MIT Technology Review

Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries. We are here until, suddenly, like a light switched off, we are gone. But while this idea of death is pervasive, evidence is building that...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Google DeepMind wants to define what counts as artificial general intelligence AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is one of the hottest topics in tech today. It's also one of the most controversial. A...

The cloud, fundamentally a tool for cost and resource efficiency, has long enabled companies and countries to organize around digital-first principles. It is an established capability that improves the bottom line for enterprises. However, maturity lags, and global standards are sorely needed. Cloud capabilities play a crucial role in accelerating the global economy's next stage...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. We've covered the dream of fusion before in this newsletter: the power source could provide consistent energy from widely available fuel without producing radioactive waste. But making a fusion power plant a...

Why isn't the universe boring? It could be. The number of subatomic particles in the universe is about 1080, a 1 with 80 zeros after it. Scatter those particles at random, and the universe would just be a monotonous desert of sameness, a thin vacuum without any structure much larger than an atom for billions...

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is one of the hottest topics in tech today. It's also one of the most controversial. A big part of the problem is that few people agree on what the term even means. Now a team of Google DeepMind researchers has put out a paper that cuts through the cross...

In San Francisco last week, everyone's favorite surprise visitor was Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. At OpenAI's DevDay-the company's first-ever event for developers building on its platform-Nadella bounded on stage to join OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, blowing the hair back on an already electrified audience. You guys have built something magic," he gushed. Two days later...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Is it possible to really understand someone else's mind? Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. It's not easy, mind you. First, you must lie motionless within a...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. This is going to be a BIG week for US-China relations: On Wednesday, Xi Jinping will sit down with Joe Biden in San Francisco and talk about military issues, trade, and more....

Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. It's not easy, mind you. First, you must lie motionless within the narrow pore of a hulking fMRI scanner, perhaps for hours, while you watch films or listen to audiobooks. Meanwhile, the machine will bang and knock as it records the shifting patterns...

EmTech MIT, MIT Technology Review's flagship event on emerging technology and global trends is November 14-15, 2023. This year's event looks at the AI, biotech, and climate innovations and the new rules of business. You can sign up and watch it live here.

This year the Earth has been hit by a record number of unpredictable extreme weather events made worse by climate change. Predicting them faster and with greater accuracy could enable us to prepare better for natural disasters and help save lives. A new AI model from Google DeepMind could make that easier. In research published...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How did life begin? How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and...

The following is excerpted from BROKEN CODE: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets by Jeff Horwitz. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (C) 2023 by Jeff Horwitz. In 2006, the U.S. patent office received a filing...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This moment in AI is an inflection moment," Fei-Fei Li told me recently. Li is co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and one of the most prominent computer science researchers of...

How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and it may well have occurred on many other worlds in the universe as well. But we don't know what does the trick. Somehow a soup of...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Are we alone in the universe? The quest to determine if anyone or anything is out there has gained greater scientific footing over the past 50 years. Back then, astronomers had yet to...

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review's weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Highly personal and sensitive data about military members, such as home addresses, health and financial information, and the names of family members and friends, is...

In 1977, the New York Times published an article titled Seeking an End to Cosmic Loneliness," describing physicists' attempts to pick up radio messages from aliens. The endeavor, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), was still in its early stages, and its proponents were struggling to persuade their peers and Congress that the...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How open-source drug discovery could help us in the next pandemic When the covid pandemic hit, our antiviral coffers were bare. After all, developing drugs for diseases that don't pose an immediate threat...

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. When the covid pandemic hit, our antiviral coffers were essentially bare. Sure, pharmaceutical companies had developed drugs to combat influenza and a handful of chronic infections....

Customer experience (CX) is a leading driver of brand loyalty and organizational performance. According to NTT's State of CX 2023 report, 92% of CEOs believe improvements in CX directly impact their improved productivity, and customer brand advocacy. They also recognize that the quality of their employee experience (EX) is critical to success. The real potential...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Noise-canceling headphones could let you pick and choose the sounds you want to hear The news: A new system for noise-canceling headphones lets users opt back in to certain sounds they'd like to...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The waiter lifted the lid with a flourish. Inside the gold-detailed ceramic container, on a bed of flower petals, rested a small black plate cradling two bits of chicken. Each was coated...

This is a subscriber-only story. Future noise-canceling headphones could let users opt back in to certain sounds they'd like to hear, such as babies crying, birds tweeting, or alarms ringing. The technology that makes it possible, called semantic hearing, could pave the way for smarter hearing aids and earphones, allowing the wearer to filter out...

Machine learning (ML) is now mission critical in every industry. Business leaders are urging their technical teams to accelerate ML adoption across the enterprise to fuel innovation and long-term growth. But there is a disconnect between business leaders' expectations for wide-scale ML deployment and the reality of what engineers and data scientists can actually build...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Why Hong Kong is still bullish on crypto While Sam Bankman-Fried was waiting for the jury in his fraud trial to return their verdict last week, Hong Kong FinTech Week 2023, a new...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. We were far from the courtroom where Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven criminal charges, but everyone still wanted to talk about him. That said, I have a feeling the conversations...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. It's shockingly easy to buy sensitive data about US military personnel For as little as $0.12 per record, data brokers in the US are selling sensitive private data about both active-duty military members...

For as little as $0.12 per record, data brokers in the US are selling sensitive private data about active-duty military members and veterans, including their names, home addresses, geolocation, net worth, and religion, and information about their children and health conditions. In a unsettling study published on Monday, researchers from Duke University approached 12 data...

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review's weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. On October 30, President Biden released his executive order on AI, a major move that I bet you've heard about by now. If you want...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Inside NASA's bid to make spacecraft as small as possible Since the 1970s, we've sent a lot of big things to Mars. But when NASA successfully sent twin Mars Cube One spacecraft, the...

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. Ahhh, fall. The leaves are changing. The air is crisp. And according to the CDC, RSV is on the rise. This year we were supposed to...

When considering the potential for AI systems to change manufacturing, Ritu Jyoti, global AI research lead at market-intelligence firm IDC, points to windmill manufacturers. To improve windmills before AI, she says, the company analyzed data from observing a functioning prototype, a process that took weeks. Now, the manufacturer has dramatically shortened the process using a...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime Tokelau, a string of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. There are growing signs of trouble for the multibillion-dollar global carbon market, as investigative stories and studies continue to erode the credibility of the business world's go-to tool for cleaning up climate...

Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone-only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. What are the hardest problems in tech we should be more focused on as a society? Technology is all about solving big thorny problems, yet one of the hardest things is knowing where...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Last week, I worked with my colleague Antonio Regalado, our senior editor for biomedicine, to break a truly inspiring and honestly kind of wild story: Chinese scientists used gene therapy to restore...

Technology is all about solving big thorny problems. Yet one of the hardest things about solving hard problems is knowing where to focus our efforts. There are so many urgent issues facing the world. Where should we even begin? So we asked dozens of people to identify what problem at the intersection of technology and...

For all of history we've turned to technology, again and again, to help us solve our hardest problems. Technology gave us warmth and light when it was cold and dark. It helped us pull fish from the sea and crops from the earth so we would not be hungry. It enabled us to cross over...

Over the past few years, the treatment of some hard-to-treat blood cancers has been revolutionized by therapies based on engineered T cells, which leverage the patient's own immune system to destroy cancerous cells. But until recently researchers haven't had much luck developing these T-cell therapies-called CAR T-for solid tumors, which make up the vast majority...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Three things to know about the White House's executive order on AI The US has set out its most sweeping set of AI rules and guidelines yet in an executive order issued by...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This week everyone is talking about AI. The White House just unveiled a new executive order that aims to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI systems. It's the most far-reaching bit...

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next.You can read more from the series here. The US has set out its most sweeping set of AI rules and guidelines yet in an executive order issued by President Joe Biden today. The order...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Joy Buolamwini: We're giving AI companies a free pass" AI researcher and activist Joy Buolamwini is best known for a pioneering paper she co-wrote with Timnit Gebru in 2017 which exposed how commercial...

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review's weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Dozens of states suedMeta on October 24, claiming that the company knowingly harms young users.The caseis a pretty big deal and will almost certainly have...