training data, and had limited web search capabilities. But now, ChatGPT will automatically search the web in response to queries about recent information such as sports, stocks, or news of the day, and can deliver rich multi-media results.How to use it: The feature is available now for the chatbots paying users, but OpenAI intends to make it available for free later, even when people are logged out. It also plans to combine search with its voice features.The context: OpenAI is the latest tech company to debut an AI-powered search assistant, challenging similar tools from competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and startup Perplexity. However, none of these tools are immune from the persistent tendency of AI language models to make things up or get them wrong. Read the full story.Melissa Heikkil and Mat HonanAI search could break the webBenjamin Brooks is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard scrutinizing the regulatory and legislative response to AI.At its best, AI search can better infer a users intent, amplify quality content, and synthesize information from diverse sources. But if AI search becomes our primary portal to the web, it threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy.Today, the production of content online depends on a fragile set of incentives tied to virtual foot traffic: ads, subscriptions, donations, sales, or brand exposure. By shielding the web behind an all-knowing chatbot, AI search could deprive creators of the visits and eyeballs they need to survive. Heres what the industry should do to make AI search sustainable.This AI-generated Minecraft may represent the future of real-time video generationWhen you walk around in a version of the video game Minecraft from the AI companies Decart and Etched, it feels a little off. Sure, you can move forward, cut down a tree, and lay down a dirt block, just like in the real thing. If you turn around, though, the dirt block you just placed may have morphed into a totally new environment. That doesnt happen in Minecraft. But this new version is entirely AI-generated, so its prone to hallucinations. Not a single line of code was written.For Decart and Etched, this demo is a proof of concept. But they believe that, with innovations in chip design and further improvements, theres no reason it wont soon be possible to develop a high-fidelity version of Minecraft, or really any game, using AI. Read the full story.Scott J MulliganRead next: AI-powered NPCs that dont need a script could make gamesand other worldsdeeply immersive. Read our feature about how generative AI could reinvent what it means to play.How exosomes could become more than just an anti-aging fadJessica HamzelouOver the past month or so, Ive been working on a story about exosomes. Theyre being touted as a hot new beauty treatment, a fountain of youth, and generally a cure-all therapy for a whole host of ailments.Any cell biologist, though, will tell you what exosomes really are: tiny little blobs that bud off from cells and contain a mixture of proteins and other components. Were not entirely clear what those components are or what they do, despite the promises made by medspas and cosmetic clinics charging thousands of dollars for exosome therapies.However, there is some very exciting scientific research underway to better understand exactly what exosomes do. It might take longer for these kinds of exosome applications to get to the clinic, but when they do, at least theyll be evidence based. Read all about whats going on.This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech and health. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 As the US election looms, social media platforms have given up moderatingEfforts to fight falsehoods have drastically backslid since 2020. (Wired$)+Young voters are encountering Trumps grab them comment for the first time on TikTok.(WP$)+Ignore the noisethe US election system is actually stronger than ever, experts say.(CNET)2 AI policy is something Harris and Trump broadly agree onOn the surface, they look miles apart. But dig into their track records, and there are lots of similarities. (The Atlantic$)+Investors are getting tired of waiting for returns on their AI investments.(Quartz$)+What even is AI? No one seems to agreeand thats a problem. (MIT Technology Review)3 Inside Elon Musks grand plan to remake the US governmentIf he gets his promised role as efficiency tsar, he plans to go on a slashing and burning spree. (WP$)4 Outside the US, the world is increasingly using Chinese technologyDespite US sanctions, it dominates fields like drones, solar panels, and electric vehicles. (Bloomberg$)+Chinese sanctions are causing a supply chain crisis for Skydio, the USs largest drone maker.(FT$)+BYD posted higher quarterly revenues than Tesla for the first time. (FT$)+Whats next for drones.(MIT Technology Review)5 Heres how to make all the political text messages go awayWhatever you do, do not actually reply Stop (seriously). (WSJ$)6 Amazon workers are furious over its return-to-office policyThey say the company is failing to provide evidence to back it up, and misrepresenting their views. (Reuters$)7 Hundreds of Dubliners turned up for a fake AI-generated Halloween paradeWe can expect to see more and more examples like this, of AI fakery spilling over into the physical world. (Metro)8 Ghost jobs are haunting tech workersFake jobs posted by real companies are growing irritation for people seeking work. (SFGate)9 Cloud-milking is a new zero-energy way to extract water from fogIts been successfully tested in the Canary Islands, but it could help other areas recovering from natural disasters. (The Guardian)10 Your wall paints could soon do much more than look prettyInnovators are working on paints that can peel off, resist dirt, and even provide insulation. (BBC)Quote of the dayWere going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way. And I think that thats going to be just very exciting.Mark Zuckerberg says we can expect our timelines to be filled with more and more AI slop during a call with investors, 404 Media reports.The big storyWhy Generation Z falls for online misinformationGETTYJune 2021In November 2019, a TikTok video claiming that if Joe Biden is elected president of the United States, trumpies will commit mass murder of LGBT individuals and people of color rapidly went viral. It was viewed, shared, liked and commented on by hundreds of thousands of young people.Clearly, the claims were false. Why, then, did so many members of Generation Za label applied to people aged roughly 9 to 24, who are presumably more digitally savvy than their predecessorsfall for such flagrant misinformation? The answer is complex, but may partly lie in a sense of common identity with the person who shared it in the first place. Read the full story.Jennifer Neda JohnWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Here are some words to warm you up on this first day of November.+ Becky Barnicoats comics always make me laugh.+ If you were also obsessed with Tom and Greg in Succession, youll enjoy this.+ Lets hear it for Missy Elliottheres why shes such a peerless entertainer. ($)

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Reviews weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.On an overcast day in early October, I picked up a rental car and drove to Devens, Massachusetts, to visit a hole in the ground.Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised over $2 billion in funding since it spun out of MIT in 2018, all in service of building the first commercial fusion reactor. The company has ambitions to build power plants, but currently the goal is to finish putting together its first demonstration system, the SPARC reactor. The plan is to have it operating by 2026.I visited the companys site recently to check in on progress. Things are starting to come together around the hole in the floor where SPARC will eventually be installed. Looking around the site, I found it becoming easier to imagine a future that could actually include fusion energy. But theres still a lot of work left to do.Fusion power has been a dream for decades. The idea is simple: Slam atoms together and use the energy thats released to power the world. The systems would require small amounts of abundant fuel and wouldnt produce dangerous waste. The problem is, executing this vision has been much slower than many had hoped.Commonwealth is one of the leaders in commercial fusion. My colleague James Temple wrote a feature story, published in early 2022, about the companys attempts to bring the technology to reality. At the time, the Devens location was still a muddy construction site, with the steel and concrete just starting to go into the ground.Things are much more polished nowwhen I visited earlier this month, I pulled into one of the designated visitor parking spots and checked in at a reception desk in a bustling office building before beginning my tour. There were two main things to see: the working magnet factory and the cluster of buildings that will house and support the SPARC reactor.We started in the magnet factory. SPARC is a tokamak, a device relying on powerful magnets to contain the plasma where fusion reactions take place. There will be three different types of magnets in SPARC, all arranged to keep the plasma in position and moving around in the right way.The company is making its own magnets powered with tape made from a high-temperature superconductor, which generates a magnetic field when an electric current runs through it. SPARC will contain thousands of miles worth of this tape in its magnets. In the factory, specialized equipment winds up the tape and tucks it into metal cases, which are then stacked together and welded into protective shells.After our quick loop around the magnet factory, I donned a helmet, neon vest, and safety glasses and got a short safety talk that included a stern warning to not stare directly at any welding. Then we walked across a patio and down a gravel driveway to the main complex of buildings that will house the SPARC reactor.Except for some remaining plywood stairs and dust, the complex appeared to be nearly completed. Theres a huge wall of glass on the front of the buildinga feature intended to show that the company is open with the community about the goings-on inside, as my tour guide, chief marketing officer Joe Paluska, put it.Four main buildings surround the central tokamak hall. These house support equipment needed to cool down the magnets, heat up the plasma, and measure conditions in the reactor. Most of these big, industrial systems that support SPARC are close to being ready to turn on or are actively being installed, explained Alex Creely, director of tokamak operations, in a call after my tour.When it was finally time to see the tokamak hall that will house SPARC, we had to take a winding route to get there. A maze of concrete walls funneled us to the entrance, and I lost track of my left and right turns. Called the labyrinth, this is a safety feature, designed to keep stray neutrons from escaping the hall once the reactor is operating. (Neutrons are a form of radiation, and enough exposure can be dangerous to humans.)Finally, we stepped into a cavernous space. From our elevated vantage point on a metal walkway, we peered down into a room with gleaming white floors and equipment scattered around the perimeter. At the center was a hole, covered with a tarp and surrounded by bright-yellow railings. That empty slot is where the star of the show, SPARC, will eventually be installed. The tokamak hall at Commonwealth Fusion Systems will house the companys SPARC reactor. COMMONWEALTH FUSION SYSTEMSWhile theres still very little tokamak in the tokamak hall right now, Commonwealth has an ambitious timeline planned: The goal is to have SPARC running and the first plasma in the reactor by 2026. The company plans to demonstrate that it can produce more energy in the reactor than is needed to power it (a milestone known as Q>1 in the fusion world) by 2027.When we published our 2022 story on Commonwealth, the plan was to flip on the reactor and reach the Q>1 milestone by 2025, so the timeline has slipped. Its not uncommon for big projects in virtually every industry to take longer than expected. But theres an especially long and fraught history of promises and missed milestones in fusion.Commonwealth has certainly made progress over the past few years, and its getting easier to imagine the company actually turning on a reactor and meeting the milestones the field has been working toward for decades. But theres still a tokamak-shaped hole in suburban Massachusetts waiting to be filled.Now read the rest of The SparkRelated readingRead our 2022 feature on Commonwealth Fusion Systems and its path to commercializing fusion energy here.In late 2022, a reactor at a national lab in the US generated more energy than was put in, a first for the industry. Heres what meeting that milestone actually means for clean energy.Theres still a lot of research to be done in fusionheres whats coming next.Another company called Helion says its first fusion power plant is five years away. Experts are skeptical, to say the least.PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH ROGERS/MITTR | PHOTOS GETTYAnother thingGenerative AI will add to our growing e-waste problem. A new study estimates that AI could add up to 5 million tons of e-waste by 2030.Its a small fraction of the total, but theres still good reason to think carefully about how we handle discarded servers and high-performance computing equipment, according to experts. Read more in my latest story.Keeping up with climateNew York City will buy 10,000 induction stoves from a startup called Copper. The stoves will be installed in public housing in the city. (Heatmap)Demand is growing for electric cabs in India, but experts say theres not nearly enough supply to meet it. (Rest of World)Pivot Bio aims to tweak the DNA of bacteria so they can help deliver nutrients to plants. The company is trying to break into an industry dominated by massive agriculture and chemical companies. (New York Times) Check out our profile of Pivot Bio, which was one of our 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch this year. (MIT Technology Review)At least 62 people are dead and many more are missing in dangerous flooding across Spain. (Washington Post)A massive offshore wind lease sale this week offered up eight patches of ocean off the coast of Maine in the US. Four sold, opening the door for up to 6.8 gigawatts of additional offshore wind power. (Canary Media)Climate change contributed to the deaths of 38,000 people across Europe in the summer of 2022, according to a new study. (The Guardian) The legacy of Europes heat waves will be more air-conditioning, and that could be its own problem. (MIT Technology Review)There are nearly 9,000 public fast-charging sites in the US, and a surprising wave of installations in the Midwest and Southeast. (Bloomberg)Some proposed legislation aims to ban factory farming, but determining what that category includes is way more complicated than you might think. (Ambrook Research)

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Housing is an election issue. But the US sucks at it.Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration, and way ahead of climate change, US voters under 30 are most concerned about one issue: housing affordability. And its not just young voters who say soaring rents and eye-watering home sale prices are among their top worries. For the first time in recent memory, the cost of housing could be a major factor in the presidential election.Its not hard to see why. From the beginning of the pandemic to early 2024, US home prices rose by 47%. In large swaths of the country, buying a home is no longer a possibility even for those with middle-class incomes.Permitting delays and strict zoning rules create huge obstacles to building more and fasteras do other widely recognized issues, like the political power of NIMBY activists across the country and an ongoing shortage of skilled workers. But there is also another, less talked-about problem: Were not very efficient at building, and we seem somehow to be getting worse. Read the full story.David RotmanInside a fusion energy facilityCasey CrownhartOn an overcast day in early October, I picked up a rental car and drove to Devens, Massachusetts, to visit a hole in the ground.Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised over $2 billion in funding since it spun out of MIT in 2018, all in service of building the first commercial fusion reactor. The plan is to have it operating by 2026.I visited the companys site recently to check in on progress. Things are starting to come together and, looking around the site, I found it becoming easier to imagine a future that could actually include fusion energy. But theres still a lot of work left to do. Read the full story.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: How gamification took over the worldInstead of liberating us from drudgery and maximizing our potential, gamification has turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control. Why did we fall for it?This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast. In partnership with News Over Audio, well be making a selection of our stories available, each one read by a professional voice actor. Youll be able to listen to them on the go or download them to listen to offline.Were 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 its released.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Bird flu has been found in a pig in the US for the first timeThe USDA says its not cause for panic. But its certainly cause for concern. (Reuters)+Why virologists are getting increasingly nervous about bird flu. (MIT Technology Review)2 Elon Musk has turned X into a political weaponThis is what $44 billion bought him: the ability to flood the zone with falsehoods during an election. (The Atlantic$)+Xs crowdsourced fact-checking program is falling woefully short. (WP$)+And its not just X. YouTube is full of election conspiracy content too.(NYT$)+Spare a thought for the election officials who have to navigate this mess.(NPR)3 Europes big tech hawks are nervously eyeing the US electionBiden was an ally in their efforts to crack down. Either of his potential successors look like a less sure bet. (Wired$)+Attendees regularly fail to disclose their links to big tech at EU events.(The Guardian)4 The AI boom is being powered by concreteIts a major ingredient for data centers and the power plants being built to serve themand a climate disaster. (IEEE Spectrum)+How electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain. (MIT Technology Review)5 What makes human brains so special?Much of the answer is still a mysterybut researchers are uncovering more and more promising leads. (Nature)+Tech that measures our brainwaves is 100 years old. How will we be using it 100 years from now?(MIT Technology Review)6 Boston Dynamics humanoid robot is getting much more capableIf its latest video, in which it autonomously picks up and moves car parts, is anything to go by. (TechCrunch)+A skeptics guide to humanoid-robot videos.(MIT Technology Review)7 Alexa desperately needs a revampThe voice assistant was launched 10 years ago, and its been disappointing us ever since. (The Verge)8 Were sick of algorithms recommending us stuffLots of people are keen to turn back to guidance from other humans. (New Yorker$)+If youre one of them, I have bad news: AI is going to make the problem much worse. (Fortune$)9 Russia fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Thats more money than exists on Earth but sure, dont let that stop you. (The Register)10 Whatisgoing on with Mark Zuckerberg recentlyHes using clothes to rebrand himself and its kinda working?! (Slate)Quote of the dayIts what happens when you let a bunch of grifters take over.A Trumpworld source explains toWiredwhy Donald Trumps ground campaign in Michigan is so chaotic.The big storyA day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driverWORLDCOINJuly 2022When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself, says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021 as a robotaxi driver.Liu is one of the hundreds of safety operators employed by Baidu, driving five days a week in Shougang Park. But despite having only worked for the company for 19 months, he already has to think about his next career move, as his job will likely be eliminated within a few years.Read the full story.Zeyi YangWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Happy Halloween! Check out some of the best spine-chillingclassic novels.+ Ifscary moviesare more your jam, Ive still got you covered.+ Thesephoto montagesof music fans outside concerts are incredible.+ Love thatthis guywent from being terrified of rollercoasters to designing them.+ Youll probably never sort your life out.And thats OK.

Inspired by an unprecedented opportunity, the life sciences sector has gone all in on AI. For example, in 2023, Pfizer introduced an internal generative AI platform expected to deliver $750 million to $1 billion in value. And Moderna partnered with OpenAI in April 2024, scaling its AI efforts to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise, embedding the tools capabilities across business functions from legal to research.In drug development, German pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA has partnered with several AI companies for drug discovery and development. And Exscientia, a pioneer in using AI in drug discovery, is taking more steps toward integrating generative AI drug design with robotic lab automation in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).Given rising competition, higher customer expectations, and growing regulatory challenges, these investments are crucial. But to maximize their value, leaders must carefully consider how to balance the key factors of scope, scale, speed, and human-AI collaboration.The early promise of connecting dataThe common refrain from data leaders across all industriesbut specifically from those within data-rich life sciences organizationsis I have vast amounts of data all over my organization, but the people who need it cant find it. says Dan Sheeran, general manager of health care and life sciences for AWS. And in a complex healthcare ecosystem, data can come from multiple sources including hospitals, pharmacies, insurers, and patients.Addressing this challenge, says Sheeran, means applying metadata to all existing data and then creating tools to find it, mimicking the ease of a search engine. Until generative AI came along, though, creating that metadata was extremely time consuming.ZSs global head of the digital and technology practice, Mahmood Majeed notes that his teams regularly work on connected data programs, because connecting data to enable connected decisions across the enterprise gives you the ability to create differentiated experiences.Majeed points to Sanofis well-publicized example of connecting data with its analytics app, plai, which streamlines research and automates time-consuming data tasks. With this investment, Sanofi reports reducing research processes from weeks to hours and the potential to improve target identification in therapeutic areas like immunology, oncology, or neurology by 20% to 30%.Achieving the payoff of personalizationConnected data also allows companies to focus on personalized last-mile experiences. This involves tailoring interactions with healthcare providers and understanding patients individual motivations, needs, and behaviors.Early efforts around personalization haverelied on next best action or next best engagement models to do this. These traditional machine learning (ML) models suggest the most appropriate information for field teams to share with healthcare providers, based on predetermined guidelines.When compared with generative AI models, more traditional machine learning models can be inflexible, unable to adapt to individual provider needs, and they often struggle to connect with other data sources that could provide meaningful context. Therefore, the insights can be helpful but limited. Sheeran notes that companies have a real opportunity to improve their ability to gain access to connected data for better decision-making processes, Because the technology is generative, it can create context based on signals. How does this healthcare provider like to receive information? What insights can we draw about the questions theyre asking? Can their professional history or past prescribing behavior help us provide a more contextualized answer? This is exactly what generative AI is great for.Beyond this, pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars annually to customize marketing materials. They must ensure the content is translated, tailored to the audience and consistent with regulations for each location they offer products and services. A process that usually takes weeks to develop individual assets has become a perfect use case for generative copy and imagery. With generative AI, the process is reduced to from weeks to minutes and creates competitive advantage with lower costs per asset, Sheeran says.Accelerating drug discovery with AI, one step at a timePerhaps the greatest hope for AI in life sciences is its ability to generate insights and intellectual property using biology-specific foundation models. Sheeran says, our customers have seen the potential for very, very large models to greatly accelerate certain discrete steps in the drug discovery and development processes. He continues, Now we have a much broader range of models available, and an even larger set of models coming that tackle other discrete steps.By Sheerans count, there are approximately six major categories of biology-specific models, each containing five to 25 models under development or already available from universities and commercial organizations.The intellectual property generated by biology-specific models is a significant consideration, supported by services such as Amazon Bedrock, which ensures customers retain control over their data, with transparency and safeguards to prevent unauthorized retention and misuse.Finding differentiation in life sciences with scope, scale, and speedOrganizations can differentiate with scope, scale, and speed, while determining how AI can best augment human ingenuity and judgment. Technology has become so easy to access. Its omnipresent. What that means is that its no longer a differentiator on its own, says Majeed. He suggests that life sciences leaders consider:Scope: Have we zeroed in on the right problem? By clearly articulating the problem relative to the few critical things that could drive advantage, organizations can identify technology and business collaborators and set standards for measuring success and driving tangible results.Scale: What happens when we implement a technology solution on a large scale? The highest-priority AI solutions should be the ones with the most potential for results.Scale determines whether an AI initiative will have a broader, more widespread impact on a business, which provides the window for a greater return on investment, says Majeed.By thinking through the implications of scale from the beginning, organizations can be clear on the magnitude of change they expect and how bold they need to be to achieve it. The boldest commitment to scale is when companies go all in on AI, as Sanofi is doing, setting goals to transform the entire value chain and setting the tone from the very top.Speed: Are we set up to quickly learn and correct course? Organizations that can rapidly learn from their data and AI experiments, adjust based on those learnings, and continuously iterate are the ones that will see the most success. Majeed emphasizes, Dont underestimate this component; its where most of the work happens. A good partner will set you up for quick wins, keeping your teams learning and maintaining momentum.Sheeran adds, ZS has become a trusted partner for AWS because our customers trust that they have the right domain expertise. A company like ZS has the ability to focus on the right uses of AI because theyre in the field and on the ground with medical professionals giving them the ability to constantly stay ahead of the curve by exploring the best ways to improve their current workflows.Human-AI collaboration at the heartDespite the allure of generative AI, the human element is the ultimate determinant of how its used. In certain cases, traditional technologies outperform it, with less risk, so understanding what its good for is key. By cultivating broad technology and AI fluency throughout the organization, leaders can teach their people to find the most powerful combinations of human-AI collaboration for technology solutions that work. After all, as Majeed says, its all about peoplewhether its customers, patients, or our own employees and users experiences.This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Reviews editorial staff.

ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a users queries, OpenAI announced today.Until now, ChatGPT was mostly restricted to generating answers from its training data, which is current up to October 2023 for GPT-4o, and had limited web search capabilities. Searches about generalized topics will still draw on this information from the model itself, but now ChatGPT will automatically search the web in response to queries about recent information such as sports, stocks, or news of the day, and can deliver rich multi-media results. Users can also manually trigger a web search, but for the most part, the chatbot will make its own decision about when an answer would benefit from information taken from the web, says Adam Fry, OpenAIs product lead for search.Our goal is to make ChatGPT the smartest assistant, and now were really enhancing its capabilities in terms of what it has access to from the web, Fry tells MIT Technology Review. The feature is available today for the chatbots paying users.ChatGPT triggers a web search when the user asks about local restaurants in this exampleWhile ChatGPT search, as it is known, is initially available to paying customers, OpenAI intends to make it available for free later, even when people are logged out. The company also plans to combine search with its voice features and Canvas, its interactive platform for coding and writing, although these capabilities will not be available in todays initial launch.The company unveiled a standalone prototype of web search in July. Those capabilities are now built directly into the chatbot. OpenAI says it has brought the best of the SearchGPT experience into ChatGPT.OpenAI is the latest tech company to debut an AI-powered search assistant, challenging similar tools from competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and startup Perplexity. Meta, too, is reportedly developing its own AI search engine. As with Perplexitys interface, users of ChatGPT search can interact with the chatbot in natural language, and it will offer an AI-generated answer with sources and links to further reading. In contrast, Googles AI Overviews offer a short AI-generated summary at the top of the website, as well as a traditional list of indexed links.These new tools could eventually challenge Googles 90% market share in online search. AI search is a very important way to draw more users, says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington, who specializes in online search. But he says it is unlikely to chip away at Googles search dominance. Microsofts high-profile attempt with Bing barely made a dent in the market, Shah says.Instead, OpenAI is trying to create a new market for more powerful and interactive AI agents, which can take complex actions in the real world, Shah says.The new search function in ChatGPT is a step toward these agents.It can also deliver highly contextualized responses that take advantage of chat histories, allowing users to go deeper in a search. Currently, ChatGPT search is able to recall conversation histories and continue the conversation with questions on the same topic.ChatGPT itself can also remember things about users that it can use later sometimes it does this automatically, or you can ask it to remember something. Those long-term memories affect how it responds to chats. Search doesnt have this yeta new web search starts from scratch but it should get this capability in the next couple of quarters, says Fry. When it does, OpenAI says it will allow it to deliver far more personalized results based on what it knows.Those might be persistent memories, like Im a vegetarian, or it might be contextual, like Im going to New York in the next few days, says Fry. If you say Im going to New York in four days, it can remember that fact and the nuance of that point, he adds.To help develop ChatGPTs web search, OpenAI says it leveraged its partnerships with news organizations such as Reuters, the Atlantic, Le Monde, the Financial Times, Axel Springer, Cond Nast, and Time. However, its results include information not only from these publishers, but any other source online that does not actively block its search crawler.Its a positive development that ChatGPT will now be able to retrieve information from these reputable online sources and generate answers based on them, says Suzan Verberne, a professor of natural-language processing at Leiden University, who has studied information retrieval. It also allows users to ask follow-up questions.But despite the enhanced ability to search the web and cross-check sources, the tool is not immune from the persistent tendency of AI language models to make things up or get it wrong. When MIT Technology Review tested the new search function and asked it for vacation destination ideas, ChatGPT suggested luxury European destinations such as Japan, Dubai, the Caribbean islands, Bali, the Seychelles, and Thailand. It offered as a source an article from the Times, a British newspaper, which listed these locations as well as those in Europe as luxury holiday options.Especially when you ask about untrue facts or events that never happened, the engine might still try to formulate a plausible response that is not necessarily correct, says Verberne. There is also a risk that misinformation might seep into ChatGPTs answers from the internet if the company has not filtered its sources well enough, she adds.Another risk is that the current push to access the web through AI search will disrupt the internets digital economy, argues Benjamin Brooks, a fellow at Harvard Universitys Berkman Klein Center, who previously led public policy for Stability AI, in an op-ed published byMIT Technology Reviewtoday.By shielding the web behind an all-knowing chatbot, AI search could deprive creators of the visits and eyeballs they need to survive, Brooks writes.

In late October, News Corp filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, a popular AI search engine. At first glance, this might seem unremarkable. After all, the lawsuit joins more than two dozen similar cases seeking credit, consent, or compensation for the use of data by AI developers. Yet this particular dispute is different, and it might be the most consequential of them all.At stake is the future of AI searchthat is, chatbots that summarize information from across the web. If their growing popularity is any indication, these AI answer engines could replace traditional search engines as our default gateway to the internet. While ordinary AI chatbots can reproduceoften unreliablyinformation learned through training, AI search tools like Perplexity, Googles Gemini, or OpenAIs now-public SearchGPT aim to retrieve and repackage information from third-party websites. They return a short digest to users along with links to a handful of sources, ranging from research papers to Wikipedia articles and YouTube transcripts. The AI system does the reading and writing, but the information comes from outside.At its best, AI search can better infer a users intent, amplify quality content, and synthesize information from diverse sources. But if AI search becomes our primary portal to the web, it threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy. Today, the production of content online depends on a fragile set of incentives tied to virtual foot traffic: ads, subscriptions, donations, sales, or brand exposure. By shielding the web behind an all-knowing chatbot, AI search could deprive creators of the visits and eyeballs they need to survive.If AI search breaks up this ecosystem, existing law is unlikely to help. Governments already believe that content is falling through cracks in the legal system, and they are learning to regulate the flow of value across the web in other ways. The AI industry should use this narrow window of opportunity to build a smarter content marketplace before governments fall back on interventions that are ineffective, benefit only a select few, or hamper the free flow of ideas across the web.Copyright isnt the answer to AI search disruptionNews Corp argues that using its content to extract information for AI search amounts to copyright infringement, claiming that Perplexity AI compete[s] for readers while simultaneously freeriding on publishers.That sentiment is likely shared by the New York Times, which sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI in mid-October.In some respects, the case against AI search is stronger than other cases that involve AI training. In training, content has the biggest impact when it is unexceptional and repetitive; an AI model learns generalizable behaviors by observing recurring patterns in vast data sets, and the contribution of any single piece of content is limited. In search, content has the most impact when it is novel or distinctive, or when the creator is uniquely authoritative. By design, AI search aims to reproduce specific features from that underlying data, invoke the credentials of the original creator, and stand in place of the original content.Even so, News Corp faces an uphill battle to prove that Perplexity AI infringes copyright when it processes and summarizes information. Copyright doesnt protect mere facts, or the creative, journalistic, and academic labor needed to produce them. US courts have historically favored tech defendants who use content for sufficiently transformative purposes, and this pattern seems likely to continue. And if News Corp were to succeed, the implications would extend far beyond Perplexity AI. Restricting the use of information-rich content for noncreative or nonexpressive purposes could limit access to abundant, diverse, and high-quality data, hindering wider efforts to improve the safety and reliability of AI systems.Governments are learning to regulate the distribution of value onlineIf existing law is unable to resolve these challenges, governments may look to new laws. Emboldened by recent disputes with traditional search and social media platforms, governments could pursue aggressive reforms modeled on the media bargaining codes enacted in Australia and Canada or proposed in California and the US Congress. These reforms compel designated platforms to pay certain media organizations for displaying their content, such as in news snippets or knowledge panels. The EU imposed similar obligations through copyright reform, while the UK has introduced broad competition powers that could be used to enforce bargaining.In short, governments have shown they are willing to regulate the flow of value between content producers and content aggregators, abandoning their traditional reluctance to interfere with the internet.However, mandatory bargaining is a blunt solution for a complex problem. These reforms favor a narrow class of news organizations, operating on the assumption that platforms like Google and Meta exploit publishers. In practice, its unclear how much of their platform traffic is truly attributable to news, with estimates ranging from 2% to 35% of search queries and just 3% of social media feeds. At the same time, platforms offer significant benefit to publishers by amplifying their content, and there is little consensus about the fair apportionment of this two-way value. Controversially, the four bargaining codes regulate simply indexing or linking to news content, not just reproducing it. This threatens the ability to link freely that underpins the web. Moreover, bargaining rules focused on legacy mediajust 1,400 publications in Canada, 1,500 in the EU, and 62 organizations in Australiaignore countless everyday creators and users who contribute the posts, blogs, images, videos, podcasts, and comments that drive platform traffic.Yet for all its pitfalls, mandatory bargaining may become an attractive response to AI search. For one thing, the case is stronger. Unlike traditional searchwhich indexes, links, and displays brief snippets from sources to help a user decide whether to click throughAI search could directly substitute generated summaries for the underlying source material, potentially draining traffic, eyeballs, and exposure from downstream websites. More than a third of Google sessions end without a click, and the proportion is likely to be significantly higher in AI search. AI search also simplifies the economic calculus: Since only a few sources contribute to each response, platformsand arbitratorscan more accurately track how much specific creators drive engagement and revenue.Ultimately, the devil is in the details. Well-meaning but poorly designed mandatory bargaining rules might do little to fix the problem, protect only a select few, and potentially cripple the free exchange of information across the web.Industry has a narrow window to build a fairer reward systemHowever, the mere threat of intervention could have a bigger impact than actual reform. AI firms quietly recognize the risk that litigation will escalate into regulation. For example, Perplexity AI, OpenAI, and Google are already striking deals with publishers and content platforms, some covering AI training and others focusing on AI search. But like early bargaining laws, these agreements benefit only a handful of firms, some of which (such as Reddit) havent yet committed to sharing that revenue with their own creators.This policy of selective appeasement is untenable. It neglects the vast majority of creators online, who cannot readily opt out of AI search and who do not have the bargaining power of a legacy publisher. It takes the urgency out of reform by mollifying the loudest critics. It legitimizes a few AI firms through confidential and intricate commercial deals, making it difficult for new entrants to obtain equal terms or equal indemnity and potentially entrenching a new wave of search monopolists. In the long term, it could create perverse incentives for AI firms to favor low-cost and low-quality sources over high-quality but more expensive news or content, fostering a culture of uncritical information consumption in the process.Instead, the AI industry should invest in frameworks that reward creators of all kinds for sharing valuable content. From YouTube to TikTok to X, tech platforms have proven they can administer novel rewards for distributed creators in complex content marketplaces. Indeed, fairer monetization of everyday content is a core objective of the web3 movement celebrated by venture capitalists. The same reasoning carries over to AI search. If queries yield lucrative engagement but users dont click through to sources, commercial AI search platforms should find ways to attribute that value to creators and share it back at scale.Of course, its possible that our digital economy was broken from the start. Subsistence on trickle-down ad revenue may be unsustainable, and the attention economy has inflicted real harm to privacy, integrity, and democracy online. Supporting quality news and fresh content may require other forms of investment or incentives.But we shouldnt give up on the prospect of a fairer digital economy. If anything, while AI search makes content bargaining more urgent, it also makes it more feasible than ever before. AI pioneers should seize this opportunity to lay the foundations for a smart, equitable, and scalable reward system. If they dont, governments now have the frameworksand confidenceto impose their own vision of shared value.Benjamin Brooks is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard scrutinizing the regulatory and legislative response to AI. He previously led public policy for Stability AI, a developer of open models for image, language, audio, and video generation. His views do not necessarily represent those of any affiliated organization, past or present.

When you walk around in a version of the video game Minecraft from the AI companies Decart and Etched, it feels a little off. Sure, you can move forward, cut down a tree, and lay down a dirt block, just like in the real thing. If you turn around, though, the dirt block you just placed may have morphed into a totally new environment. That doesnt happen in Minecraft. But this new version is entirely AI-generated, so its prone to hallucinations. Not a single line of code was written.For Decart and Etched, this demo is a proof of concept. They imagine that the technology could be used for real-time generation of videos or video games more generally. Your screen can turn into a portalinto some imaginary world that doesnt need to be coded, that can be changed on the fly. And thats really what were trying to target here, says Dean Leitersdorf, cofounder and CEO of Decart, which came out of stealth this week.Their version of Minecraft is generated in real time, in a technique known as next-frame prediction. They did this by training their model, Oasis, on millions of hours of Minecraft gameplay and recordings of the corresponding actions a user would take in the game. The AI is able to sort out the physics, environments, and controls of Minecraft from this data alone.The companies acknowledge that their version of Minecraft is a little wonky. The resolution is quite low, you can only play for minutes at a time, and its prone to hallucinations like the one described above. But they believe that with innovations in chip design and further improvements, theres no reason they cant develop a high-fidelity version of Minecraft, or really any game.What if you could say Hey, add a flying unicorn here? Literally, talk to the model. Or Turn everything here into medieval ages, and then, boom, its all medieval ages. Or Turn this into Star Wars, and its all Star Wars, says Leitersdorf.A major limitation right now is hardware. They relied on Nvidia cards for their current demo, but in the future, they plan to use Sohu, a new card that Etched has in development, which the firm claims will improve performance by a factor of 10. This gain would significantly cut down on the cost and energy needed to produce real-time interactive video. It would allow Decart and Etched to make a better version of their current demo, allowing the game to run longer, with fewer hallucinations, and at higher resolution. They say the new chip would also make it possible for more players to use the model at once.Custom chips for AI hold the potential to unlock significant performance gains and energy efficiency gains, says Siddharth Garg, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU Tandon, who is not associated with Etched or Decart.Etched says that its gains come from designing their cards specifically for AI development. For example, the chip uses a single core, which it says makes it possible to handle complicated mathematical operations with more efficiency. The chip also focuses on inference (where an AI makes predictions) over training (where an AI learns from data).We are building something much more specialized than all of the chips out on the market today, says Robert Wachen, cofounder and COO of Etched. They plan to run projects on the new card next year. Until the chip is deployed or its capabilities are verified, Etcheds claims are yet to be substantiated. And given the extent of AI specialization already in the top GPUs on the market, Garg is very skeptical about a 10x improvement just from smarter or more specialized design.But the two companies have big ambitions. If the efficiency gains are close to what Etched claims, they believe, they will be able to generate real-time virtual doctors or tutors. All of that is coming down the pipe, and it comes from having a better architecture and better hardware to power it. So thats what were really trying to get people to realize with the proof of concept here, says Wachen.For the time being, you can try out the demo of their version of Minecraft here.

Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration, and way ahead of climate change, US voters under 30 are most concerned about one issue: housing affordability. And its not just young voters who are identifying soaring rents and eye-watering home sale prices as among their top worries. For the first time in recent memory, the cost of housing could be a major factor in the presidential election. Its not hard to see why. From the beginning of the pandemic to early 2024, US home prices rose by 47%. In large swaths of the country, buying a home is no longer a possibility even for those with middle-class incomes. For many, that marks the end of an American dream built around owning a house. Over the same time, rents have gone up 26%.Vice President Kamala Harris has offered an ambitious plan to build more: Right now, a serious housing shortage is part of what is driving up cost, shesaid last month in Las Vegas. So we will cut the red tape and work with the private sector to build 3 million new homes. Included in her proposals is a $40 billion innovation fund to support housing construction.Former president Donald Trump, meanwhile, has also called for cutting regulations but mostly emphasizes a far different way to tackle the housing crunch: mass deportation of the immigrants he says are flooding the country, and whose need for housing he claims is responsible for the huge jump in prices. (While a few studies show some local impact on the cost of housing from immigration in general, the effect is relatively small, and there is no plausible economic scenario in which the number of immigrants over the last few years accounts for the magnitude of the increase in home prices and rents across much of the country.)The opposing views offered by Trump and Harris have implications not only for how we try to lower home prices but for how we view the importance of building more and faster. Moreover, this attention on the housing crisis also reveals a broader issue with the construction industry at large: This sector has been tech-averse for decades, and it has become less productive over the past 50 years.The reason for the current rise in the cost of housing is clear to most economists: a lack of supply. Simply put, we dont build enough houses and apartments, and we havent for years. Depending on how you count it, the US has a shortage of around 1.2 million to more than 5.5 million single-family houses.Permitting delays and strict zoning rules create huge obstacles to building more and fasteras do other widely recognized issues, like the political power of NIMBY activists across the country and an ongoing shortage of skilled workers. But there is also another, less talked-about problem thats plaguing the industry: Were not very efficient at building, and we seem somehow to be getting worse.Together these forces have made it more expensive to build houses, leading to increases in prices. Albert Saiz, a professor of urban economics and real estate at MIT, calculates that construction costs account for more than two-thirds of the price of a new house in much of the country, including the Southwest and West, where much of the building is happening. Even in places like California and New England, where land is extremely expensive, construction accounts for 40% to 60% of value of a new home, according to Saiz.Part of the problem, Saiz says, is if you go to any construction site, youll see the same methods used 30 years ago. The productivity woes are true across the construction industry, not just in the housing sector. From clean-energy advocates dreaming of renewables and an expanded power grid to tech companies racing to add data centers, everyone seems to agree: We need to build more and do it quickly. The practical reality, though, is that it costs more, and takes more time, to construct anything.For decades, companies across the industry have largely ignored ways they could improve the efficiency of their operations. They have shunned data science and the kinds of automation that have transformed the other sectors of the economy. According to an estimation by the McKinsey Global Institute, construction, one of the largest parts of the global economy, is the least digitized major sector worldwideand it isnt even close.The reality is that even if we ease the endless permitting delays and begin cutting red tape, we will still be faced with a distressing fact: the construction industry is not very efficient when it comes to building stuff.The awful truthProductivity is our best measure of long-term progress in an industry, at least according to economists. Technically, its a measure of how much a worker can produce; as companies adopt more efficient practices and new technologies, productivity grows and businesses can make stuff (in this case, homes and buildings) faster and more cheaply. Yet something shocking has happened in the construction industry: Productivity seems to have stalled and even gone into reverse over the last few decades.In a recent paper called The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector, two leading economists at the University of Chicago showed that productivity growth in US construction came to a halt beginning around 1970. Productivity is notoriously difficult to quantify, but the Chicago researchers calculated it in one of the key parts of the construction business: housing. They found that the number of houses or total square footage (houses are getting bigger) built per employee each year was flat or even falling over the last 50 years. And the researchers believe the lack of productivity growth holds true for all different types of construction.Chad Syverson, one of the authors, admits he is still trying to pinpoint the reasonIts probably a few things. While he says its difficult to quantify the specific impact of various factors on productivity, including the effects of regulatory red tape and political fights that often delay construction, part of the industrys problem is its own operational inefficiency. Theres no doubt about it. In other words, the industry just isnt very innovative.The lack of productivity in construction over the last half-century, at a time when all other sectors grew dramatically, is really amazing, he saysand not in a good way.US manufacturing, in contrast, continued growing at around 2% to 3% annually over the same period. Auto workers, as a result, now produce far more cars than they once did, leading to cheaper vehicles if you adjust for inflation (and, by most measures, safer and better ones).Productivity in construction is not just a US problem, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, which has tracked the issue for nearly a decade. Not all countries are faring as badly as the US, but worldwide construction productivity has been flat over the last few decades, says Jan Mischke, who heads the McKinsey work.Beyond adding to the costs and threatening the financial viability of many planned projects, Mischke says, the lack of productivity is reflected in all the mess, time and cost overruns, concerns about quality, rework, and all the things that everyone who has ever built anything will have seen.The nature of construction work can make it difficult to improve longstanding processes and introduce new technologies, he says: Most other sectors become better over time by doing the same thing twice or three times or 3 million times. They learn and improve. All that is essentially missing in construction, where every single project starts from scratch and reinvents the wheel.Mischke also sees another reason for the industrys lack of productivity: the misaligned incentives of the various players, who often make more money the longer a project takes.Though the challenges are endemic to the business, Mischke adds that builders can take steps to overcome them by moving to digital technologies, implementing more standardized processes, and improving the efficiency of their business practices.Most other sectors become better over time by doing the same thing twice or three times or 3 million times. All that is essentially missing in construction.Its an urgent problem to solve as many countries race to build housing, expand clean-energy capabilities, and update infrastructure like roads and airports. In their latest report, the McKinsey researchers warn of the dangers if productivity doesnt improve: The net-zero transition may be delayed, growth ambitions may be deferred, and countries may struggle to meet the infrastructure and housing needs for their populations.But the report also says theres a flip side to the lack of progress in much of the industry: Individual companies that begin to improve their efficiency could gain a huge competitive advantage.Building on the dataWhen Jit Kee Chin joined Suffolk Construction as its chief data officer in 2017, the title was unique in the industry. But Chin, armed with a PhD in experimental physics from MIT and a 10-year stint at McKinsey, brought to the large Boston-based firm the kind of technical and management expertise often missing from construction companies. And she recognized that large construction projectsincluding the high-rise apartment buildings and sprawling data centers that Suffolk often buildsgenerate vast amounts of useful data.At the time, much of the data was siloed; information on the progress of a project was in one place, scheduling in another, and safety data and reports in yet another. The systems didnt talk to each other, and it was very difficult to cross-correlate, says Chin. Getting all the data together so it could be understood and utilized across the business was an early task.Almost all construction companies are talking about how to better use their data now, says Chin, who is currently Suffolks CTO, and since her hiring, a couple others have even appointed chief data officers. But despite such encouraging signs, she sees the effort to improve productivity in the industry as still very much a work in progress. One ongoing and obvious target: the numerous documents that are constantly being revised as they move along from architect to engineers to subcontractors. Its the lifeblood of any construction project, and Chin says the process is by no means seamless. Architects and subcontractors sometimes use different software; meanwhile, the legally binding documents spelling out details of a project are still circulated as printouts. A more frictionless flow of information among the multitude of players is critical to better coordinate the complex building process.Ultimately, though, building is a physical activity. And while automation has largely been absent from building trades, robots are finally cheap enough to be attractive to builders, especially companies facing a shortage of workers. The cost of off-the-shelf robotic components has come down to a point where it is feasible to think of simple robots automating a very repetitive task, says Chin. And advances in robotic image recognition, lidar, AI, and dexterity, she says, mean robots are starting to be able to safely navigate construction sites.One step in construction where digital designs meet the physical world is the process of laying out blueprints for walls and other structures on the floor of a building. Its an exacting, time-consuming manual practice, prone to errors.The Dusty Robotics field printer marks the layout for walls and other structures.DUSTY ROBOTICSAnd startups like Dusty Robotics are betting its an almost perfect application for a Roomba-like robot. Tessa Lau, its CEO, recalls that when she researched the industry before founding the company in 2018, she was struck by seeing people on their hands and knees snapping chalk lines.Based in Silicon Valley, the company builds a box-shaped machine that scoots about a site on sturdy wheels to mark the layout. Though the company often markets it as a field printer to allay any fears about automation, its an AI-powered robot with advanced sensors that plan and guide its travels.Not only does the robot automate a critical job, but because that task is so central in the construction process, it also helps open a digital window into the overall workflow of a project.A history lessonWhatever the outcome of the upcoming election, dont hold your breath waiting for home prices to fall; even if we do build more (or somehow decrease demand), it will probably take years for the supply to catch up. But the political spotlight on housing affordability could be a rare opportunity to focus on the broad problem of construction productivity. While some critics have argued that Harriss plan is too vague and lacks the ambition required to solve the housing crisis, her message that we need to build more and faster is the right one. It takes too long and it costs too much to build. Whether its a new housing development, a new factory, or a new bridge, projects take too long to go from concept to reality, Harris said in a speech in late September. Then she asked: You know long it took to build [the Empire State Building]?Harris stresses cutting red tape to unleash a building boom. Thats critical, but its only part of the long-term answer. The construction of the famous New York City skyscraper took just over a year in 1931a feat that provides valuable clues to how the industry itself can finally increase its productivity.The explanation for why it was built so quickly has less to do with new technologiesin fact, the engineers mostly opted for processes and materials that were familiar and well-tested at the timeand more to do with how the project leaders managed every aspect of the design and construction process for speed and efficiency. The activity of the thousands of workers was carefully scheduled and tracked, and the workflow was highly choreographed to minimize delays. Even the look of the 1,250-foot building was largely a result of choosing the fastest and simplest way to build.To a construction executive like Suffolks Chin, who estimates it would take at least four years to construct such a building today, the lessons of the Empire State Building resonate, especially the operational discipline and the urgency to finish the structure as quickly as possible. Its a stark difference when you think about how much time it took and how much time it would take to build that building now, she says.If we want an affordable future, the construction business needs to recapture that sense of urgency and efficiency. To do so, the industry will need to change the way it operates and alter its incentive structures; it will need to incorporate the right mix of automation and find financial models that will transform outdated business practices. The good news is that advances in data science, automation, and AI are offering companies new opportunities to do just that.The hope, then, is that capitalism will do capitalism. Innovative firms will (hopefully) build more cheaply and faster, boost their profits, and become more competitive. Such companies will prosper, and others will begin to mimic the early adopters, investing in the new technologies and business models. In other words, the reality of seeing some builders profit by using data and automation will finally help drag the construction industry into the modern digital age.

Thumpa-thumpa, thumpa-thumpa, bump,thumpa, skip,thumpa-thump, pause My heart wasnt supposed to be beating like this. Way too fast, with bumps, pauses, and skips. On my smart watch, my pulse was topping out at 210 beats per minute and jumping every which way as my chest tightened. Was I having a heart attack?The day was July 4, 2022, and I was on a 12-mile bike ride on Marthas Vineyard. I had just pedaled past Inkwell Beach, where swimmers sunbathed under colorful umbrellas, and into a hot, damp headwind blowing off the sea. Thats when I first sensed a tugging in my chest. My legs went wobbly. My head started to spin. I pulled over, checked my watch, and discovered that I was experiencing atrial fibrillationa fancy name for a type of arrhythmia. The heart beats, but not in the proper time. Atria are the upper chambers of the heart; fibrillation means an attack of uncoordinated electrical activity.I recount this story less to describe a frightening moment for me personally than to consider the idea of arrhythmiaa critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable, triggered by what? That July afternoon was steamy and over 90 F, but how many times had I biked in heat far worse? I had recently recovered from a not-so-bad bout of covidmy second. Plus, at age 64, I wasnt a kid anymore, even if I didnt always act accordingly.Whatever the proximal cause, what was really gripping me on July 4, 2022, was the idea of arrhythmia as metaphor. That a pulse once seemingly so steady was now less sure, and how this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s. I know its quite a leap from one mans abnormal ticker to the current state of an entire species and era, but thats where my mind went as I was taken to the emergency department at Marthas Vineyard Hospital.Maybe you feel it, toothat the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, glaciers dissolve, and sunsets turn a deeper orange as fires spew acrid smoke into the sky, and into our lungs. We cant stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we dont need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands. Poverty remains intractable for billions. So does loneliness and a rising crisis in mental health even as we fret over whether AI is going to save us or turn us into pets; and on and on.For most of my life, Ive leaned into optimism, confident that things will work out in the end. But as a nurse admitted me and attached ECG leads to my chest, I felt a wave of doubt about the future. Lying on a gurney, I watched my pulse jump up and down on a monitor, erratically and still way too fast, as another nurse poked a needle into my hand to deliver an IV bag of saline that would hydrate my blood vessels. Soon after, a young, earnest doctor came in to examine me, and I heard the word uttered for the first time.You are having an arrhythmia, he said.Even with my heart beating rat-a-tat-tat, I couldnt help myself. Intrigued by the word, which I had heard before but had never really heard, I pulled out the phone that is always at my side and looked it up.arrhythmiaNoun: a condition in which the heart beats with anirregularorabnormal rhythm. Greek a-, without, and rhuthmos, rhythm.I lay back and closed my eyes and let this Greek origin of the word roll around in my mind as I repeated it several timesrhuthmos, rhuthmos, rhuthmos.Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm I tapped my finger to follow the beat of my heart, but of course I couldnt, because my heart wasnt beating in the steady and predictable manner that my finger could easily have followed before July 4, 2022. After all, my heart was built to tap out in a rhythm, a rhuthmosnot an arhuthmos.Later I discovered that the Greek rhuthmos, , like the English rhythm, refers not only to heartbeats but to any steady motion, symmetry, or movement. For the ancient Greeks this word was closely tied to music and dance; to the physics of vibration and polarity; to a state of balance and harmony. The concept of rhuthmos was incorporated into Greek classical sculptures using a strict formula of proportions called the Kanon, an example being the Doryphoros (Spear Bearer) originally by the fifth century sculptor Polykleitos. Standing today in the Acropolis Museum in Athens this statue appears to be moving in an easy fluidity, a rhuthmos thats somehow drawn out of the milky-colored stone.The Greeks also thought of rhuthmos as harmony and balance in emotions, with Greek playwrights penning tragedies where the rhuthmos of life, nature, and the gods goes awry. In this rhythm, I am caught, cries Prometheus in Aeschyluss Prometheus Bound, where rhuthmos becomes a steady, unrelenting punishment inflicted by Zeus when Prometheus introduces fire to humans, providing them with a tool previously reserved for the gods. Each day Prometheus, who is chained to a rock, has his liver eaten out by an eagle, only to have the liver grow back each night, a cycle repeated day after day in a steady beat for an eternity of penance, pain, and vexation.In modern times, cardiologists have used rhuthmos to refer to the physical beating of the muscle in our chests that mixes oxygen and blood and pumps it through 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries to fingertips, toe tips, frontal cortex, kidneys, eyes, everywhere. In 2006, the journal Rhythmos launched as a quarterly medical publication that focuses on cardiac electrophysiology. This subspecialty of cardiology involves the electrical signals animating the heart with pulses that keep it beating steadilyor, for me in the summer of 2022, not.The question remained: Why?As far as I know, I wasnt being punished by Zeus, although I couldnt entirely rule out the possibility that I had annoyed some god or goddess and was catching hell for it. Possibly covid was the culpritthat microscopic bundle of RNA with the power of a god to mess with us mortalsbut who knows? As science learns more about this pernicious bug, evidence suggests that it can play havoc with the nervous system and tissue that usually make sure the heart stays in rhuthmos.A-fib also can be instigated by even moderate imbibing of alcohol, by aging, and sometimes by a gene called KCNQ1. Mutations in this gene appear to increase the flow of potassium ions through the channel formed with the KCNQ1 protein, according to MedlinePlus, part of the National Library of Medicine. The enhanced ion transport can disrupt the hearts normal rhythm, resulting in atrial fibrillation. Was a miscreant mutation playing a role in my arrhythmia?Angst and fear can influence A-fib too. I had plenty of both during the pandemic, along with most of humanity. Lest we forgetand were trying really, really hard to forgetcovid anxiety continued to rage in the summer of 2022, even after vaccines had arrived and most of the world had reopened.Back then, the damage done to fragile brains forced to shelter in place for months and months was still fresh. Cable news and social media continued to amplify the terror of seeing so many people dead or facing permanent impairment. Politics also seemed out of control, with demagoguesanother Greek wordrunning amok. Shootings, invasions, hatred, and fury seemed to lurk everywhere. This is one reason I stopped following the news for days at a timesomething I had never done, as a journalist and news junkie. I felt that my fragile heart couldnt bear so much visceral tragedy, so much arhuthmos.We each have our personal stories from those dark days. For me, covid came early in 2020 and led to a spring and summer with a pervasive brain fog, trouble breathing, and eventually a depression of the sort that I had never experienced before. At the same time, I had friends who ended up in the ICU, and I knew people whose parents and other relatives had passed. My mother was dying of dementia, and my father had been in and out of the ICU a half-dozen times with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that can be fatal. This family dissolution had started before covid hit, but the pandemic made the implosion of my nuclear family seem worse and undoubtedly contributed to the failure of my hearts pulse to stay true.Likewise, the wider arhuthmos some of us are feeling now began long before the novel coronavirus shut down ordinary life in March 2020. Statistics tell us that anxiety, stress, depression, and general mental unhealthiness have been steadily ticking up for years. This seems to suggest that something bigger has been going on for some timea collective angst that seems to point to the darker side of modern life itself.Dont get me wrong. Modern life has provided us with spectacular benefitsManhattan, Boeing 787 Dreamliners, IMAX films, cappuccinos, and switches and dials on our walls that instantly illuminate or heat a room. Unlike our ancestors, most of us no longer need to fret about when we will eat next or whether well find a safe place to sleep, or worry that a saber-toothed tiger will eat us. Nor do we need to experience an A-fib attack without help from an eager and highly trained young doctor, an emergency department, and an IV to pump hydration into our veins.But there have been trade-offs. New anxieties and threats have emerged to make us feel uneasy and arrhythmic. These start with an uneven access to things like emergency departments, eager young doctors, shelter, and foodwhich can add to anxiety not only for those without them but also for anyone who finds this situation unacceptable. Even being on the edge of need can make the heart gambol about.Consider, too, the basic design features of modern life, which tend toward straight linesverticals and horizontals. This comes from an instinct we have to tidy up and organize things, and from the fact that verticals and horizontals in architecture are stable and functional.All this straightness, however, doesnt always sit well with brains that evolved to see patterns and shapes in the natural world, which isnt horizontal and vertical. Our ancestors looked out over vistas of trees and savannas and mountains that were not made from straight lines. Crooked lines, a bending tree, the fuzzy contour of a grassy vista, a horizon that bobs and weavesthese feel right to our primordial brains. We are comforted by the curve of a robins breast and the puffs and streaks and billows of clouds high in the sky, the soft earth under our feet when we walk.Not to overly romanticize nature, which can be violent, unforgiving, and deadly. Devastating storms and those predators with sharp teeth were a major reason why our forebears lived in trees and caves and built stout huts surrounded by walls. Homo sapiens also evolved something crucial to our survivaloptimism that they would survive and prevail. This has been a powerful toolone of the reasons we are able to forge ahead, forget the horrors of pandemics and plagues, build better huts, and learn to make cappuccinos on demand.As one of the great optimists of our day, Kevin Kelly, has said: Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.But is everything really okay in this future that our ancestors built for us? Is the optimism thats hardwired into us and so important for survival and the rise of civilization one reason for the general anxiety were feeling in a future that has in some crucial ways turned out less ideal than those who constructed it had hoped?At the very least, modern life seems to be downplaying elements that are as critical to our feelings of safety as sturdy walls, standing armies, and clean ECGsand truly more crucial to our feelings of happiness and prosperity than owning two cars or showing off the latest swimwear on Miami Beach. These fundamentals include love and companionship, which statistics tell us are in short supply. Today millions have achieved the once optimistic dream of living like minor pharaohs and kings in suburban tract homes and McMansions, yet inadvertently many find themselves separated from the companionship and community that are basic human cravings.Modern science and technology can be dazzling and good and useful. But theyve also been used to design things that hurt us broadly while spectacularly benefiting just a few of us. We have let the titans of social media hijack our genetic cravings to be with others, our need for someone to love and to love us, so that we will stay glued to our devices, even in the ED when we think we might be having a heart attack. Processed foods are designed to play on our bodys craving for sweets and animal fat, something that evolution bestowed so we would choose food that is nutritious and safe to eat (mmm, tastes good) and not dangerous (ugh, sour milk). But now their easy abundance overwhelms our bodies and makes many of us sick.We invented money so that acquiring things and selling what we make in order to live better would be faster and easier. In the process, we also invented a whole new category of anxietyabout money. We worry about having too little of it and sometimes too much; we fear that someone will steal it or trick us into spending it on things we dont need. Some of us feel guilty about not spending enough of it on feeding the hungry or repairing our climate. Money also distorts elections, which require huge amounts of it. You may have gotten a text message just now, asking for some to support a candidate you dont even like.The irony is that we know how to fix at least some of what makes us on edge. For instance, we know we shouldnt drive gas-guzzling SUVs and that we should stop looking at endless perfect kitchens, too-perfect influencers, and 20-second rants on TikTok. We can feel helpless even as new ideas and innovations proliferate. This may explain one of the great contradictions of this age of arrhythmiaone demonstrated in a 2023 UNESCO global survey about climate change that questioned 3,000 young people from 80 different countries, aged 16 to 24. Not surprisingly, 57% were eco-anxious. But an astonishing 67% were eco-optimistic, meaning many were both anxious and hopeful.Me too.All this anxiety and optimism have been hard on our heartsliterally and metaphorically. Too much worry can cause this fragile muscle to break down, to lose its rhythm. So can too much of modern life. Cardiovascular disease remains the No. 1 killer of adults, in the US and most of the world, with someone in America dying of it every 33 seconds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The incidence of A-fib has tripled in the past 50 years (possibly because were diagnosing it more); it afflicted almost 50 million people globally in 2016.For me, after that initial attack on Marthas Vineyard, the A-fib episodes kept coming. I charted them on my watch, the blips and pauses in my pulse, the moments when my heart raced at over 200 beats per minute, causing my chest to tighten and my throat to feel raw. Sometimes I tasted blood, or thought I did. I kept bicycling through the summer and fall of 2022, gingerly watching my heart rate to see if I could keep the beats from taking a sudden leap from normal to out of control.When an arrhythmic episode happened, I struggled to catch my breath as I pulled over to the roadside to wait for the misfirings to pass. Sometimes my mind grew groggy, and I got confused. It became difficult during these cardio-disharmonious moments to maintain my cool with other people. I became less able to process the small setbacks that we all face every daythings I previously had been able to let roll off my back.Early in 2023 I had my heart checked by a cardiologist. He conducted an echocardiogram and had me jog on a treadmill hooked up to monitors. There has been no damage to your heart, he declared after getting the results, pointing to a black-and-white video of my heart muscle contracting and constricting, drawing in blood and pumping it back out again. I felt relieved, although he also said that the A-fib was likely to persist, so he prescribed a blood thinner called Eliquis as a precaution to prevent stroke. Apparently, during unnatural pauses in ones heartbeat blood can clot and send tiny, scab-like fragments into the brain, potentially clogging up critical capillaries and other blood vessels. You dont want that to happen, said the cardiologist.Toward the end of my heart exam, the doctor mentioned a possible fix for my arrhythmia. I was skeptical, although what he proposed turned out to be one of the great pluses of being alive right nowa solution that was unavailable to my ancestors or even to my grandparents. Its called a heart ablation, he said. The procedure, a simple operation, redirects errant electric signals in the heart muscle to restore a normal pattern of beating. Doctors will run a tube into your heart, find the abnormal tissue throwing off the rhythm, and zap it with either extreme heat, cold, or (the newest option) electrical pulses. There are an estimated 240,000 such procedures a year in the United States.Can you really do that? I asked.We can, said the doctor. It doesnt always work the first time. Sometimes you need a second or third procedure, but the success rate is high.A few weeks later, I arrived at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. My first cardiologist was unavailable to do the procedure, so after being prepped in the pre-op area I was greeted by Andre dAvila, a specialist in electrocardiology, who explained again how the procedure worked. He said that he and an electrophysiology fellow would be inserting long, snakelike catheters through the femoral arteries in my groin tipped with a tiny camera and a cauterizer that would be used to selectively and carefully burn the surfaces of my atrial muscles. The idea was to create patterns of scar tissue to block and redirect the errant electrical signals and restore a steady rhuthmos to my heart. The whole thing would take about two or three hours, and I would likely be going home that afternoon.Moments later, an orderly came and wheeled me through busy hallways to an OR where Dr. dAvila introduced the technicians and nurses on his OR team. Monitors pinged and machines whirred as moments later an anesthesiologist placed a mask over my mouth and nose, and I slipped into unconsciousness.The ablation was a success. Since I woke up, my heart has kept a steady beat, restoring my internal rhuthmos, even if the procedure sadly did not repair the myriad worrisome externalitiesthe demagogues, carbon footprints, and the rest. Still, the undeniably miraculous singeing of my atrial muscles left me with a realization that if human ingenuity can fix my heart and restore its rhythm, shouldnt we be able to figure out how to fix other sources of arhuthmos in our lives?We already have solutions to some of what ails us. We know how to replace fossil fuels with renewables, make cities less sharp-edged, and create smart gizmos and apps that calm our minds rather than agitating them.For my own small fix, I thank Dr. dAvila and his team, and the inventors of the ablation procedure. I also thank Prometheus, whose hubris in bringing fire to mortals literally saved me by providing the hot-tipped catalyst to repair my ailing heart. Perhaps this can give us hope that the human species will bring the larger rhythms of life into a better, if not perfect, beat. Call me optimistic, but also anxious, about our prospects even as I can now place my finger on my wrist and feel once again the steady rhuthmos of my heart.

It turns out that you dont need to be a scientist to encode data in DNA. Researchers have been working on DNA-based data storage for decades, but a new template-based method inspired by our cells chemical processes is easy enough for even nonscientists to practice. The technique could pave the way for an unusual but ultra-stable way to store information.The idea of storing data in DNA was first proposed in the 1950s by the physicist Richard Feynman. Genetic material has exceptional storage density and durability; a single gram of DNA can store a trillion gigabytes of data and retain the information for thousands of years. Decades later, a team led by George Church at Harvard University put the idea into practice, encoding a 53,400-word book. This early approach relied on DNA synthesisstringing genetic sequences together piece by piece, like beads on a thread, using the four nucleotide building blocks A, T, C, and G to encode information. The process was expensive, time consuming, and error prone, creating only one bit (or an eighth of a byte) with each nucleotide added to a strand. Crucially, the process required skilled expertise to carry out.The new method, published in Nature last week, is more efficient, storing 350 bits at a time by encoding strands in parallel. Rather than hand-threading each DNA strand, the team assembles strands from pre-built DNA bricks about 20 nucleotides long, encoding information by altering some and not others along the way. Peking Universitys Long Qian and team got the idea for such templates from the way cells share the same basic set of genes but behave differently in response to chemical changes in DNA strands. Every cell in our bodies has the same genome sequence, but genetic programming comes from modifications to DNA. If life can do this, we can do this, she says.Qian and her colleagues encoded data through methylation, a chemical reaction that switches genes on and off by attaching a methyl compounda small methane-related molecule. Once the bricks are locked into their assigned spots on the strand, researchers select which bricks to methylate, with the presence or absence of the modification standing in for binary values of 0 or 1. The information can then be deciphered using nanopore sequencers to detect whether a brick has been methylated. In theory, the new method is simple enough to be carried out without detailed knowledge of how to manipulate DNA.The storage capacity of each DNA strand caps off at roughly 70 bits. For larger files, researchers splintered data into multiple strands identified by unique barcodes encoded in the bricks. The strands were then read simultaneously and sequenced according to their barcodes. With this technique, researchers encoded the image of a tiger rubbing from the Han dynasty, troubleshooting the encoding process until the image came back with no errors. The same process worked for more complex images, like a photorealistic print of a panda.To gauge the real-world applicability of their approach, the team enlisted 60 students from diverse academic backgroundsnot just scientiststo encode any writing of their choice. The volunteers transcribed their writing into binary code through a web server. Then, with a kit sent by the team, they pipetted an enzyme into a 96-well plate of the DNA bricks, marking which would be methylated. The team then ran the samples through a sequencer to make the DNA strand. Once the computer received the sequence, researchers ran a decoding algorithm and sent the restored message back to a web server for students to retrieve with a password. The writing came back with a 1.4% error rate in letters, and the errors were eventually corrected through language-learning models.Once its more thoroughly developed, Qian sees the technology becoming useful as long-term storage for archival information that isnt accessed every day, like medical records, financial reports, or scientific data.The success nonscientists achieved using the technique in coding trials suggests that the DNA storage could eventually become a practical technology. Everyone is storing data every day, and so to compete with traditional data storage technologies, DNA methods need to be usable by the everyday person, says Jeff Nivala, co-director of University of Washingtons Molecular Information Systems Lab. This is still an early demonstration of going toward nonexperts, but I think its pretty unique that theyre able to do that.DNA storage still has many strides left to make before it can compete with traditional data storage. The new system is more expensive than either traditional data storage techniques or previous DNA-synthesis methods, Nivala says, though the encoding process could become more efficient with automation on a larger scale. With future development, template-based DNA storage might become a more secure method of tackling ever-climbing data demands.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.The arrhythmia of our current ageArrhythmia means the heart beats, but not in proper timea critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable. Its frightening to experience, but what if its also a good metaphor for our current times? That a pulse once seemingly so steady is now less sure. Perhaps this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s.Maybe you feel it, toothat the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, and glaciers dissolve. We cant stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we dont need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands.All the resulting anxiety has been hard on our heartsliterally and metaphorically. Read the full story.David Ewing DuncanAn easier-to-use technique for storing data in DNA is inspired by our cellsThe news: It turns out that you dont need to be a scientist to encode data in DNA. Researchers have been working on DNA-based data storage for decades, but a new template-based method inspired by our cells chemical processes is easy enough for even nonscientists to practice.Some background: So far, the process of storing data in DNA has been expensive, time consuming, and error prone. It also required skilled expertise to carry out.The details: The new method is more efficient and easy enough that anyone can do it. They enlisted 60 studentsstudying all sorts of topics, not just scienceto test it out, and the trial was a success. It could pave the way for an unusual but ultra-stable way to store information. Read the full story.Jenna AhartRead next: Were making more data than ever. What canand shouldwe save for future generations? And will they be able to understand it? Read our feature all about the race to save our online lives from a digital dark age.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Facebook is auto-generating militia group pagesRather than shutting extremist content down, its actually lending a helping hand. (Wired$)+X is shoving political content into peoples feeds, whether they want it or not. (WSJ$)+Some users say theyre being paid thousands of dollars by X to promote misinformation.(BBC)2 OpenAI is working on its first in-house chip with Broadcom and TSMCIts abandoned ambitious plans to manufacture its own chips. Instead, its focusing on the design stage of the process. (Reuters$)+Chip designer Arm could become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom. (FT$)3 Elon Musk has build a compound for his children and their mothersIt is an unconventional set-up to say the least. (NYT$)+Musk fans are losing a lot of money to crypto scams.(Gizmodo)4 A quarter of new code at Google is now AI-generatedThat fascinating fact emerged from CEO Sundar Pichai himself on the companys latest earnings call. (The Verge)+Github Copilot will switch from only using OpenAIs models to a multi-model approach. (Ars Technica)+How AI assistants are already changing the way code gets made.(MIT Technology Review)5 This app can operate your smartphone for youIf you live in China anywaybut companies everywhere are working on the same capabilities. (South China Morning Post)+LinkedIn has launched an AI agent that purports to do a whole range of recruitment tasks.(TechCrunch)6 Universal is building an AI music generatorBut its a long way off from demoing it just yet. (The Verge)+Rival AI music startups face a big barrier: licensing copyrighted music is very expensive. (MIT Technology Review)7 Kids are getting around school smartphone bans with smartwatchesBut it seems its anxious parents that are really driving adoption. (Wired$)8 Reddit just turned a profit for the first timeIt has almost 100 million daily users now. (FT$)9 AI is coming to the world of dance You still need human bodiesbut AI is helping with choreography and set designs. (The Guardian)10 A PhD student found a lost city in Mexico by accidentLuke Auld-Thomas stumbled across a vast ancient Maya city while studying online Lidar survey data. (BBC)Quote of the dayCompared to what AI boosters were predicting after ChatGPT was released, this is a glacial pace of adoption.Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, digs into a study which found that only 0.5-3.5% of work hours involve generative AI in a post on X.The big storyHow Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test usersWORLDCOINApril 2022In December 2021, residents of the village of Gunungguruh, Indonesia, were curious when technology company Worldcoin turned up at a local school. It was pitched as a new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible, in exchange for an iris scan and other personal data.Gunungguruh was not alone in receiving a visit from Worldcoin. MIT Technology Review has interviewed over 35 individuals in six countries who either worked for or on behalf of Worldcoin, had been scanned, or were unsuccessfully recruited to participate.Our investigation reveals wide gaps between Worldcoins public messaging, which focused on protecting privacy, and what users experienced. We found that the companys representatives used deceptive marketing practices, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. Read the full investigation.Eileen Guo and Adi RenaldiWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Can you guess these movies from their French name?+ Why leopard print is an eternally solid style choice. ($)+ Sitting all day screws our bodies up, but these stretches can help.+ You can pretty much pinpoint the exact hour you hit peak happiness on vacation. ($)

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.War is a catalyst for change, an expert in AI and warfare told me in 2022. At the time, the war in Ukraine had just started, and themilitary AI business was booming. Two years later, things have only ramped up as geopolitical tensions continue to rise.Silicon Valley players are poised to benefit. One of them is Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual-reality headset company Oculus, which he sold to Facebook for $2 billion. After Luckeys highly public ousting from Meta, he founded Anduril, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense. The company is now valued at $14 billion. My colleague James ODonnellinterviewedLuckey about his new pet project: headsets for the military.Luckey is increasingly convinced that the military, not consumers, will see the value of mixed-reality hardware first:Youre going to see an AR headset on every soldier, long before you see it on every civilian, he says. In the consumer world, any headset company is competing with the ubiquity and ease of the smartphone, but he sees entirely different trade-offs in defense.Read the interview here.The use of AI for military purposes is controversial.Back in 2018, Google pulled out of the Pentagons Project Maven, an attempt to build image recognition systems to improve drone strikes, following staff walkouts over the ethics of the technology. (Google has sincereturned to offering servicesfor the defense sector.) There has been a long-standing campaign to ban autonomous weapons, also known as killer robots, which powerful militaries such as the US have refused to agree to.But the voices that boom even louder belong to an influential faction in Silicon Valley, such as Googles former CEO Eric Schmidt, who has called for the military to adopt and invest more in AI to get an edge over adversaries. Militaries all over the world have been very receptive to this message.Thats good news for the tech sector.Military contracts are long and lucrative, for a start. Most recently, the Pentagon purchased services from Microsoft and OpenAI to do search, natural-language processing, machine learning, and data processing, reportsThe Intercept. In the interview with James, Palmer Luckey says the military is a perfect testing ground for new technologies. Soldiers do as they are told and arent as picky as consumers, he explains. Theyre also less price-sensitive: Militaries dont mind spending a premium to get the latest version of a technology.But there are serious dangers in adopting powerful technologies prematurely in such high-risk areas.Foundation models pose serious national security and privacy threats by, for example, leaking sensitive information, argue researchers at the AI Now Institute and Meredith Whittaker, president of the communication privacy organization Signal, in anew paper. Whittaker, who was a core organizer of the Project Maven protests, has said that the push to militarize AI is really more about enriching tech companies than improving military operations.Despite calls for stricter rules around transparency, we are unlikely to see governments restrict their defense sectors in any meaningful way beyond voluntary ethical commitments. We are in the age of AI experimentation, and militaries are playing with the highest stakes of all. And because of the militarys secretive nature, tech companies can experiment with the technology without the need for transparency or even much accountability. That suits Silicon Valley just fine.Now read the rest of The AlgorithmDeeper LearningHow Wayves driverless cars will meet one of their biggest challenges yetThe UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firms cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well. And that brings a new challenge: Its AI will need to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right.Full speed ahead:As visitors to or from the UK will know, making that switch is harder than it sounds. Your view of the road, how the vehicle turnsits all different. The move to the US will be a test of Wayves technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering. Across the Atlantic, the company will now go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla.Join Will Douglas Heaven on a ride in one of its cars to find out more.Bits and BytesKids are learning how to make their own little language modelsLittle Language Models is a new application from two PhD researchers at MITs Media Lab that helps children understand how AI models workby getting to build small-scale versions themselves. (MIT Technology Review)Google DeepMind is making its AI text watermark open sourceGoogle DeepMind has developed a tool for identifying AI-generated text called SynthID, which is part of a larger family of watermarking tools for generative AI outputs. The company is applying the watermark to text generated by its Gemini models and making it available for others to use too. (MIT Technology Review)Anthropic debuts an AI model that can use a computerThe tool enables the companys Claude AI model to interact with computer interfaces and take actions such as moving a cursor, clicking on things, and typing text. Its a very cumbersome and error-prone version of what some have saidAI agentswill be able to do one day. (Anthropic)Can an AI chatbot be blamed for a teens suicide?A 14-year-old boy committed suicide, and his mother says it was because he was obsessed with an AI chatbot created by Character.AI. She is suing the company. Chatbots have been touted as cures for loneliness, but critics say they actually worse isolation. (The New York Times)Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in search resultsThe internets biggest AI-powered search engines are featuring the widely debunked idea that white people are genetically superior to other races. (Wired)

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Exosomes are touted as a trendy cure-all. We dont know if they work.Theres a trendy new cure-all in townyou might have seen ads pop up on social media or read rave reviews in beauty magazines.Exosomes are being touted as a miraculous treatment for hair loss, aging skin, acne, eczema, pain conditions, long covid, and even neurological diseases like Parkinsons and Alzheimers. Thats, of course, if you can afford the price tagwhich can stretch to thousands of dollars.But theres a big problem with these big promises: We dont fully understand how exosomes workor what they even really are. Read our story.Jessica HamzelouAI will add to the e-waste problem. Heres what we can do about it.The news: Generative AI could add up to 5 million metric tons of e-waste in total by 2030, according to a new study. Thats a relatively small fraction of the current global total of over 60 million metric tons of e-waste each year. However, its still a significant part of a growing problem.Under the hood: The primary contributor is high-performance computing hardware thats used in data centers and server farms. That equipment is full of valuable metals and hazardous materials, and its being replaced at a rapid rate as AI companies race to adopt the most cutting-edge hardware to power their models.What can be done: Expanding hardwares lifespan is one of the most significant ways to cut down on e-waste. Refurbishing and reusing components can also play a significant role, as can designing hardware in ways that makes it easier to recycle and upgrade. Read the full story.Casey CrownhartMilitaries are great testing grounds for AI tech, says Palmer LuckeyWar is a catalyst for technological change, and the last couple of years have been marred by high-profile conflicts around the world. Geopolitical tensions are still rising now.Silicon Valley players are poised to benefit. One of them is Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual-reality headset company Oculus, which he sold to Facebook for $2 billion. After Luckeys highly public ousting from Meta, he founded Anduril, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense. The company is now valued at $14 billion. We interviewed Luckey about his new project: headsets for the military.But the use of AI for the military is a controversial topic, with a long and bitter history that stretches from Project Maven to killer robots. Read the full story.Melissa HeikkilThis story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter all about the latest in AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Strava is leaking the location of foreign leadersTheir bodyguards runs are revealing more than they ought to. (Le Monde)+Its shockingly easy to buy sensitive data about US military personnel.(MIT Technology Review)2 A man who used AI to make child sexual abuse images has been jailedHis 18-year sentence is the first of its kind in the UK. (FT$)3 Heres what Trump plans to do if he wins a second termThe 900-page Project 2025 document provides plenty of hints. (The Verge)+It would be hard for him to roll back the Green New Dealbut not impossible.(Axios)+Russia, China and Iran are interfering in the election.(NYT$)+But cybercriminals may pose an even greater threat.(Wired$)4 Apple Intelligence is hereBut it seems its still kinda dumb. (WP$)+Meta is reportedly building its own AI search engine.(The Information$)+ The trouble is, AI chatbots make stuff up. And its not a fully fixable problem. (MIT Technology Review)5 Medium is drowning in AI slopAlmost half of the posts on there now are probably AI-generated. (Wired$)6 What steampunk can teach tech todayWere too keen on removing frictionpeople still like fiddling with dials and gears. (New Yorker$)+Prosthetics designers are coming up with new ways to augment our bodies.(MIT Technology Review)7 This is what wargaming looks like nowMilitaries around the world use software called Command PE built by a tiny British game publisher. (WSJ$)8 Tiktoks founder has become Chinas richest manZhang Yimings wealth has almost doubled in the last year, to $49 billion. (BBC)+How China takes extreme measures to keep teens off TikTok.(MIT Technology Review)9 How complex life started to flourishYou can thank eukaryotes, a type of cell that emerged about 3 billion years ago. (Quanta$)10 Oregon Trail is being turned into an action-comedy movieWith musical numbers. Yes, seriously. (Hollywood Reporter)Quote of the dayI thought it would conquer the world.Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, spoke for us all (well, for me anyway), when he waxed lyrical about the 1999 Sega Dreamcast video game console on a Twitch stream last weekend, the Washington Post reports.The big storyMeet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraines drone defenseEMRE AYLAKSeptember 2024Drones 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 communicationsa 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 countrys defense in all matters related to radio. He studies Russian transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops.In this race for survivalas each side constantly tries to best the other, only to start all over again when the other inevitably catches upUkrainian soldiers need to develop creative solutions, and fast. As Ukraines wartime radio guru, Flash may just be one of their best hopes for doing that.Read the full story.Charlie MetcalfeWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Timothe Chalamet turned up at his own look-alike contest in New York last weekend. Spoiler alert: he didnt win.+ Learn these basic rules to make veg-based meals delicious.+ Theres something very special about ancient trees.+ Do you tend to please everyone but yourself? Heres how to stop. (NYT $)

A few years ago, I had to make one of the biggest decisions of my life: continue as a professor at the University of Melbourne or move to another part of the world to help build a brand new university focused entirely on artificial intelligence.With the rapid development we have seen in AI over the past few years, I came to the realization that educating the next generation of AI innovators in an inclusive way and sharing the benefits of technology across the globe is more important than maintaining the status quo. I therefore packed my bags for the Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi.The world in all its complexityToday, the rewards of AI are mostly enjoyed by a few countries in what the Oxford Internet Institute dubs the Compute North. These countries, such as the US, the U.K., France, Canada, and China, have dominated research and development, and built state of the art AI infrastructure capable of training foundational models. This should come as no surprise, as these countries are home to many of the worlds top universities and large tech corporations.But this concentration of innovation comes at a cost for the billions of people who live outside these dominant countries and have different cultural backgrounds.Large language models (LLMs) are illustrative of this disparity. Researchers have shown that many of the most popular multilingual LLMs perform poorly with languages other than English, Chinese, and a handful of other (mostly) European languages. Yet, there are approximately 6,000 languages spoken today, many of them in communities in Africa, Asia, and South America. Arabic alone is spoken by almost 400 million people and Hindi has 575 million speakers around the world.For example, LLaMA 2 performs up to 50% better in English compared to Arabic, when measured using the LM-Evaluation-Harness framework. Meanwhile, Jais, an LLM co-developed by MBZUAI, exceeds LLaMA 2 in Arabic and is comparable to Metas model in English (see table below).The chart shows that the only way to develop AI applications that work for everyone is by creating new institutions outside the Compute North that consistently and conscientiously invest in building tools designed for the thousands of language communities across the world.Environments of innovationOne way to design new institutions is to study history and understand how todays centers of gravity in AI research emerged decades ago. Before Silicon Valley earned its reputation as the center of global technological innovation, it was called Santa Clara Valley and was known for its prune farms. However, the main catalyst was Stanford University, which had built a reputation as one of the best places in the world to study electrical engineering. Over the years, through a combination of government-led investment through grants and focused research, the university birthed countless inventions that advanced computing and created a culture of entrepreneurship. The results speak for themselves: Stanford alumni have founded companies such as Alphabet, NVIDIA, Netflix, and PayPal, to name a few.Today, like MBZUAIs predecessor in Santa Clara Valley, we have an opportunity to build a new technology hub centered around a university.And thats why I chose to join MBZUAI, the worlds first research university focused entirely on AI. From MBZUAIs position at the geographical crossroads of East and West, our goal is to attract the brightest minds from around the world and equip them with the tools they need to push the boundaries of AI research and development.A community for inclusive AIMBZUAIs student body comes from more than 50 different countries around the globe. It has attracted top researchers such as Monojit Choudhury from Microsoft, Elizabeth Churchill from Google, Ted Briscoe from the University of Cambridge, Sami Haddin from the Technical University of Munich, and Yoshihiko Nakamura from the University of Tokyo, just to name a few.These scientists may be from different places but theyve found a common purpose at MBZUAI with our interdisciplinary nature, relentless focus on making AI a force for global progress, and emphasis on collaboration across disciplines such as robotics, NLP, machine learning, and computer vision.In addition to traditional AI disciplines, MBZUAI has built departments in sibling areas that can both contribute to and benefit from AI, including human computer interaction, statistics and data science, and computational biology.Abu Dhabis commitment to MBZUAI is part of a broader vision for AI that extends beyond academia. MBZUAIs scientists have collaborated with G42, an Abu Dhabi-based tech company, on Jais, an Arabic-centric LLM that is the highest-performing open-weight Arabic LLM; and also NANDA, an advanced Hindi LLM. MBZUAIs Institute of Foundational Models has created LLM360, an initiative designed to level the playing field of large model research and development by publishing fully open source models and datasets that are competitive with closed source or open weights models available from tech companies in North America or China.MBZUAI is also developing language models that specialize in Turkic languages, which have traditionally been underrepresented in NLP, yet are spoken by millions of people.Another recent project has brought together native speakers of 26 languages from 28 different countries to compile a benchmark dataset that evaluates the performance of vision language models and their ability to understand cultural nuances in images.These kinds of efforts to expand the capabilities of AI to broader communities are necessary if we want to maintain the worlds cultural diversity and provide everyone with AI tools that are useful to them. At MBZUAI, we have created a unique mix of students and faculty to drive globally-inclusive AI innovation for the future. By building a broad community of scientists, entrepreneurs, and thinkers, the university is increasingly establishing itself as a driving force in AI innovation that extends far beyond Abu Dhabi, with the goal of developing technologies that are inclusive for the worlds diverse languages and culture.This content was produced by the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. It was not written by MIT Technology Reviews editorial staff.

The US has a major problem with education inequality. Children from low-income families are less likely to receive high-quality education, partly because poorer districts struggle to retain experienced teachers.Artificial intelligence could help, by improving the one-on-one tutoring sometimes used to supplement class instruction in these schools. With help from an AI tool, tutors could tap into more experienced teachers expertise during virtual tutoring sessions.Researchers from Stanford University developed an AI system calledTutor CoPilot on top of OpenAIs GPT-4 and integrated it into a platform called FEV Tutor, which connects students with tutors virtually. Tutors and students type messages to one another through a chat interface, and a tutor who needs help explaining how and why a student went wrong can press a button to generate suggestions from Tutor CoPilot.The researchers created the model by training GPT-4 on a database of 700 real tutoring sessions in which experienced teachers worked on on one with first- to fifth-grade students on math lessons, identifying the students errors and then working with them to correct the errors in such a way that they learned to understand the broader concepts being taught. From this, the model generates responses that tutors can customize to help their online students.Im really excited about the future of human-AI collaboration systems, says Rose Wang, a PhD student at Stanford University who worked on the project, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed I think this technology is a huge enabler, but only if its designed well.The tool isnt designed to actually teach the students mathinstead, it offers tutors helpful advice on how to nudge students toward correct answers while encouraging deeper learning.For example, it can suggest that the tutor ask how the student came up with an answer, or propose questions that could point to a different way to solve a problem.To test its efficacy, the team examined the interactions of 900 tutors virtually teaching math to 1,787 students between five and 13 years old from historically underserved communities in the US South. Half the tutors had the option to activate Tutor CoPilot, while the other half did not.The students whose tutors had access to Tutor CoPilot were 4 percentage points more likely to pass their exit ticketan assessment of whether a student has mastered a subjectthan those whose tutors did not have access to it. (Pass rates were 66% and 62%, respectively.)The tool works as well as it does because its being used to teach relatively basic mathematics, says Simon Frieder, a machine-learning researcher at the University of Oxford, who did not work on the project. You couldnt really do a study with much more advanced mathematics at this current point in time, he says.The team estimates that the tool could improve student learning at a cost of around $20 per tutor annually to the tutoring provider, which is significantly cheaper than the thousands of dollars it usually takes to train educators in person.It has the potential to improve the relationship between novice tutors and their students by training them to approach problems the way experienced teachers do, says Mina Lee, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the project.This work demonstrates that the tool actually does work in real settings, she says. We want to facilitate human connection, and this really highlights how AI can augment human-to-human interaction.As a next step, Wang and her colleagues are interested in exploring how well novice tutors remember the teaching methods imparted by Tutor CoPilot. This could help them gain a sense of how long the effects of these kinds of AI interventions might last. They also plan to try to work out which other school subjects or age groups could benefit from such an approach.Theres a lot of substantial ways in which the underlying technology can get better, Wang says. But were not deploying an AI technology willy-nilly without pre-validating itwe want to be sure were able to rigorously evaluate it before we actually send it out into the wild. For me, the worst fear is that were wasting the students time.

Theres a trendy new cure-all in townyou might have seen ads pop up on social media or read rave reviews in beauty magazines. Exosomes are being touted as a miraculous treatment for hair loss, aging skin, acne, eczema, pain conditions, long covid, and even neurological diseases like Parkinsons and Alzheimers. Thats, of course, if you can afford the price tagwhich can stretch to thousands of dollars.Theyre magic! claims one YouTube review. One US clinic exhorts: Unlock the fountain of youth with exosome therapy. All aspects of skin health improve with exosome therapy, states one UK clinics website, adding that this is as cutting-edge as it gets. Exosome particles could be used to treat any inflammatory disease you could think about, which is almost all of them, the founder of an exosome company says in a video on YouTube.But theres a big problem with these big promises: We dont fully understand how exosomes workor what they even really are.We do know that exosomes are tiny particles that bud off from cells and that their contents can vary hugely, depending on the source of the cell (some popular options include human umbilical cords, salmon testicles, and roses) and how healthy or stressed it is. Even cell biologists cant agree on what, exactly, is inside them, and how beneficialor dangerousthose contents may be.The world of exosome treatments is being likened to a Wild West by some researchers. Rigorous trials have not been conducted, so we dont know how safe it is to spray on or inject these tiny mystery blobs. Exosome products have not been approved by regulatory agencies in the US, UK, or Europe, where the treatments are growing in popularity. Nor have they been approved for medical uses in Japan or South Korea, two other countries where exosome treatments are popular. Still, exosomes have emerged as a sort of panacea for almost everything, says Leigh Turner, a bioethicist and public health researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who tracks direct-to-consumer marketing of unapproved health products. Risks are commonly minimized, and benefits are commonly exaggerated.This hasnt stopped customers from flocking to the growing number of aesthetic centers, stem-cell clinics, and medspas offering exosome treatments, hoping for a miracle fix. The global market for exosome skin-care products was valued at $256 million in 2023 and is forecast to grow to $674 million in the next six years.Mystery blobsTechnically referred to as vesicles, exosomes are made inside cells before being released. Theyve long been mysterious. The term exosome was introduced in the 1980s. Before that, tiny particles that are now thought to have been exosomes were described as platelet dust or matrix vesicles.At first, scientists assumed that exosomes functioned as trash bags, shuttling waste out of the cell. But research in 1996 suggested that exosomes might also work to help cells communicate by delivering signals between them. If a cell is dying, for instance, it could perhaps send a signal to neighboring cells, giving them a chance to produce more protective substances in order to save themselves from the same fate. Cancer cells, on the other hand, could potentially use exosomes to send signals that co-opt other cells to support the growth of a tumor. Still, its not fully understood what signals are actually being sent.Another major mystery is what, exactly, is inside exosomes. It depends who you ask, says James Edgar, who studies exosomes and similar vesicles at the University of Cambridge, UK. Cell biologists agree that exosomes contain proteins, lipids, and other molecules that result from cell metabolism. Some believe they also contain DNA and RNA, but not everyone is convinced. Its just very difficult to prove or disprove, says Edgar.Thats partly because exosomes are so smallonly about 70 nanometers wide, around one-hundredth the size of a red blood cell. While the first images of them were published in the 1970s, we still dont even know for sure what they look like; Raghu Kalluri at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and his colleagues are studying the shape of exosomes to figure out if they are round, oval, or rod-like, for example.Further complicating all of this, cell biologists dont know what triggers the release of an exosome from a cell. Most cells release them at a relatively steady pulse. Some cells release a lot of exosomes; others release a relatively small number. Immune cells, for example, release more exosomes than cancer cells. We dont really understand why thats the case, says Edgar.Fundamentally, we dont know enough, he adds. We dont quite know yet where these things go when they hit cells, and if theyre released into that cellor how any of it happens, basically.Exosome explosionDespite these enduring questions, exosomes have taken off as a beauty and health treatment. Turner has been tracking stem-cell clinics both in the US and globally for years. When he and his colleagues assessed US clinics offering direct-to-consumer treatments in 2016, exosomes just didnt pop up at all, he says. When he did the same analysis in 2021, he identified around 100 clinics in the US offering exosome therapies.Its not clear why exosomes are taking off now. Its not as though theres an overwhelming amount of safety and efficacy data, says Turner. I think it might be more of a buzz kind of phenomenon. This seems to be kind of a moment for exosomes.There are many different types of exosomes available on the market. Some are from human cells, including those from the placenta or umbilical cord. Some companies are selling exosomes from plants and animals. In the US, exosomes are regulated as drugs and biological products when they are intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease and intended to affect the structure of any function of the body of man or other animals, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medicines in the US.Clinics get around this by using them as cosmetics, defined in law as articles intended to be rubbed, poured, sprinkled, or sprayed on, introduced into, or otherwise applied to the human body for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance. What practitioners are not allowed to do is make claims about the health benefits of exosomes. After all, even anti-dandruff shampoo, which purports to treat a skin condition, is considered a drug by the FDA.Dev Patel offers exosome treatments at his anti-aging and skin rejuvenation clinic, Perfect Skin Solutions, in Portsmouth, UK. Over the last 10 years, he says, he has noticed a trend: Customers are less interested in injectable treatments that merely give an impression of youth, like fillers and Botox, and more interested in the idea of treatments that can rejuvenate their skin. The demand for devices like lasers, which create heat on the skin and trigger repair, has gone through the roof, he says. Now, exosomes are catching on too.Patelwho has a medical degree, served in the Royal Navy, and holds a postgraduate diploma in dermatologyleft his job in the UKs National Health Service to start his clinic around 10 years ago. He didnt start offering exosome treatments until 2020, after he heard about them at a meeting for aesthetic clinicians.The first treatment he offered involved unapproved exosomes derived from human fat cellsmaking them illegal to sell in Europe, he says. Patel says that he didnt realize this until after hed bought the exosomes and started using them, partly because of the misinformation hed been fed by the distributor. He says some of the sellers were telling doctors that they were allowed to use the exosomes topically (on a persons skin) and then inject them as part of an off-label use. Patel wont name the distributor he bought from, but he says the company continued to sell its exosome products to clinics in the UK for at least two years after that point.Patel stresses that as soon as he found out about the regulations surrounding exosomes derived from human cells, he stopped using the product. I had probably had 5,000 [around $6,500] worth of product sitting in my clinic, and it was just thrown away, he says. Instead, he switched to exosomes from plant cells and, more recently, others derived from salmon testes.For hair regrowth, Perfect Skin Solutions offers a course of five exosome treatments, each delivered during a half-hour appointment, at a total cost of 2,000. When it comes to skin treatments, Patel recommends two or three sessionsmore for those who are looking to counter the signs of aging. By harnessing the power of exosomes, you can achieve a more youthful and radiant complexion, while also addressing specific skin concerns and promoting overall skin health, according to the companys website.Patel says he uses the exosomes to treat clients for baldness around four times a week. He and his team members will first perform microneedling on the scalp. This technique uses tiny needles to make miniature holes in the skin80,000 holes a minute, he says. Microneedling is often used to trigger a wound healing process that can improve the look of the skin. But after Patel performs the procedure on a persons head, he uses a jet propulsion device that uses carbon dioxide to spray cooled salmon exosomes into the tiny indentations. You basically create these micro-icicles containing the product, he says. They pierce the skin, but you dont feel it. It feels quite nice, actually. After six to 10 weeks, customers can expect healthier skin and thicker, stronger hair, he says.The results are amazing, says Patel. Ive had it done on my hair, which is probably why its looking out of control now, he adds, pointing to his thick but neatly styled do, combed back and shaved at the sides.Not everyone is as enthusiastic. Sarah, who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her professional image, tried exosomes last year, though not at Patels clinic. Now in her 30s, she had acne as a teenager, and her dermatologist suggested that rubbing exosomes from human umbilical-cord cells into her face after a microneedling treatment might reduce the scarring. But he didnt fully explain exactly what exosomes are or what they were expected to do, she says.I feel like its a little bit of health marketing bullshit, she says. I dont really understand how they work.Sarah received three treatments, three months apart, as part of a trial her dermatologist was participating in. As a participant, Sarah didnt have to pay for her treatment. In each of the sessions, the doctor numbed Sarahs face with lidocaine cream before microneedling it. Then they kind of dribbled the exosomes on with a syringe, she recalls. She was advised to sleep on a clean pillow and avoid washing her face that evening. There was some redness but my skin was mostly back to normal the following day, she says.Her last treatment was a year ago. And she hasnt seen a reduction in her scarring. I dont think Id recommend it, she says. The results were very underwhelming.Safety in salmon?In theory, exosomes should be safer than stem-cell therapies. Cells can be thought of as living drugs, while exosomes are non-living collections of biological molecules, says Ke Cheng at Columbia University in New York, who is doing more conventional research into potential applications of exosomes. Cheng is exploring the use of engineered exosomes for heart diseases. Exosomes are less likely than cells to trigger an immune response, and because they cant replicate, the risk of tumor formation is also lower.But that, of course, does not make them risk-free. There are no established standards or regulations for the manufacture of exosomes to be used in people. This leaves plenty of room for companies to manufacture exosomes in different waysand for disagreements over which method is the best and safest.The product Sarah tried that was derived from human umbilical-cord cells is called Age Zero. Erin Crowley and her father, Michael Crowley, who manufacture and sell the product, have a team that grows the cells and then harvests the exosome-containing liquid surrounding them at a clean lab in Rochester, New York.We have in stock right now about $3.5 billion worth of exosomes, says Michael Crowley. Thats enough for millions of treatments, he says, although the figure will depend on what they are used for: The pair have different companies that sell exosomes for experimental medical use (25 billion to 100 billion exosomes per treatment) and cosmetic use (5 to 10 billion). Cosmetic clinics can buy vials that the company says contain 5, 10, 50, or 100 billion exosomes. Those with 10 billion exosomes are sold in packs of nine for $1,999, according to the companys website.Right now, were in about a little less than a thousand medspas, aesthetician offices, dermatologists, plastic surgeons with our cosmetic product, Erin Crowley says. We can sell direct to consumer, but the product really works great after microneedling or after laser or dermaplaning. They have been selling in the US for the last year and half; she says the product is also available in the UAE, Pakistan, Lebanon, Canada, and Turkey.The Crowleys argue that because their exosomes come from human umbilical-cord cells, they are more effective than those from other sources, although again, rigorous side-by-side comparison studies have not been done. Exosomes from plant or fish cells just dont have the right language to speak to human cells, says Erin Crowley, who has a background in mechanical engineering and quality control. She says that she analyzed the exosome market a couple of years ago and was appalled at what was on offer.The industry now is very, very confused, and the marketing is very confused, she says. Across the board, production quality standards are low, she says, adding that she and her dad hold their product to higher standards by testing for potential sources of infections (which can arise from contamination) and using devices to count exosomes.On the other hand, Primacure, the company that sells the product derived from salmon testicles, argues that fish exosomes are safer than those taken from human cells or from other animals. These exosomes are collected from cells grown in a medium that contains a mix of growth factors and peptides, and the team uses ultrasound to release the exosomes from the cells, according to a video presentation by Mike Lee, CEO of Primacure. We want to refrain from using products that are human-derived, or maybe even animal-derived, that can transmit diseases to humans, Lee says in the video.There are no known cases of exosomes causing such diseases in people. But some practitioners buy that argument: Fish present a very low-risk option in terms of disease transmission, says Patel. Turner, though, isnt convinced: I dont see any reason why they would be [safer], he says, adding that usually, biological materials from other animals are seen as posing a greater risk to patients. The use of animal cells or tissues in humans carries risks of infection, for example.We cant be sure either way, because rigorous research comparing these exosomes and their safety simply has not been done. If they are from different sources, their outcomes and effects will be different, says Cheng. You need to have science; you need to know why they work.Exosomes derived from human cells will still have molecules that are foreign to a persons body and could trigger an immune response, says Edgar. He is also concerned that because exosomes may hold the original cells waste, they could be introducing things that a recipients cells would rather be rid of. They might, for example, shuttle excess receptors for growth factors out of a cell. If another cell takes these up, it might end up with too many growth factor receptors, which could help drive cancer, he says. We do need to understand the basics of whats going on here before we jump into the clinic, he adds.At any rate, there are no rigorous human studies to support the safety or effectiveness of using exosomes for skin health, hair growth, or anything else. Look at any clinic website, and it will probably have some impressive-looking before-and-after photos of a customer or two. But these individuals are often having several treatments at the same time. Microneedling alone has been used for decades as an aesthetic treatment. And Patel says he delivers each vial of exosomes alongside a second vial containing a concoction of many other ingredients that are thought to be beneficial to skin health.So how can a clinician be sure that the apparent effects are due to the exosomes? I put this question to Patel. I cant answer that, he told me. Ive never just used the mix on its own to see [what it does]. Youd have to do countless patients with either [vial] to know.Beyond beautyWhile many of the clinics offering exosome treatments are focused on their purported cosmetic benefits, a significant number claim that they can treat diseases. In the three months between November 2021 and January 2022, Turner and his colleagues identified 16 businesses that were marketing exosome-based therapies to treat or prevent covid-19 or long covid, for example. Others claim exosomes can treat sports injuries and even disorders like Alzheimers disease. Again, there is no rigorous research to support these claims.There have been some promising early studies in animals, and a handful of small, weak phase I trials exploring the use of exosomes in medical treatments. But these fall way below the approval standards of the FDA.There are currently no FDA-approved exosome products for any use, Paul Richards, an FDA representative, wrote in an email to MIT Technology Review. Because of this, no exosome product should be marketed for any medical use.There is an abundance of misleading information in the public domain regarding regenerative medicine products, including exosome products, wrote Richards. The FDA continues to remind consumers to be cautious of any clinics, including regenerative medicine clinics, health-care providers, physicians, chiropractors, or nurses, that advertise or offer anything purported to be an exosome product. These products are not without risk and are often marketed by clinics as being safe and effective for the treatment of a wide range of diseases or conditions, even though they havent been adequately studied in clinical trials.No exosome-based products have been approved by the UKs Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) or by the European Medicine Agency (EMA), either.Theyre unproven technologies, at least from the perspective of the FDA, says Dave Carter, head of research at the biotech company Evox, which is exploring the use of exosomes for drug delivery. We dont really understand [how they work] I personally would be somewhat wary of these types of things outside of the context of proper clinical trials.The FDA has issued letters to some of the clinics providing these treatments. In 2020, for example, the organization wrote to Douglas Spiel, president of Regenerative Solutions of New Jersey, about its claimsbeing published on Facebook at the timethat exosomes could mitigate, prevent, treat, or cure covid. The company was also marketing exosome products for a range of other disorders, including spinal cord injury, Parkinsons, Alzheimers, lupus, and multiple sclerosis.The FDA letter listed the problematic posts and requested a response within 30 days. Spiels current clinic doesnt make any claims about exosomes.Turner is concerned that letters like these have little impact. Its not terribly consequential, he says. No one has to surrender their medical license, and there are no automatic financial penalties.Beyond potential harm to individual patients, both scientists and regulatory agencies are concerned that unapproved, untested, and unregulated exosome treatments could set back an exciting field of research. Potential uses of exosomes to diagnose and treat diseases are being explored through lab-based research and early-stage clinical trials. Companies making unsubstantiated claims to sell products could undermine that progress.These marketing claims are often a mishmash of marketing froth, marketing hype, and some credible claims cut and paste[d] from [scientific] papers and websites, says Turner. It makes it more challenging for us to have any kind of meaningful public understanding or discussion.In the meantime, Turner is one of many scientists cautioning people against the use of exosomes. I would say that its a bit of a Wild West out there with respect to how these are being used, says Kalluri of MD Anderson Cancer Center. Ultimately, some science needs to be done to show that this actually works.From a very basic point of view, we dont really know what theyre doing, good or bad, says Edgar, from the University of Cambridge. I wouldnt take them, lets put it that way.Even Sarah, who received three exosome treatments last year, agrees. I think there needs to be more research around it I would just hold on and see, she says. Maybe [I would feel] different if I looked a million years younger after using it. But that wasnt the case.

Palmer Luckey has, in some ways, come full circle.His first experience with virtual-reality headsets was as a teenage lab technician at a defense research center in Southern California, studying their potential to curb PTSD symptoms in veterans. He then built Oculus, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion, left Facebook after a highly public ousting, and founded Anduril, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense. The company is now valued at $14 billion.Now Luckey is redirecting his energy again, to headsets for the military. In September, Anduril announced it would partner with Microsoft on the US Armys Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), arguably the militarys largest effort to develop a headset for use on the battlefield. Luckey says the IVAS project is his top priority at Anduril.There is going to be a heads-up display on every soldier within a pretty short period of time, he told MIT Technology Review in an interview last week on his work with the IVAS goggles. The stuff that were buildingits going to be a big part of that.Though few would bet against Luckeys expertise in the realm of mixed reality, few observers share his optimism for the IVAS program. They view it, thus far, as an avalanche of failures.IVAS was first approved in 2018 as an effort to build state-of-the-art mixed-reality headsets for soldiers. In March 2021, Microsoft was awarded nearly $22 billion over 10 years to lead the project, but it quickly became mired in delays. Just a year later, a Pentagon audit criticized the program for not properly testing the goggles, saying its choices could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended. The first two variants of the gogglesof which the army purchased 10,000 unitsgave soldiers nausea, neck pain, and eye strain, according to internal documents obtained by Bloomberg.Such reports have left IVAS on a short leash with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which helps determine how much money should be spent on the program. In a subcommittee meeting in May, Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and ranking member, expressed frustration at IVASs slow pace and high costs, and in July the committee suggested a $200 million cut to the program.Meanwhile, Microsoft has for years been cutting investments into its HoloLens headsetthe hardware on which the IVAS program is basedfor lack of adoption. In June, Microsoft announced layoffs to its HoloLens teams, suggesting the project is now focused solely on serving the Department of Defense. The company received a serious blow in August, when reports revealed that the Army is considering reopening bidding for the contract to oust Microsoft entirely.This is the catastrophe that Luckeys stepped into. Andurils contribution to the project will be Lattice, an AI-powered system that connects everything from drones to radar jammers to surveil, detect objects, and aid in decision-making. Lattice is increasingly becoming Andurils flagship offering. Its a tool that allows soldiers to receive instantaneous information not only from Andurils hardware, but also from radars, vehicles, sensors, and other equipment not made by Anduril. Now it will be built into the IVAS goggles. Its not quite a hive mind, but its certainly a hive eye is how Luckey described it to me.Anvil, seen here held by Luckey in Andurils Costa Mesa Headquarters, integrates with the Lattice OS and can navigate autonomously to intercept hostile drones.PHILIP CHEUNGBoosted by Lattice, the IVAS program aims to produce a headset that can help soldiers rapidly identify potential threats and take decisive action on the battlefield, according to the Army. If designed well, the device will automatically sort through countless pieces of informationdrone locations, vehicles, intelligenceand flag the most important ones to the wearer in real time.Luckey defends the IVAS programs bumps in the road as exactly what one should expect when developing mixed reality for defense. None of these problems are anything that you would consider insurmountable, he says. Its just a matter of if its going to be this year or a few years from now. He adds that delaying a product is far better than releasing an inferior product, quoting Shigeru Miyamoto, the game director of Nintendo: A delayed game is delayed only once, but a bad game is bad forever.Hes increasingly convinced that the military, not consumers, will be the most important testing ground for mixed-reality hardware: Youre going to see an AR headset on every soldier, long before you see it on every civilian, he says. In the consumer world, any headset company is competing with the ubiquity and ease of the smartphone, but he sees entirely different trade-offs in defense.The gains are so different when we talk about life-or-death scenarios. You dont have to worry about things like Oh, this is kind of dorky looking, or Oh, you know, this is slightly heavier than I would prefer, he says. Because the alternatives of, you know, getting killed or failing your mission are a lot less desirable.Those in charge of the IVAS program remain steadfast in the expectation that it will pay off with huge gains for those on the battlefield. If it works, James Rainey, commanding general of the Army Futures Command, told the Armed Services Committee in May, it is a legitimate 10x upgrade to our most important formations. Thats a big if, and one that currently depends on Microsofts ability to deliver. Luckey didnt get specific when I asked if Anduril was positioning itself to bid to become IVASs primary contractor should the opportunity arise.If that happens, US troops may, willingly or not, become the most important test subjects for augmented- and virtual-reality technology as it is developed in the coming decades. The commercial sector doesnt have thousands of individuals within a single institution who can test hardware in physically and mentally demanding situations and provide their feedback on how to improve it.Thats one of the ways selling to the defense sector is very different from selling to consumers, Luckey says: You dont actually have to convince every single soldier that they personally want to use it. You need to convince the people in charge of him, his commanding officer, and the people in charge of him that this is a thing that is worth wearing. The iterations that eventually come from IVASif it keeps its fundingcould signal whats coming next for the commercial market.When I asked Luckey if there were lessons from Oculus he had to unlearn when working with the Department of Defense, he said theres one: worrying about budgets. I prided myself for years, you knowIm the guy whos figured out how to make VR accessible to the masses by being absolutely brutal at every part of the design process, trying to get costs down. That isnt what the DOD wants, he says. They dont want the cheapest headset in a vacuum. They want to save money, and generally, spending a bit more money on a headset that is more durable or that has better visionand therefore allows you to complete a mission fasteris definitely worth the extra few hundred dollars.I asked if hes impressed by the progress thats been made during his eight-year hiatus from mixed reality. Since he left Facebook in 2017, Apple, Magic Leap, Meta, Snap, and a cascade of startups have been racing to move the technology from the fringe to the mainstream. Everything in mixed reality is about trade-offs, he says. Would you like more computing power, or a lighter and more comfortable headset?With more time at Meta, I would have made different trade-offs in a way that I think would have led to greater adoption, he says. But of course, everyone thinks that. While hes impressed with the gains, having been on the inside, I also feel like things could be moving faster.Years after leaving, Luckey remains noticeably annoyed by one specific decision he thinks Meta got wrong: not offloading the battery. Dwelling on technical details is unsurprising from someone who spent his formative years living in a trailer in his parents driveway posting in obscure forums and obsessing over goggle prototypes. He pontificated on the benefits of packing the heavy batteries and chips in removable pucks that the user could put in a pocket, rather than in the headset itself. Doing so makes the headset lighter and more comfortable. He says he was pushing Facebook to go that route before he was ousted, but when he left, it abandoned the idea. Apple chose to have an external battery for its Vision Pro, which Luckey praised.Anyway, he told me. Im still sore about it eight years later.Speaking of soreness, Luckeys most public professional wound, his ouster from Facebook in 2017, was partially healed last month. The storyinvolving countless Twitter threads, doxxing, retractions and corrections to news articles, suppressed statements, and a significant segment in Blake Harriss 2020 book The History of the Futureis difficult to boil down. But heres the short version: A donation by Luckey to a pro-Trump group called Nimble America in late 2016 led to turmoil within Facebook after it was reported by the Daily Beast. That turmoil grew, especially after Ars Technica wrote that his donation was funding racist memes (the founders of Nimble America were involved in the subreddit r/TheDonald, but the organization itself was focused on creating pro-Trump billboards). Luckey left in March 2017, but Meta has never disclosed why.This April, Oculuss former CTO John Carmack posted on X that he regretted not supporting Luckey more. Metas CTO, Andrew Bosworth, argued with Carmack, largely siding with Meta. In response, Luckey said, You publicly told everyone my departure had nothing to do with politics, which is absolutely insane and obviously contradicted by reams of internal communications. The two argued. In the X argument, Bosworth cautioned that there are limits on what can be said here, to which Luckey responded, I am down to throw it all out there. We can make everything public and let people judge for themselves. Just say the word.Six months later, Bosworth apologized to Luckey for the comments. Luckey responded, writing that although he is infamously good at holding grudges, neither Bosworth nor current leadership at Meta was involved in the incident.By now Luckey has spent years mulling over how much of his remaining anger is irrational or misplaced, but one thing is clear. He has a grudge left, but its against people behind the scenesPR agents, lawyers, reporterswho, from his perspective, created a situation that forced him to accept and react to an account he found totally flawed. Hes angry about the steps Facebook took to keep him from communicating his side (Luckey has said he wrote versions of a statement at the time but that Facebook threatened further escalation if he posted it).What am I actually angry at? Am I angry that my life went in that direction? Absolutely, he says.I have a lot more anger for the people who lied in a way that ruined my entire life and that saw my own company ripped out from under me that Id spent my entire adult life building, he says. Ive got plenty of anger left, but its not at Meta, the corporate entity. Its not at Zuck. Its not at Boz. Those are not the people who wronged me.While various subcommittees within the Senate and House deliberate how many millions to spend on IVAS each year, what is not in question is the Pentagon is investing to prepare for a potential conflict in the Pacific between China and Taiwan. The Pentagon requested nearly $10 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative in its latest budget. The prospect of such a conflict is something Luckey considers often.He told the authors of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War that Andurils entire internal road map has been organized around the question How do you deter China? Not just in Taiwan, but Taiwan and beyond?At this point, nothing about IVAS is geared specifically toward use in the South Pacific as opposed to Ukraine or anywhere else. The design is in early stages. According to transcripts of a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee meeting in May, the military was scheduled to receive the third iteration of IVAS goggles earlier this summer. If they were on schedule, theyre currently in testing. That version is likely to change dramatically before it approaches Luckeys vision for the future of mixed-reality warfare, in which you have a little bit of an AI guardian angel on your shoulder, helping you out and doing all the stuff that is easy to miss in the midst of battle.Designs for IVAS will have to adapt amid a shifting landscape of global conflict.PHILIP CHEUNGBut will soldiers ever trust such a guardian angel? If the goggles of the future rely on AI-powered software like Lattice to identify threatssay, an enemy drone ahead or an autonomous vehicle racing toward youAnduril is making the promise that it can sort through the false positives, recognize threats with impeccable accuracy, and surface critical information when it counts most.Luckey says the real test is how the technology compares with the current abilities of humans. In a lot of cases, its already better, he says, referring to Lattice, as measured by Andurils internal tests (it has not released these, and they have not been assessed by any independent external experts). People are fallible in ways that machines arent necessarily, he adds.Still, Luckey admits he does worry about the threats Lattice will miss.One of the things that really worries me is theres going to be people who die because Lattice misunderstood something, or missed a threat to a soldier that it should have seen, he says. At the same time, I can recognize that its still doing far better than people are doing today.When Lattice makes a significant mistake, its unlikely the public will know. Asked about the balance between transparency and national security in disclosing these errors, Luckey said that Andurils customer, the Pentagon, will receive complete information about what went wrong. Thats in line with the Pentagons policies on responsible AI adoption, which require that AI-driven systems be developed with methodologies, data sources, design procedures, and documentation that are transparent to and auditable by their relevant defense personnel.However, the policies promise nothing about disclosure to the public, a fact thats led some progressive think tanks, like the Brennan Center for Justice, to call on federal agencies to modernize public transparency efforts for the age of AI.Its easy to say, Well, shouldnt you be honest about this failure of your system to detect something? Luckey says, regarding Andurils obligations. Well, what if the failure was because the Chinese figured out a hole in the system and leveraged that to speed past our defenses of some military base? Id say theres not very much public good served in saying, Attention, everyonethere is a way to get past all of the security on every US military base around the world. I would say that transparency would be the worst thing you could do.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Palmer Luckey on the Pentagons future of mixed realityPalmer Luckey has, in some ways, come full circle.His first experience with virtual-reality headsets was as a teenage lab technician at a defense research center in Southern California, studying their potential to curb PTSD symptoms in veterans. He then built Oculus, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion, left Facebook after a highly public ousting, and founded Anduril, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense. The company is now valued at $14 billion.Now Luckey is redirecting his energy again, to headsets for the military. In September, Anduril announced it would partner with Microsoft on the US Armys Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), arguably the militarys largest effort to develop a headset for use on the battlefield. Luckey says the IVAS project is his top priority at Anduril.He spoke to MIT Technology Review about his plans. Read the full interview.James ODonnellThis AI system makes human tutors better at teaching children mathThe US has a major problem with education inequality. Children from low-income families are less likely to receive high-quality education, partly because poorer districts struggle to retain experienced teachers.Artificial intelligence could help. A new tool could improve the one-on-one tutoring sometimes used to supplement class instruction in these schools, by letting tutors tap into more experienced teachers expertise during virtual sessions. Heres how it works.Rhiannon WilliamsThe must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Google is developing an AI agent called JarvisItll be able to do entire tasks for you, like buying things or making bookings. (The Information$)+What are AI agents?(MIT Technology Review)2 Far-right sheriffs are preparing to disrupt the electionAnd the means theyre planning to use are getting more and more violent. (Wired$)+Election officials are receiving an unprecedented number of threats. (The Atlantic$)+Groups are coordinating online to spread lies about the election. (NBC)3 Check out the first images of the suns flares from a new NASA telescopeThese storms are whats behind the increased visibility of shimmering lights in our night skies recently. (NYT$)4 Elon Musk seems to have briefly worked illegally in the USWhich makes his current obsession with borders look a tad hypocritical. (WP$)+Why is he backing Trump so enthusiastically?(Vox)5 An AI transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one saidOpenAI has said its Whisper tool shouldnt be used in high-risk domains. But thats exactly whats happening. (AP)6 China is restricting access to materials needed to make chipsIt has a near-monopoly, so any squeeze on supply is likely to have an outsized impact. (NYT$)+Whats next in chips.(MIT Technology Review)7 A Neuralink rival says its eye implant restored vision to blind peopleIts an exciting findingbut still very early days for testing the technology. (Wired$)8 Nuclear power is back in fashionBut whether building new reactors is the best way to rapidly cut emissions is debatable. (Nature)+ Why artificial intelligence and clean energy need each other. (MIT Technology Review)9 Is Boeing fixable?Its been in chaos for the best part of five years, and the problems just keep piling up. (FT$)10 People have a lot of love for Microsoft ExcelIts been around for 40 years, during which time its gathered a surprisingly devoted fanbase. (The Guardian)Quote of the dayTodays win may not be parfait, but its still pretty sweet.Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel for consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, hails a US Copyright Office ruling which should make it much easier to fix McDonalds McFlurry machines,Ars Technicareports.The big storyLongevity enthusiasts want to create their own independent state. Theyre eyeing Rhode Island.GETTY IMAGESMay 2023Jessica HamzelouEarlier this month, I traveled to Montenegro for a gathering of longevity enthusiasts. All the attendees were super friendly, and the sense of optimism was palpable. Theyre all confident well be able to find a way to slow or reverse agingand they have a bold plan to speed up progress.Around 780 of these people have created a pop-up city that hopes to circumvent the traditional process of clinical trials. They want to create an independent state where like-minded innovators can work together in an all-new jurisdiction that gives them free rein to self-experiment with unproven drugs. Welcome to Zuzalu. Read the full story.We can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ I learned a lovely new word recently:sonder.+ Feeling less brave than youd like to? This Maya Angeloupoemis for you.+ You can usemisoto boost the flavor of so many more things than youd imagine.+ Such a tender moment captured inthis photoof kids buying ice cream.

Generative AI could account for up to 5 million metric tons of e-waste by 2030, according to a new study.Thats a relatively small fraction of the current global total of over 60 million metric tons of e-waste each year. However, its still a significant part of a growing problem, experts warn.E-waste is the term to describe things like air conditioners, televisions, and personal electronic devices such as cell phones and laptops when they are thrown away. These devices often contain hazardous or toxic materials that can harm human health or the environment if theyre not disposed of properly. Besides those potential harms, when appliances like washing machines and high-performance computers wind up in the trash, the valuable metals inside the devices are also wastedtaken out of the supply chain instead of being recycled.Depending on the adoption rate of generative AI, the technology could add 1.2 million to 5 million metric tons of e-waste in total by 2030, according to the study, published today in Nature Computational Science.This increase would exacerbate the existing e-waste problem, says Asaf Tzachor, a researcher at Reichman University in Israel and a co-author of the study, via email.The study is novel in its attempts to quantify the effects of AI on e-waste, says Kees Bald, a senior scientific specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and an author of the latest Global E-Waste Monitor, an annual report.The primary contributor to e-waste from generative AI is high-performance computing hardware thats used in data centers and server farms, including servers, GPUs, CPUs, memory modules, and storage devices. That equipment, like other e-waste, contains valuable metals like copper, gold, silver, aluminum, and rare earth elements, as well as hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, and chromium, Tzachor says.One reason that AI companies generate so much waste is how quickly hardware technology is advancing. Computing devices typically have lifespans of two to five years, and theyre replaced frequently with the most up-to-date versions.While the e-waste problem goes far beyond AI, the rapidly growing technology represents an opportunity to take stock of how we deal with e-waste and lay the groundwork to address it. The good news is that there are strategies that can help reduce expected waste.Expanding the lifespan of technologies by using equipment for longer is one of the most significant ways to cut down on e-waste, Tzachor says. Refurbishing and reusing components can also play a significant role, as can designing hardware in ways that makes it easier to recycle and upgrade. Implementing these strategies could reduce e-waste generation by up to 86% in a best-case scenario, the study projected.Only about 22% of e-waste is being formally collected and recycled today, according to the 2024 Global E-Waste Monitor. Much more is collected and recovered through informal systems, including in low- and lower-middle-income countries that dont have established e-waste management infrastructure in place. Those informal systems can recover valuable metals but often dont include safe disposal of hazardous materials, Bald says.Another major barrier to reducing AI-related e-waste is concerns about data security. Destroying equipment ensures information doesnt leak out, while reusing or recycling equipment will require using other means to secure data. Ensuring that sensitive information is erased from hardware before recycling is critical, especially for companies handling confidential data, Tzachor says.More policies will likely be needed to ensure that e-waste, including from AI, is recycled or disposed of properly. Recovering valuable metals (including iron, gold, and silver) can help make the economic case. However, e-waste recycling will likely still come with a price, since its costly to safely handle the hazardous materials often found inside the devices, Bald says.For companies and manufacturers, taking responsibility for the environmental and social impacts of their products is crucial, Tzachor says. This way, we can make sure that the technology we rely on doesnt come at the expense of human and planetary health.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.How Wayves driverless cars will meet one of their biggest challenges yetThe UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firms cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well, which brings a new challenge: Its AI will need to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right.As visitors to or from the UK will know, making that switch is harder than it sounds. Your view of the road, how the vehicle turnsits all different. The move to the US will be a test of Wayves technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering.For the first time, Wayve will go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla. Will Douglas Heaven, our senior AI editor, visited the companys office for a ride-along. Read on to find out what he thought.Kids are learning how to make their own little language modelsThis new AI technologyits very interesting to learn how it works and understand it more, says 10-year-old Luca, a young AI model maker.Luca is one of the first kids to try Little Language Models, a new application from Manuj and Shruti Dhariwal, two PhD researchers at MITs Media Lab, that helps children understand how AI models workby getting to build small-scale versions themselves.The program is a way to introduce the complex concepts that make modern AI models work without droning on about them in a theoretical lecture. Instead, kids can see and build a visualization of the concepts in practice, which helps them get to grips with them. Read the full story.Scott J MulliganThe must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 The Biden administration has outlined its AI plansFor everything from national security to nuclear weapons. (Reuters)+ Its banned government agencies from using AI in undemocratic ways. (WP $)+ But the majority of the proposals wont come into effect after Biden leaves office. (NYT $)2 OpenAIs next major AI model is imminentIts new flagship model, known as Orion, is slated for release by the end of the year. (The Verge)+ Miles Brundage, the companys head of AGI Readiness, is leaving. (Insider $)3 This crypto gambling site is the 2024 elections betting phenomenonPolymarkets odds are music to Donald Trump and Elon Musks ears. (NYT $)+ Election betting is seriously big business these days. (Vox)+ Musk is Xs highest-profile spreader of anti-immigrant conspiracies. (Bloomberg $)4 Chinese AI video apps are taking America by stormTheyve stolen a march on their US rivals. (The Information $)+ I tested out a buzzy new text-to-video AI model from China. (MIT Technology Review)5 Why did it take Amazon this long to make a color Kindle?After 17 years, the e-readers technicolor makeover feels long overdue. (Wired $)6 Were living in a solar panel boom Theyre affordable, scalable, and everywhere. (The Atlantic $)+ The race to get next-generation solar technology on the market. (MIT Technology Review)7 The perils of building a computer in socialist YugoslaviaAn enterprising engineer managed to swerve the countrys import restrictions during the 1980s. (The Guardian)8 The food industry is coming around to the rise of weight loss drugsIts cashing in on patients altered dietary needs with new product ranges. (WSJ $)+ Its not just obesity the drugs could curb, either. (Economist $)+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)9 One Direction fans are finding comfort onlineThe death of former member Liam Payne is uniting them in grief. (WP $)10 Silicon Valley is completely obsessed with this video gameBut Factorio isnt just funits also a pretty valuable teaching tool. (FT $)Quote of the dayDid she say turtle marks?A TikTok user remarks on why Mexican content creator Delilah Barajas used the word turtle instead of torture in a bid to circumvent the platforms ban on contentious terms and topics, Rest of World reports.The big storyWhat happens when you donate your body to scienceOctober 2022Rebecca George doesnt mind the vultures that complain from the trees that surround the Western Carolina University body farm. Her arrival has interrupted their breakfast. George studies human decomposition, and part of decomposing is becoming food. Scavengers are welcome.George, a forensic anthropologist, places the body of a donor in the Forensic Osteology Research Stationknown as the FOREST. This is Enclosure One, where donors decompose naturally above ground. Nearby is Enclosure Two, where researchers study bodies that have been buried in soil. She is the facilitys curator, and monitors the donorssometimes for yearsas they become nothing but bones.In the US, about 20,000 people or their families donate their bodies to scientific research and education each year. Whatever the reason, the decision becomes a gift. Western Carolinas FOREST is among the places where watchful caretakers know that the dead and the living are deeply connected, and the way you treat the first reflects how you treat the second. Read the full story.Abby OhlheiserWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Haunted houses can teach us about a lot more than just the past.+ Sleepwalking is seriously strange.+ Las Vegas has always been a weird and wonderful place, but is it weirder than ever? Time to find out.+ As we get closer to November, its time to crack out this all-time classic.

This new AI technologyits very interesting to learn how it works and understand it more, says 10-year-old Luca, a young AI model maker.Luca is one of the first kids to try Little Language Models, a new application from Manuj and Shruti Dhariwal, two PhD researchers at MITs Media Lab, that helps children understand how AI models workby getting to build small-scale versions themselves.The program is a way to introduce the complex concepts that make modern AI models work without droning on about them in a theoretical lecture. Instead, kids can see and build a visualization of the concepts in practice, which helps them get to grips with them.What does it mean to have children see themselves as being builders of AI technologies and not just users? says Shruti.The program starts out by using a pair of dice to demonstrate probabilistic thinking, a system of decision-making that accounts for uncertainty. Probabilistic thinking underlies the LLMs of today, which predict the most likely next word in a sentence. By teaching a concept like it, the program can help to demystify the workings of LLMs for kids and assist them in understanding that sometimes the models choices are not perfect but the result of a series of probabilities.Students can modify each side of the dice to whatever variable they want. And then they can change how likely each side is to come up when you roll them. Luca thinks it would be really cool to incorporate this feature into the design of a Pokmon-like game he is working on. But it can also demonstrate some crucial realities about AI.Lets say a teacher wanted to educate students about how bias comes up in AI models. The kids could be told to create a pair of dice and then set each side to a hand of a different skin color. At first, they could set the probability of a white hand at 100%, reflecting a hypothetical situation where there are only images of white people in the data set. When the AI is asked to generate a visual, it produces only white hands.Then the teacher can have the kids increase the percentage of other skin colors, simulating a more diverse data set. The AI model now produces hands of varying skin colors.It was interesting using Little Language Models, because it makes AI into something small [where the students] can grasp whats going on, says Helen Mastico, a middle school librarian in Hanson, Massachusetts, who taught a group of eighth graders to use the program.You start to see, Oh, this is how bias creeps in, says Shruti. It provides a rich context for educators to start talking about and for kids to imagine, basically, how these things scale to really big levels.They plan for the tool to be used around the world. Students will be able to upload their own data, monitored by their teacher. [Students] can also add their own sounds, images, and backdrops that represent their culture, says Manuj.The Dhariwals have also implemented a tool where kids can play around with more advanced concepts like Markov chains, where a preceding variable influences what comes after it. For example, a child could build an AI that creates random houses made from Lego bricks. The child can dictate that if the AI uses a red brick first, the percentage of yellow brick coming next is set much higher.The best way to support young people as creative learners is through helping them work on projects based on their passions, says the Dhariwals PhD advisor Mitch Resnick, co-creator of Scratch, the most famous program in the world for teaching kids to code. And thats what Little Language Models does. It lets children take these new ideas and put them to use in creative ways.Little Language Models may fill a hole in the current educational landscape. There is a real lack of playful resources and tools that teach children about data literacy and about AI concepts creatively, says Emma Callow, a learning experience designer who works with educators and schools on implementing new ways to teach kids about technology. Schools are more worried about safety, rather than the potential to use AI. But it is progressing in schools, and people are starting to kind of use it, she says. There is a space for education to change.Little Language Models is rolling out on the Dhariwals online education platform, coco.build, in mid-November, and theyre trialing the program at various schools over the next month.Lucas mom, Diana, hopes the chance to experiment with it will serve him well. Its experiences like this that will teach him about AI from a very young age and help him use it in a wiser way, she says.

The UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firms cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well. And that brings a new challenge: Its AI will need to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right.As visitors to or from the UK will know, making that switch is harder than it sounds. Your view of the road, how the vehicle turnsits all different, says Wayves vice president of software, Silvius Rus. Rus himself learned to drive on the left for the first time last year after years in the US. Even for a human who has driven a long time, its not trivial, he says.Wayves US fleet of Ford Mustang Mach-Es.WAYVEThe move to the US will be a test of Wayves technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering. Wayves approach has attracted massive investmentincluding a $1 billion funding round that broke UK records this Mayand partnerships with Uber and online grocery firms such as Asda and Ocado. But it will now go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla.Back in 2022, when I first visited the companys offices in north London, there were two or three vehicles parked in the buildings auto shop. But on a sunny day this fall, both the shop and the forecourt are full of cars. A billion dollars buys a lot of hardware.Ive come for a ride-along. In London, autonomous vehicles can still turn heads. But what strikes me as I sit in the passenger seat of one of Wayves Jaguar I-PACE cars isnt how weird it feels to be driven around by a computer program, but how normalhow comfortable, how safe. This car drives better than I do.Regulators have not yet cleared autonomous vehicles to drive on Londons streets without a human in the loop. A test driver sits next to me, his hands hovering a centimeter above the wheel as it turns back and forth beneath them. Rus gives a running commentary from the back.The midday traffic is light, but that makes things harder, says Rus: When its crowded, you tend to follow the car in front. We steer around roadworks, cyclists, and other vehicles stopped in the middle of the street. It starts to rain. At one point I think were on the wrong side of the road. But its a one-way street: The car has spotted a sign that I didnt. We approach every intersection with what feels like deliberate confidence.At one point a blue car (with a human at the wheel) sticks its nose into the stream of traffic just ahead of us. Urban drivers know this can go two ways: Hesitate and its a cue for the other car to pull out; push ahead and youre telling it to wait its turn. Wayves car pushes ahead.The interaction lasts maybe a second. But its the most impressive moment of my ride. Wayve says its model has picked up lots of defensive driving habits like this. It was our right of way, and the safest approach was to assert that, says Rus. It learned to do that; its not programmed.Learning to driveEverything that Wayves cars do is learned rather than programmed. The company uses different technology from whats in most other driverless cars. Instead of separate, specialized models trained to handle individual tasks like spotting obstacles or finding a route around themmodels that must then be wired up to work togetherWayve uses an approach called end-to-end learning.This means that Wayves cars are controlled by a single large model that learns all the individual tasks needed to drive at once, using camera footage, feedback from test drivers (many of whom are former driving instructors), and a lot of reruns in simulation.Wayve has argued that this approach makes its driving models more general-purpose. The firm has shown that it can take a model trained on the streets of London and then use that same model to drive cars in multiple UK citiessomething that others have struggled to do.But a move to the US is more than a simple relocation. It rewrites one of the most basic rules of drivingwhich side of the road to drive on. With Wayves single large model, theres no left-hand-drive module to swap out. We did not program it to drive on the left, says Rus. Its just seen it enough to think thats how it needs to drive. Even if theres no marking on the road, it will still keep to the left.So how will the model learn to drive on the right? This will be an interesting question for the US.Answering that question involves figuring out whether the side of the road it drives on is a deep feature of Wayves modelintrinsic to its behavioror a more superficial one that can be overridden with a little retraining.Given the adaptability seen in the model so far, Rus believes it will switch to US streets just fine. He cites the way the cars have shown they can adapt to new UK cities, for example. That gives us confidence in its capability to learn and to drive in new situations, he says.Under the hoodBut Wayve needs to be certain. As well as testing its cars in San Francisco, Rus and his colleagues are poking around inside their model to find out what makes it tick. Its like youre doing a brain scan and you can see theres some activity in a certain part of the brain, he says.The team presents the model with many different scenarios and watches what parts of it get activated at specific times. One example is an unprotected turna turn that crosses traffic going in the opposite direction, without a traffic signal. Unprotected turns are to the right here and to the left in the US, says Rus. So will it see them as similar? Or will it just see right turns as right turns?Figuring out why the model behaves as it does tells Wayve what kinds of scenarios require extra help. Using a hyper-detailed simulation tool called PRISM-1 that can reconstruct 3D street scenes from video footage, the company can generate bespoke scenarios and run the model through them over and over until it learns how to handle them. How much retraining might the model need? I cannot tell you the amount. This is part of our secret sauce, says Rus. But its a small amount.Wayves simulation tool, PRISM-1, can reconstruct virtual street scenes from real video footage. Wayve uses the tool to help train its driving model. WAYVEThe autonomous-vehicle industry is known for hype and overpromising. Within the past year, Cruise laid off hundreds after its cars caused chaos and injury on the streets of San Francisco. Tesla is facing federal investigation after its driver-assistance technology was blamed for multiple crashes, including a fatal collision with a pedestrian.But the industry keeps forging ahead. Waymo has said it is now giving 100,000 robotaxi rides a week in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. In China, Baidu claims it is giving some 287,000 rides in a handful of cities, including Beijing and Wuhan. Undaunted by the allegations that Teslas driver-assistance technology is unsafe, Elon Musk announced his Cybercab last week with a timeline that would put these driverless concept cars on the road by 2025.What should we make of it all? The competition between robotaxi operators is heating up, says Crijn Bouman, CEO and cofounder of Rocsys, a startup that makes charging stations for autonomous electric vehicles. I believe we are close to their ChatGPT moment.The technology, the business model, and the consumer appetite are all there, Bouman says. The question is which operator will seize the opportunity and come out on top.Others are more skeptical. We need to be very clear what were talking about when we talk about autonomous vehicles, says Saber Fallah, director of the Connected Autonomous Vehicle Research Lab at the University of Surrey, UK. Some of Baidus robotaxis still require a safety driver behind the wheel, for example. Cruise and Waymo have shown that a fully autonomous service is viable in certain locations. But it took years to train their vehicles to drive specific streets, and extending routessafelybeyond existing neighborhoods will take time. We wont have robotaxis that can drive anywhere anytime soon, says Fallah.Fallah takes the extreme view that this wont happen until all human drivers hand in their licenses. For robotaxis to be safe, they need to be the only vehicles on the road, he says. He thinks todays driving models are still not good enough to interact with the complex and subtle behaviors of humans. There are just too many edge cases, he says.Wayve is betting its approach will win out. In the US, it will begin by testing what it calls an advanced driver assistance system, a technology similar to Teslas. But unlike Tesla, Wayve plans to sell that technology to a wide range of existing car manufacturers. The idea is to build on this foundation to achieve full autonomy in the next few years. Well get access to scenarios that are encountered by many cars, says Rus. The path to full self-driving is easier if you go level by level.But cars are just the start, says Rus. What Wayve is in fact building, he says, is an embodied model that could one day control many different types of machines, whether they have wheels, wings, or legs.Were an AI shop, he says. Driving is a milestone, but its a stepping stone as well.

Generative AI has the power to surprise in a way that few other technologies can. Sometimes thats a very good thing; other times, not so good. In theory, as generative AI improves, this issue should become less important. However, in reality, as generative AI becomes more human it can begin to turn sinister and unsettling, plunging us into what robotics has long described as the uncanny valley.It might be tempting to overlook this experience as something that can be corrected by bigger data sets or better training. However, insofar as it speaks to a disturbance in our mental model of the technology (e.g., I dont like what it did there) its something that needs to be acknowledged and addressed.Mental models and antipatternsMental models are an important concept in UX and product design, but they need to be more readily embraced by the AI community. At one level, mental models often dont appear because they are routine patterns of our assumptions about an AI system. This is something we discussed at length in the process of putting together the latest volume of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar, a biannual report based on our experiences working with clients all over the world.For instance, we called out complacency with AI generated code and replacing pair programming with generative AI as two practices we believe practitioners must avoid as the popularity of AI coding assistants continues to grow. Both emerge from poor mental models that fail to acknowledge how this technology actually works and its limitations. The consequences are that the more convincing and human these tools become, the harder it is for us to acknowledge how the technology actually works and the limitations of the solutions it provides us.Of course, for those deploying generative AI into the world, the risks are similar, perhaps even more pronounced. While the intent behind such tools is usually to create something convincing and usable, if such tools mislead, trick, or even merely unsettle users, their value and worth evaporates. Its no surprise that legislation, such as the EU AI Act, which requires of deep fake creators to label content as AI generated, is being passed to address these problems.Its worth pointing out that this isnt just an issue for AI and robotics. Back in 2011, our colleague Martin Fowler wrote about how certain approaches to building cross platform mobile applications can create an uncanny valley, where things work mostly like native controls but there are just enough tiny differences to throw users off.Specifically, Fowler wrote something we think is instructive: different platforms have different ways they expect you to use them that alter the entire experience design. The point here, applied to generative AI, is that different contexts and different use cases all come with different sets of assumptions and mental models that change at what point users might drop into the uncanny valley. These subtle differences change ones experience or perception of a large language models (LLM) output.For example, for the drug researcher that wants vast amounts of synthetic data, accuracy at a micro level may be unimportant; for the lawyer trying to grasp legal documentation, accuracy matters a lot. In fact, dropping into the uncanny valley might just be the signal to step back and reassess your expectations.Shifting our perspectiveThe uncanny valley of generative AI might be troubling, even something we want to minimize, but it should also remind us of generative AIs limitationsit should encourage us to rethink our perspective.There have been some interesting attempts to do that across the industry. One that stands out is Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who argues that AI shouldnt be understood as good software but instead as pretty good people.Therefore, our expectations about what generative AI can do and where its effective must remain provisional and should be flexible. To a certain extent, this might be one way of overcoming the uncanny valleyby reflecting on our assumptions and expectations, we remove the technologys power to disturb or confound them.However, simply calling for a mindset shift isnt enough. There are various practices and tools that can help. One example is the technique, which we identified in the latest Technology Radar, of getting structured outputs from LLMs. This can be done by either instructing a model to respond in a particular format when prompting or through fine-tuning. Thanks to tools like Instructor, it is getting easier to do that and creates greater alignment between expectations and what the LLM will output. While theres a chance something unexpected or not quite right might happen, this technique goes some way to addressing that.There are other techniques too, including retrieval augmented generation as a way of better controlling the context window. There are frameworks and tools that can help evaluate and measure the success of such techniques, including Ragas and DeepEval, which are libraries that provide AI developers with metrics for faithfulness and relevance.Measurement is important, as are relevant guidelines and policies for LLMs, such as LLM guardrails. Its important to take steps to better understand whats actually happening inside these models. Completely unpacking these black boxes might be impossible, but tools like Langfuse can help. Doing so may go a long way in reorienting the relationship with this technology, shifting mental models, and removing the possibility of falling into the uncanny valley.An opportunity, not a flawThese toolspart of a Cambrian explosion of generative AI toolscan help practitioners rethink generative AI and, hopefully, build better and more responsible products. However, for the wider world, this work will remain invisible. Whats important is exploring how we can evolve toolchains to better control and understand generative AI, even though existing mental models and conceptions of generative AI are a fundamental design problem, not a marginal issue we can choose to ignore.Ken Mugrage is the principal technologist in the office of the CTO at Thoughtworks. Srinivasan Raguraman is a technical principal at Thoughtworks based in Singapore.This content was produced by Thoughtworks. It was not written by MIT Technology Reviews editorial staff.