MIT Technology Review

On Wednesday, the US waited with bated breath as president Trump handed the government reins over to president Biden. The transition of power ended up peaceful, and Biden promptly ushered in his new vision for America with a flurry of executive orders. At the moment, the most pressing issues on his table are fighting the…

A virtual robot arm has learned to solve a wide range of different puzzles—stacking blocks, setting the table, arranging chess pieces—without having to be retrained for each task. It did this by playing against a second robot arm that was trained to give it harder and harder challenges. Self play: Developed by researchers at OpenAI,…

The news: President Biden has said it will take a “wartime effort” to tackle the covid-19 pandemic as he unveiled a seven-point plan on his first full day in the job. He pledged to be guided by science, and to make transparency and accountability core values for his administration’s response. The plan is a distillation…

In the last few years, research has shown that deep learning can match expert-level performance in medical imaging tasks like early cancer detection and eye disease diagnosis. But there’s also cause for caution. Other research has shown that deep learning has a tendency to perpetuate discrimination. With a healthcare system already riddled with disparities, sloppy…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, now the world’s richest person with a net worth north of $180 billion, announced on Twitter that he plans to give away $100 million of it as a prize for the “best carbon capture technology.” He added in a subsequent tweet that he’ll provide more details next week, so it’s not…

For oil and gas companies, digital transformation is a priority—not only as a way to modernize the enterprise, but also to secure the entire energy ecosystem. With that lens, the urgency of applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities for optimization and cybersecurity becomes clear, especially as threat actors increasingly target connected devices and…

China’s space program might have been slowed by the pandemic in 2020, but it certainly didn’t stop. The year’s highlights included sending a rover to Mars, bringing moon rocks back to Earth, and testing out the next-generation crewed vehicle that should take taikonauts into orbit—and possibly to the moon—one day. But there were a few…

A flurry of executive orders is expected to take place over the next few days from the new US president as he takes residence in the White House. Here are the highlights of those he has signed so far. The “100 day mask challenge” Biden’s first order is part recommendation, part requirement: it requires people…

The news: Hours before leaving the presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order that requires American cloud computing companies to do more to verify the identities of their foreign customers. The stated aim is to help prevent hacking operations against the United States, although the timing and scope of the order mean it is surrounded…

For two years now, NASA’s InSight probe has sat on the surface of Mars, attempting to dig 5 meters (16 feet) deep in order to install the lander’s heat probe. The instrument was going to effectively take the planet’s temperature and tell scientists more about the internal thermal activity and geology of Mars. InSight never…

At the height of California’s worst wildfire season on record, Geoff Marshall looked down at his computer and realized that an enormous blaze was about to take firefighters by surprise. Marshall runs the fire prediction team at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (known as Cal Fire), headquartered in Sacramento, which gives him…

As the world watched rioters take over the US Capitol on January 6, the lack of security was chilling. Some active police officers stood their ground but were outnumbered and defenseless. Other video showed an officer appearing to wave members of a pro-Trump mob beyond a police barrier; some were even filmed taking selfies with…

As the coronavirus vaccines have rolled out across the US, the process has been confusing and disastrous. States, left by the federal government to fend for themselves, have struggled to get a handle on the logistics of distribution. Many, including Georgia, Virginia, and California, have fallen woefully behind schedule. But even if there were a…

Every financial institution is looking to digital transformation to meet rising customer expectations for speed and convenience, lower its operating cost, and fend off competition, including from tech companies moving into financial services. Some are spending over 10% of yearly revenue on technology investments, according to Bloomberg. “This is a huge investment and most financial…

Rumman Chowdhury’s job used to involve a lot of translation. As the “responsible AI” lead at the consulting firm Accenture, she would work with clients struggling to understand their AI models. How did they know if the models were doing what they were supposed to? The confusion often came about partly because the company’s data…

As rioters stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, Theo—like many Americans—watched, dumbfounded and in horror. Then he had an idea. “What if we went on social and started pulling these screenshots together and tried to go around and crowdsource [the rioters’] identities?” he remembers thinking. So Theo bought a burner phone, set up a fake…

As covid-19 began spreading around the world, an avalanche of new digital services and data-driven approaches has emerged to aid pandemic response. From smartphone exposure notifications to vaccine allocation algorithms, these systems have been developed under the watch of politicians, public health officials, scientists and businesses. They have also faced many challenges. The Pandemic Technology…

Galileo once observed that nature is written in math. Biology might be written in words. Natural-language processing (NLP) algorithms are now able to generate protein sequences and predict virus mutations, including key changes that help the coronavirus evade the immune system. The key insight making this possible is that many properties of biological systems can…

The year 2020 was profoundly challenging for citizens, companies, and governments around the world. As covid-19 spread, requiring far-reaching health and safety restrictions, artificial intelligence (AI) applications played a crucial role in saving lives and fostering economic resilience. Research and development (R&D) to enhance core AI capabilities, from autonomous driving and natural language processing to…

Covid vaccines reprogrammed to aim at emerging new strains of the virus could reach the market quickly, without going through large clinical trials, according to officials at Moderna Therapeutics and the US government. As researchers identify mutated versions of the coronavirus that causes covid-19, there’s concern that the germ could evade approved vaccines and new…

The US may face a rapidly closing window to bring a suspected extra-contagious variant of covid-19 under control. If the variant strain, first spotted in the United Kingdom, is as infectious as some suspect, it could dominate US case numbers by March, send covid-19 deaths to unprecedented levels, and collide with the rollout of vaccines,…

Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks don’t notice when the words in a sentence are jumbled up, which shows that they don’t really understand language at all. The problem lies in the way natural-language processing (NLP) systems are trained; it also…

When the pandemic threw the world into disarray in spring 2020, most organizations responded by holding on—barely, at times. Executives assessed the impact on operations and dealt with the immediate emergency. Now businesses are ready to move beyond resilience and recovery and capture growth. Certainly, corporate execs and finance professionals have to focus on the…

For Singaporeans, the covid-19 pandemic has been closely intertwined with technology: two technologies, to be specific. The first is the QR code, whose little black-and-white squares have been ubiquitous all over the country as part of the SafeEntry contact tracing system rolled out in April and May. Under SafeEntry, anyone entering a public venue—restaurants, stores,…

What’s happening: Parler, a site that bills itself as a “free speech social network” and that was widely used to coordinate the storming of the Capitol last week, has gone offline after Amazon stopped hosting it on Sunday night, citing violations of the terms of service. Why?: BuzzFeed obtained a copy of the email from…

This week a violent mob mounted the biggest attack on the Capitol, the seat of American democracy, in more than 200 years, driven by the false belief that the presidential election had been stolen. The chief author of that claim was President Donald Trump, but the mob’s readiness to believe it was in large part…

On January 7, following the violent white supremacist riots that breached the US Capitol, Twitter and Facebook both suspended President Donald Trump from their platforms. The next day, Twitter made its suspension permanent. Many praised the decision for preventing the president from doing more harm at a time when his adherents are taking cues from…

Less than 24 hours after President Trump was allowed back on Twitter, the social media platform announced on Friday afternoon, January 8, that it was permanently suspending his @realdonaltrump account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” The decision followed several more tweets warning that his supporters would not be “disrespected” and saying…

As a violent mob incited by President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol on January 6, halting the procedure in Congress to formally certify Joe Biden as president-elect, a Redditor with the username Adam Lynch began a thread on the subreddit r/DataHoarder—a forum dedicated to saving data that might be erased or deleted. “Archiving videos…

A year ago, none the wiser about what 2020 would bring, I reflected on the pivotal moment that the AI community was in. The previous year, 2018, had seen a series of high-profile automated failures, like self-driving-car crashes and discriminatory recruiting tools. In 2019, the field responded with more talk of AI ethics than ever…

Maybe you saw this coming nearly a decade ago, when #YourSlipIsShowing laid bare how racist Twitter users were impersonating Black women on the internet. Maybe, for you, it was during Gamergate, the online abuse campaign targeting women in the industry. Or maybe it was the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, when a gunman steeped…

Just as well-known, easily identifiable far-right figures livestreamed themselves invading the Capitol in Washington, DC, a lie started spreading around the Trump-supporting internet: What if the mob was actually a group of antifa activists trying to make the president’s supporters look bad? The rumor was false, and debunked repeatedly—not least by the words and actions…

The outcomes in Georgia’s runoff Senate elections hand the Democratic Party control of both chambers of Congress, easing the path for President-elect Joe Biden to achieve progress on his ambitious climate agenda, at least during the next two years. The dual victories of Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—which appeared highly improbable just weeks…

As a mob of right-wing extremists occupied the US Capitol building on Tuesday, President Trump posted a short video message to his loyal supporters on social media: “We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said, repeating a lie he has promoted for months. “Go home. We love you; you’re very special,” he…

Covid-19 patients who recovered from the disease still have robust immunity from the coronavirus eight months after infection, according to a new study. The result is an encouraging sign that the authors interpret to mean immunity to the virus probably lasts for many years, and it should alleviate fears that the covid-19 vaccine would require…

To say the first few weeks of vaccine delivery have been turbulent would be an understatement. States across the US have found themselves struggling with underdeveloped logistics that have caused problems in delivery and made rollout slower than promised. Meanwhile, the debacle at Stanford Medical Center, where a system to rank potential vaccine recipients managed…

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence has fostered hope that it will help us solve many of the world’s most intractable problems. However, there’s also much concern about the power of AI, and growing agreement that its use should be guided to avoid infringing upon our rights. Many groups have discussed and proposed ethical guidelines…

We’ve all been there by now: surfing the web and bumping into ads with an uncanny flavor. How did they know I was thinking about joining a gym? Or changing careers? Or that I need a loan? You might wonder if Google can read your mind. Google even boasts that it knows you better than…

With GPT-3, OpenAI showed that a single deep-learning model could be trained to use language in a variety of ways simply by throwing it vast amounts of text. It then showed that by swapping text for pixels, the same approach could be used to train an AI to complete half-finished images. GPT-3 mimics how humans…

The news: Police will be able to access data collected by Singapore’s covid-19 contact tracing system for use in criminal investigations, a senior official said on Monday. The announcement contradicts the privacy policy originally outlined when the government launched its TraceTogether app in March 2020 and is being criticized as a backpedal just after participation…

Spaceflight in 2020 did not go as planned. Like nearly everything else in the world, space activity was hit hard by the pandemic. Last year we listed the seven space missions that we were most excited to see take flight throughout 2020. Some of those went brilliantly: SpaceX sent astronauts into space! China brought moon rocks…

There’s a case to be made that 2020, for all the sacrifices it demanded and tragedies it inflicted, could at least mark a turning point on climate change. It’s now possible that global oil demand and greenhouse-gas emissions may have already peaked in 2019, since the pandemic could slow economic growth for years, accelerate the…

Even amidst stay-at-home orders and restricted mobility, the photographers commissioned for stories this year were able to connect us with events around the world.

From the MIT Technology Review art team, here are some of our very favorite illustrations of the year:

This was a year we needed technology to save us. A pandemic raced over the land, there were wildfires, uneasy political divisions, and we gasped in the miasma of social media. In 2020, the ways in which technology can help or hurt never seemed clearer. In the success column we have covid-19 vaccines. But this…

America’s first confirmed wrongful arrest by facial recognition technology happened in January 2020. Robert Williams, a Black man, was arrested in his driveway just outside Detroit, with his wife and young daughter watching. He spent the night in jail. The next day in the questioning room, a detective slid a picture across the table to…

A spacesuit is more like a miniature spacecraft you wear around your body than an item of clothing. It’s pressurized, it’s decked out with life support systems, and it’s likely to look pretty cool. But should the suit fail, you’re toast. No one has ever died because of a faulty spacesuit, but that doesn’t mean…

Valerie Fitzhugh has watched the news a lot more over the past four years, certainly more than she remembers doing at any other point in her life. In the first months of the pandemic, she kept hearing one message, from news outlet to news outlet, that she couldn’t stop thinking about: there weren’t enough people…

When Joe Biden takes over the US presidency on January 20, 2021, he intends to make climate change a centerpiece of his administration. As well as rejoining the Paris agreement, reinforcing the Clean Air Act, and restoring the Clean Power Plan, he will also have an opportunity to strengthen climate research. One way he can…

The consensus is that 2020 has been “the worst.” But there is reason to look back at this year and find the unexpected silver linings of quarantine, particularly when it comes to how we connect with other people. None of these benefits compare with the death and suffering and misery of a terrible year, but…