MIT Technology Review

Around the world, countries are facing the challenges of aging populations, growing rates of chronic disease, and workforce shortages, leading to a growing burden on health care systems. From diagnosis to treatment, AI and other digital solutions can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of health care, easing the burden on straining systems. According to 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. See the stunning first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory The first spectacular images taken by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have been released for the world to peruse: a panoply of...

Privacy only matters to those with something to hide. So goes one of the more inane and disingenuous justifications for mass government and corporate surveillance. There are others, of course, but the nothing to hide" argument remains a popular way to rationalize or excuse what's become standard practice in our digital age: the widespread and...

The first spectacular images taken by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have been released for the world to peruse: a panoply of iridescent galaxies and shimmering nebulas. This is the dawn of the Rubin Observatory," says Meg Schwamb, a planetary scientist and astronomer at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Much has been written about...

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 pretty easy to get DeepSeek to talk dirty AI companions like Replika are designed to engage in intimate exchanges, but people use general-purpose chatbots for sex talk too, despite their stricter content...

In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so fond of doing these days, pontificated at punishing length on a podcast. In the interview, he addressed America's loneliness epidemic: The average American has-I think it's fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or...

Living comes with a side effect: aging. Despite what you might hear on social media or in advertisements, there are no drugs that are known to slow or reverse human aging. But there's some evidence to support another approach: cutting back on calories. Caloric restriction (reducing your intake of calories) and intermittent fasting (switching between...

AI companions like Replika are designed to engage in intimate exchanges, but people use general-purpose chatbots for sex talk too, despite their stricter content moderation policies. Now new research shows that not all chatbots are equally willing to talk dirty: DeepSeek is the easiest to convince. But other AI chatbots can be enticed too, if...

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. Before we embark on our usual programming we're thrilled to share that The Download won Best Technology Newsletter at this year's Publisher Newsletter Awards! Thank you to all of you for reading, subscribing,...

One morning in the middle of March, a slow-moving spring blizzard stalled above eastern Nebraska, pounding the state capital of Lincoln with 60-mile-per-hour winds, driving sleet, and up to eight inches of snow. Lincoln Electric System, the local electric utility, has approximately 150,000 customers. By lunchtime, nearly 10% of them were without power. Ice was...

Coal power is on life support in the US. It used to carry the grid with cheap electricity, but now plants are closing left and right. There are a lot of potential reasons to let coal continue its journey to the grave. Carbon emissions from coal plants are a major contributor to climate change. And...

A new paper from OpenAI has shown why a little bit of bad training can make AI models go rogue-but also demonstrates that this problem is generally pretty easy to fix. Back in February, a group of researchers discovered that fine-tuning an AI model (in their case, OpenAI's GPT-4o) by training it on code that...

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Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the September/October 2024 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by guest editor Edward Faulkner '03.

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 it's so hard to stop tech-facilitated abuse After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their home-to watch what we were doing," she says, while...

After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their Massachusetts home-to watch what we were doing," she says, while he went to work. She'd turn them off; he'd get angry. By the time their third child turned seven, Gioia and her husband had divorced, but he still found...

When OpenAI acquired Io to create the coolest piece of tech that the world will have ever seen," it confirmed what industry experts have long been saying: Hardware is the new frontier for AI. AI will no longer just be an abstract thing in the cloud far away. It's coming for our homes, our rooms,...

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. Puerto Rico's power struggles On the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico lies the country's only coal-fired power station, flanked by a mountain of toxic ash. The plant, owned by the utility giant AES,...

At first glance, it seems as if life teems around Carmen Suarez Vazquez's little teal-painted house in the municipality of Guayama, on Puerto Rico's southeastern coast. The edge of the Aguirre State Forest, home to manatees, reptiles, as many as 184 species of birds, and at least three types of mangrove trees, is just a...

Last fall, while attending a board meeting in Amsterdam, I had a few free hours and made an impromptu visit to the Van Gogh Museum. I often steal time for visits like this-a perk of global business travel for which I am grateful. Wandering the galleries, I found myself before The Courtesan (after Eisen), painted...

Back in February, I flew to Amsterdam to report on a high-stakes experiment the city had recently conducted: a pilot program for what it called Smart Check, which was its attempt to create an effective, fair, and unbiased predictive algorithm to try to detect welfare fraud. But the city fell short of its lofty goals-and,...

The race to build ever larger AI models is slowing down. The industry's focus is shifting toward agents-systems that can act autonomously, make decisions, and negotiate on users' behalf. But what would happen if both a customer and a seller were using an AI agent? A recent study put agent-to-agent negotiations to the test 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. How AI can help make cities work better In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are...

In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are unable to communicate, let alone analyze or put to use, all the information they have access to. This dynamic has always bothered Sarah Williams, a professor of urban planning and...

Businesses in highly-regulated industries like financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and health care are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to streamline complex and sensitive tasks.Conversational AI-driven interfaces are helping hospitals to track the location and delivery of a patient's time-sensitive cancer drugs. Generative AI chatbots are helping insurance customers answer questions and solve problems. And agentic...

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. Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity's future Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond...

The best way to predict the future is to invent it," the famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said. Uttered more out of exasperation than as inspiration, his remark has nevertheless attained gospel-like status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in particular a handful of tech billionaires who fancy themselves the chief architects of humanity's future. Sam...

Earlier this week, two new leaders of the US Food and Drug Administration published a list of priorities for the agency. Both Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad are controversial figures in the science community. They were generally highly respected academics until the covid pandemic, when their contrarian opinions on masking, vaccines, and lockdowns turned many...

The outbreak of covid-19 laid bare the vulnerabilities of global, interconnected supply chains. National lockdowns triggered months-long manufacturing shutdowns. Mass disruption across international trade routes sparked widespread supply shortages. Costs spiralled. And wild fluctuations in demand rendered tried-and-tested inventory planning and forecasting tools useless. It was the black swan event that nobody had accounted for,...

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 ready to hand AI agents the keys? In recent months, a new class of agents has arrived on the scene: ones built using large language models. Any action that can be...

On May 6, 2010, at 2:32 p.m. Eastern time, nearly a trillion dollars evaporated from the US stock market within 20 minutes-at the time, the fastest decline in history. Then, almost as suddenly, the market rebounded. After months of investigation, regulators attributed much of the responsibility for this flash crash" to high-frequency trading algorithms, which...

Lithium-ion batteries have some emerging competition: Sodium-based alternatives are starting to make inroads. Sodium is more abundant on Earth than lithium, and batteries that use the material could be cheaper in the future. Building a new battery chemistry is difficult, mostly because lithium is so entrenched. But, as I've noted before, this new technology has...

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 Amsterdam's high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI Amsterdam thought it was on the right track. City officials in the welfare department believed they could build technology that would prevent fraud while...

Last year, a humanoid warehouse robot named Digit set to work handling boxes of Spanx. Digit can lift boxes up to 16 kilograms between trolleys and conveyor belts, taking over some of the heavier work for its human colleagues. It works in a restricted, defined area, separated from human workers by physical panels or laser...

This story is a partnership between MIT Technology Review, Lighthouse Reports, and Trouw, and was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Two futures Hans de Zwart, a gym teacher turned digital rights advocate, says that when he saw Amsterdam's plan to have an algorithm evaluate every welfare applicant in the city for potential fraud, he nearly...

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. IBM aims to build the world's first large-scale, error-corrected quantum computer by 2028 The news: IBM announced detailed plans today to build an error-corrected quantum computer with significantly more computational capability than existing...

IBM announced detailed plans today to build an error-corrected quantum computer with significantly more computational capability than existing machines by 2028. It hopes to make the computer available to users via the cloud by 2029. The proposed machine, named Starling, will consist of a network of modules, each of which contains a set of chips,...

The Trump administration's chainsaw approach to federal spending lives on, even as Elon Musk turns on the president. On May 28, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced he'd be gutting a key office at the Department of Defense responsible for testing and evaluating the safety of weapons and AI systems. As part of a string...

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 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics -Jon Keegan As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While...

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. Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has...

This week, I've been thinking about the powerful connection between mind and body. Some new research suggests that people with heart conditions have better outcomes when they are more hopeful and optimistic. Hopelessness, on the other hand, is associated with a significantly higher risk of death. The findings build upon decades of fascinating research into...

Later this month, an inconspicuous 150-kilogram satellite is set to launch into space aboard the SpaceX Transporter 14 mission. Once in orbit, it will test super-accurate next-generation satnav technology designed to make up for the shortcomings of the US Global Positioning System (GPS). The satellite is the first of a planned constellation called Pulsar, which...

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents-systems that are less about responding to users' queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them. There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose...

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. Crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong is ready to invest in CRISPR baby tech Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, says he's ready to fund a US startup focused on gene-editing...

The clean cement industry might be facing the end of the road, before it ever really got rolling. On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced that it was canceling $3.7 billion in funding for 24 projects related to energy and industry. That included nearly $1.3 billion for cement-related projects. Cement is a massive climate...

Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, says he's ready to fund a US startup focused on gene-editing human embryos. If he goes forward, it would be the first major commercial investment in one of medicine's most fraught ideas. In a post on X June 2, Armstrong announced he was looking for...

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's next for AI and math The modern world is built on mathematics. Math lets us model complex systems such as the way air flows around an aircraft, the way financial markets fluctuate,...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of themhere. The way DARPA tells it, math is stuck in the past. In April, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency kicked off a new initiative called expMath-short...