MIT Technology Review

It's a really weird time in AI. In just six months, the public discourse around the technology has gone from Chatbots generate funny sea shanties" to AI systems could cause human extinction." Who else is feeling whiplash? My colleague Will Douglas Heaven asked AI experts why exactly people are talking about existential risk, and why...

Who's afraid of the big bad bots? A lot of people, it seems. The number of high-profile names that have now made public pronouncements or signed open letters warning of the catastrophic dangers of artificial intelligence is striking. Hundreds of scientists, business leaders, and policymakers have spoken up, from deep learning pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and...

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. Police got called to an overcrowded presentation on rejuvenation" technology It's not every day that police storm through the doors of a scientific session and eject half the audience. But that's what happened...

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. It was a big week in tech policy in Europe withthe European Parliament's vote to approve its draft rules for the AI Acton the same...

In the cavernous grand ballroom of the Seattle Convention Center, Sarah Kane stood in front of an oversize computer monitor, methodically reconstructing the life history of the Milky Way. Waving her shock of long white hair as she talked (I'm easy to spot from a distance," she joked), she outlined the Hunt for Galactic Fossils,"...

It's not every day that police storm through the doors of a scientific session and eject half the audience. But that is what occurred on Friday at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center during a round of scientific presentations featuring Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a specialist in rejuvenation" technology at a secretive, wealthy anti-aging startup...

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. The new US border wall is an app Keisy Plaza, 39, left her home in Colombia seven months ago. She walked a 62-mile stretch of dense mountainous rainforest and swampland with her two...

A few minutes before 9 a.m. on a day in late March, Keisy Plaza, 39, leans against a wall on the corner of Juarez Avenue and Gardenias Street in Ciudad Juarez. It's the last intersection before Mexico turns into El Paso, Texas, and a stream of commuters drive past on their way to work and...

If we're going to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming, experts agree, removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential. That's why, over the past few years, projects focused on growing seaweed to suck CO2 from the air and lock it in the sea have attracted attention-and significant amounts of funding-from...

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A brain implant changed her life. Then it was removed against her will. Sticking an electrode inside a person’s brain can do more than treat a disease. Take the case of Rita Leggett,…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Ian Burkhart sustained a severe spinal cord injury while he was on vacation at 19 years old. “It left me as a quadriplegic,” he says. “I had a little bit of movement…

Sticking an electrode inside a person’s brain can do more than treat a disease. Take the case of Rita Leggett, an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant changed her sense of agency and self. She told researchers that she “became one” with her device. She was devastated when, two years later, she was told she…

The e-mobility revolution is in high gear. Automakers are promising to launch dozens of electric models over the next decade. In August 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden set a target for 50% of new car sales to be electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030. And electric car registrations in Europe increased from 3.5% in 2019 to…

The automotive industry is rapidly changing as connected and autonomous vehicles — enabled by AI and machine learning — are transforming transportation to create a seamless and personalized customer experience. The modernization of systems and software is steering vehicles to be more intelligent than ever, improving driving experiences and propelling operational efficiencies. From simulation testing…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer What’s happening: Last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor containing 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Sitting in a booth in a hotel lobby in Brooklyn, I stared down the lineup of sliders, each on a separate bamboo plate. On the far left was a plant-based burger from Impossible…

Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years. IBM…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Food delivery by drone is just part of daily life in Shenzhen —Zeyi Yang In a buzzy urban area in Shenzhen, China, I watched as a drone descended onto a pickup kiosk to…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It feels as though a switch has turned on in AI policy. For years, US legislators and American tech companies were reluctant to introduce—if not outright against—strict technology regulation. Now both have…

My iced tea arrived from the sky. In a buzzy urban area in Shenzhen, China, sandwiched between several skyscrapers, I watched as a yellow-and-black drone descended onto a pickup kiosk by the street. The top of the vending-machine-size kiosk opened up for the drone to land, and a white cardboard box containing my drink was…

Tech Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here. AI regulation is hot. Ever since the success of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, the public’s attention has been grabbed by wonder and worry about what these powerful AI tools can do. Generative…

Meta has built AI models that can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages—a tenfold increase on what’s currently available. It’s a significant step toward preserving languages that are at risk of disappearing, the company says. Meta is releasing its models to the public via the code hosting service GitHub. It claims that…

Brain signals can be used to detect how much pain a person is experiencing, which could overhaul how we treat certain chronic pain conditions, a new study has suggested. The research, published in Nature Neuroscience today, is the first time a human’s chronic-pain-related brain signals have been recorded. It could aid the development of personalized…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The FDA just approved rub-on gene therapy that helps “butterfly” children The news: Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration approved sales of the first gene therapy that is directly applied 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. I recently published a short story about new policies recently announced by Google and Twitter that allow the companies to remove inactive accounts. Google said the decision…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Regular readers will know that the microbiome is one of my favorite topics to cover. The billions of bacteria crawling all over our bodies play a vital role in our health, influencing…

Last week a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech’s grip on AI. New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers…

Things got weird at yesterday’s Google I/O conference right from the jump, when the duck hit the stage. The day began with a musical performance described as a “generative AI experiment featuring Dan Deacon and Google’s MusicLM, Phenaki, and Bard AI tools.” It wasn’t clear exactly how much of it was machine-made and how much…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Google is throwing generative AI at everything The news: Google is stuffing powerful new AI tools into tons of its existing products and launching a slew of new ones, including a coding assistant,…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Buckle up, because this week, we’re talking about batteries. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been noticing a lot of announcements about a new type of battery, one that could majorly shake…

Google is stuffing powerful new AI tools into tons of its existing products and launching a slew of new ones, including a coding assistant, it announced at its annual I/O conference today. Billions of users will soon see Google’s latest AI language mode, PaLM 2, integrated into over 25 products like Maps, Docs, Gmail, Sheets,…

The joke about the Human Genome Project is how many times it’s been finished, but not actually. The first time was in 2000, when Bill Clinton announced the “first survey of the entire human genome” at a White House ceremony, calling it “the most important and most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.” But the…

A startup backed by Sam Altman says it’s on track to flip on the world’s first fusion power plant in five years, dramatically shortening the timeline to a carbon-free energy source that’s eluded scientists for three-quarters of a century. Helion Energy’s announcement that it’s on the verge of commercializing the process that powers the sun…

As the impacts of climate change like desertification, biodiversity loss, pollution, and severe weather persist, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is approaching the green transition and decarbonization with a great sense of urgency. Between its ratification of the 2015 Paris Agreement, its $160 billion investment in renewables over the next 30 years, and its green…

Scientists have come up with a new way to introduce odors into virtual reality via small, wireless interfaces. Creating smells in virtual reality is a vexing problem that has prevented consumer VR devices from offering a full sensory experience in most settings. “People can touch in VR,” says Xinge Yu, a professor at the department…

With greater awareness and urgency around the climate crisis and the impact of energy consumption, 140 countries have announced or are considering net zero targets, covering close to 90% of global emissions. These efforts will collectively support the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions. Additionally, the number of large cities with net zero targets has…

My pet Orzo was panting, excited to bring me the tennis ball I had thrown a few feet away. Orzo’s eyes were bright and it wagged its tail. “Good job, buddy!” I cooed. Orzo indicated it wanted a belly rub, so I obliged. Orzo is not a real pet. It is a virtual creature on…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This abundant material could unlock cheaper batteries for EVs Lithium is currently the ruler of the battery world, a key ingredient in the batteries powering phones and electric vehicles. But as concerns about…

Move over, lithium—there’s a new battery chemistry in town. Lithium is currently the ruler of the battery world, a key ingredient in the batteries that power phones, electric vehicles, and even store energy on the electrical grid. But as concerns about the battery supply chain swell, scientists are looking for ways to cut down on…

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. Do you know how many internet-connected devices there are inside your home? I certainly don’t. These days, it could be almost anything: a thermostat, a…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Doctors have performed brain surgery on a fetus in one of the first operations of its kind What’s happened: A seven-week-old baby girl is one of the first people to have undergone an…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. She doesn’t know it yet, but a baby girl living somewhere near Boston has made history. The seven-week-old is one of the first people to have undergone an experimental brain operation while…

She doesn’t know it yet, but a baby girl living somewhere near Boston has made history. The seven-week-old is one of the first people to have undergone an experimental brain operation while still in the womb. It might have saved her life. Before she was born, this little girl developed a dangerous condition that led…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Geoffrey Hinton talks about the “existential threat” of AI Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton announced on Monday that he was stepping down from his role as an AI researcher at Google after a…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Sometimes, as a reporter following climate technology, I feel like I have a front-row seat for some of the hottest topics on the planet. That’s how I’ve felt watching the news about solar…

Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton announced on Monday that he was stepping down from his role as a Google AI researcher after a decade with the company. He says he wants to speak freely as he grows increasingly worried about the potential harms of artificial intelligence. Prior to the announcement, Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How chemists could give new life to old wind turbine blades The news: Wind turbines are crucial for addressing climate change, but when they’ve reached the end of their lives, turbine blades could…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build Geoffrey Hinton is a pioneer of deep learning who helped develop some of the most important techniques at the…

Wind turbines are crucial for addressing climate change, but when they’ve reached the end of their lives, turbine blades could add up to a lot of waste. Now new research, published in Nature, could represent a first step toward building renewable-energy infrastructure that doesn’t end up in a landfill. Wind turbine blades need to be…