MIT Technology Review

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...

This is an excerpt from Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini, published on October 31 by Random House. It has been lightly edited. The term x-risk" is used as a shorthand for the hypothetical existential risk posed by AI. While my research supports the...

Joy Buolamwini, the renowned AI researcher and activist, appears on the Zoom screen from home in Boston, wearing her signature thick-rimmed glasses. As an MIT grad, she seems genuinely interested in seeing old covers of MIT Technology Review that hang in our London office. An edition of the magazine from 1961 asks: Will your son...

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. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, on his hopes and fears for the future of AI Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's cofounder and chief scientist, is no longer focusing on building the next generation of his...

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. We don't usually delve into war and politics here in The Checkup, but this week is an exception. The spreading human devastation of the Israel-Gaza...

Here's the easy game Li Xincheng has been playing at home. Her mother says a few words. Then the six-year-old, nicknamed Yiyi, repeats what she heard. Clouds, one by one, blossomed in the mountains," says her mother, Qin Lixue, while covering her mouth so Yiyi can't read her lips. Clouds, one, one, blossomed in big...

Ilya Sutskever, head bowed, is deep in thought. His arms are spread wide and his fingers are splayed on the tabletop like a concert pianist about to play his first notes. We sit in silence. I've come to meet Sutskever, OpenAI's cofounder and chief scientist, in his company'sunmarked office building on an unremarkable street in...

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 people were gene-edited in an effort to cure their HIV. The result is unknown. The news: The gene-editing technology CRISPR has been used to change the genes of human babies, to modify...

Sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks, underpinned by artificial intelligence (AI), are poised to combine communication and computing in a hyperconnected world of digital and physical experiences that will transform daily lives, experts predict. In the past, we talked about internet of things, but with 6G, we talk about intelligent or smart internet of things," says Qin...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Welcome back to The Spark! I'm June Kim, a new fellow reporting on climate at Tech Review. Casey is off enjoying a well-deserved break, so this week I will be filling in...

The PFAS sample slides around the inside of the plastic jar when I swirl it, dark and murky, like thin maple syrup. For many, these toxic so-called forever chemicals" amount to something of a specter, having crept into our lives-and bodies-quietly for more than half a century. In the environment, PFAS are clear and odorless....

The gene-editing technology CRISPR has been used to change the genes of human babies, to modify animals, and to treat people with sickle-cell disease. Now scientists are attempting a new trick: using CRISPR to permanently cure people of HIV. In a remarkable experiment, a biotechnology company called Excision BioTherapeutics says it added the gene-editing tool...

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. Introducing: the Hard Problems issue For all of history we've turned to technology, again and again, to help us solve our hardest problems. It has made virtually all of human knowledge available to...

For a long time, spider silk held the top spot as the strongest biological material on the planet, inspiring researchers and startups worldwide to manufacture an artificial version. But not so long ago, spiders were pushed off their silky pedestal by the common limpet, a small marine snail dotting the shores of Western Europe. When...

His official title is vice president of regulated reporting solutions. But really, Billy Scherba is a carbon accountant. At Persefoni, a platform for climate management, Scherba works with companies to measure, manage, and disclose their contributions to climate change. Carbon accountants help companies understand what data matters to their carbon footprint, how to collect that...

On a bright sunny day in August, in a second-floor room at the Gandhi Bhavan Museum in Bengaluru, workers sit in front of five giant tabletop scanners, lining up books and flipping pages with foot pedals. The museum building houses the largest reference library for Gandhian philosophy in the state of Karnataka, and over the...

It's often believed that authoritarian governments resist technical innovation in a way that ultimately weakens them both politically and economically. But a more complicated story emerges from a new study on how China has embraced AI-driven facial recognition as a tool of repression. What we found is that in regions of China where there is...

A supercapacitor made from cement and carbon black (a conductive material resembling fine charcoal) could form the basis for a low-cost way to store energy from renewable sources, according to MIT researchers. The amount of power a capacitor can store depends on the total surface area of its conductive plates. Professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic,...

MIT researchers have demonstrated a technology that can transmit underwater signals much farther than existing methods, using only about a millionth as much power. The system is based on backscatter communication, a method of encoding data in sound waves that are reflected from the sound source, or interrogator, back to a receiver in the same...

Early detection is key to surviving breast cancer, but tumors that develop in between routine mammograms-known as interval cancers-tend to be especially aggressive. A wearable ultrasound device devised by MIT researchers could help detect such tumors when they are still in early stages. The device can be attached to a specialized bra to let an...

Remember that selfie you posted last week? There's currently nothing stopping someone from taking it and editing it with AI-and it might be impossible to prove that the resulting image is fake. The good news is that a new tool created by researchers at MIT could prevent this. The tool, calledPhotoGuard, works like a protective...

I've written to you before about the experience of reviewing young faculty up for promotion-in my very first week as the Institute's president. It was an intoxicating introduction to the human potential of MIT. Getting this kind of preview of MIT's intellectual future was so inspiring I thought we ought to find a way to...