MIT Technology Review

We’ve never relied more on technology to solve our problems than we do now. Sometimes it works. Vaccines against covid-19 have cut the death toll. We’ve got virus tests and drugs, too. But this isn’t the story about what worked in 2021. This is MIT Technology Review’s annual list of cases where innovation went wrong.…

A shock has reverberated inside Israel in the last few months. NSO Group, the billion-dollar Israeli company that has sold hacking tools to governments around the world for more than a decade, has drawn intense scrutiny after a series of public scandals. The company is in crisis. Its future is in doubt. But while NSO…

When Hongzhi Gao was young, he lived with his family in Gansu, a province located in the center of northern China by the Tengger Desert. Thinking back to his childhood, he recalls the constant, steady wind of dirt outside their house, and that during most months of the year it didn’t take more than a…

New data shows that the polarization of political discourse online has remained largely unchanged since the end of 2020. That’s probably not surprising if you’ve looked at the internet at all in the past year. But the data also shows an underlying pattern in which individual topics—like abortion and immigration—took turns driving divisiveness. While people…

The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year. We asked our writers and editors to look back over all the stories we published in 2021 and tell us which…

Less than three hours after a jury in Boston began deliberating the fate of Harvard chemistry professor Charlies Lieber, the verdict was in: he was found guilty on Tuesday of six felony counts, including false statements and tax fraud, that stemmed from his failure to disclose affiliations and funding from a Chinese university and talent…

It might sound strange to think of storytelling as a climate solution, but after spending five years documenting 1,001 voices on climate change in 20 countries, I believe one of the most powerful forms of climate action is to listen deeply to people already affected by the crisis. To ensure that solutions actually help communities…

The Sulphur Springs Valley is a windswept desert in southeastern Arizona, bounded on three sides by forest-­topped mountain ranges known as the sky islands. It can take an hour or more to drive between inhabited places in the valley, but the community there is tight-knit—many of the farmers went to the same high school (as…

In the world of water, 2021 was yet another year for the record books. Parts of Western Europe reeled from deadly floods that sent rivers surging to levels not seen in 500 to 1,000 years. Destructive floods hit central China as well, displacing more than a quarter of a million people from their homes. Meanwhile,…

When Ahsan Rehman graduated from one of Pakistan’s top engineering universities in 2016, he knew he wanted a job that would help people. He did not have to look far for ideas. At his home in Karachi, his family often went days without getting any water from the city’s pipes. Initially, they had dug a…

The comings and goings of water define Mexico City, a mile-high metropolis sprawled across three dry lake beds. The city floods in the wet season and thirsts during regular droughts. CDMX, as the city of 21 million styles itself, pumps more water from the aquifer below it than it replenishes: the city sank some 12…

Every day, the Linggiu Reservoir does quiet battle with the ocean, feeding rainwater into the Johor River in southern Malaysia to keep its salt levels low enough to treat. Singapore, which built the reservoir in 1995, had been entitled to extract some 250 million gallons per day from the 123-kilometer-­long river, meeting more than half…

In the waning weeks of 2017, many residents of Cape Town, South Africa, lined up day and night to fill old jugs with water from the city’s few natural springs. Palpable angst hung in the air. After months of warnings through an anomalously long drought, Cape Town was on the verge of becoming the world’s…

As we were closing this issue, I came across a video on Twitter of a highway just outside Vancouver, submerged in water. It wasn’t the only one. The densely populated urban heart of British Columbia was cut off from the rest of Canada by flooding and mudslides after an atmospheric river barreled through. The country’s…

In 2021 we saw images from the deep reaches of geologic time, to visionaries working on today’s pressing issues, to a glimpse into a transhuman future.

The Congo River is the world’s second-largest river system after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and animals that live in the swamps and peatlands it supports. The massive tropical rainforest sprawled across its middle helps regulate the entire Earth’s…

It’s been a year of supersized AI models. When OpenAI released GPT-3, in June 2020, the neural network’s apparent grasp of language was uncanny. It could generate convincing sentences, converse with humans, and even autocomplete code. GPT-3 was also monstrous in scale—larger than any other neural network ever built. It kicked off a whole new trend in…

This story has been adapted from Erica Gies‘ book Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, available for preorder at slowwater.world. For years, Beijing landscape architect Yu Kongjian was ridiculed by his fellow citizens as a backward thinker. Some even called him an American spy—a nod to his doctorate from Harvard’s…

While the covid-19 pandemic upended workplaces and ushered in rapid digital transformation, the turmoil around cybercrime has remained constant: attackers are always changing tactics to evade detection. Flexible, customer-first solutions have emerged to meet ever-changing circumstances to keep organizations secure and confident against cyber threats. In the new year and beyond, as technology and workplace…

Being on social media can feel a bit like living in a new kind of city. It’s the greatest city in the world. Millions of people can do things their parents never dreamed of. They can live together, play together, learn together. The city is a marvel. But it’s also rotten. Raw sewage runs in the streets.…

About 20 miles outside El Paso, Texas, on a warm afternoon just before the fall harvest, Ramon Tirres Jr. turns his truck between two fields covered in nothing but dirt. Both should be lush with cotton by now, but these 70 acres—a fraction of the nearly 1,000 that Tirres left unplanted this year—are bare. All…

Cassandria Campbell, MCP ’11, traces her interest in food to her first summer job working with the Food Project on farms in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and Roxbury, the Boston neighborhood where she grew up. “I really enjoyed that experience of seeing things grow,” she recalls, “and I appreciated how much change it was creating in Roxbury…

Geothermal power is a promising energy source limited by factors including the need to locate plants in areas where reservoirs of hot water deep below the earth’s surface are easily accessible. Carlos Araque is looking to change that through his company, Quaise, using a groundbreaking technology developed at MIT. “We need to go deeper and…

When Jesse Solomon ’91 first started teaching at a middle school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, he was overwhelmed. “I had 25 students working at eight different grade levels—some that were learning English, some that were on individual education plans,” he says. “I wasn’t prepared for that level of complexity.” Luckily, a veteran teacher…

Julian Adams remembers clearly the first time he saw a bonsai. He was wandering a botanical garden as a young man when, among the orchids, cacti, and acres of vegetables, he stumbled on a room full of the diminutive and ancient trees. Adams had always felt a respect for older things, he says. Something about…

In 1982, when Lynn Best ’69 joined the public utility Seattle City Light, her team faced an immediate challenge: evaluating the environmental, cultural, and financial impacts of its three dams generating electricity on the Skagit River in northwest Washington State. As acting director, she was able to persuade City Light to allow the environmental team…

Editor’s Note: In 2020, an MIT Task Force produced a comprehensive report on the Work of the Future. Since then, the global pandemic has had a significant effect on work and businesses, providing the impetus for The Work of the Future, by the same authors. The book, from which the following excerpt is adapted, will be published…

“At MIT, we believe that public service can be—and should be—as intense, meaningful, and intellectually rigorous as academic work. MIT alumni help convey this philosophy … that serving others is not an activity separate from academic and professional pursuits; it is a vital element of a wise, creative life.” Institute president L. Rafael Reif shared…

When Mike Koval, the police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, abruptly resigned on a Sunday in September 2019, the community’s relationship with its men and women in blue was already strained. Use-of-force issues hung over the department after the killing of a Black teenager in 2015. Then, months before Koval left, another Black teenager, in the…

Julius Mutero has harvested virtually nothing in the past six years. For his entire adult life, he has farmed a three-hectare plot in Mabiya, a farming community in eastern Zimbabwe. There he grows maize and groundnuts to feed himself, his wife, and their three children. He sells whatever’s left for cash. But over a decade…

Right now, Volkan Yazici is working 22 hour days for free. Yazici is a member of the Log4J project, an open-source tool used widely to record activity inside various types of software. It helps run huge swaths of the internet, including applications ranging from iCloud to Twitter, and he and his colleagues are now desperately…

By midnight on December 1, 2015, when Eric Wastl first launched his annual Santa-themed puzzle-a-day programming challenge Advent of Code, 81 people had signed up. That pretty much matched his capacity planning for 70 participants. Wastl figured this amusement might be of interest to a few friends, friends of friends, and maybe some of their…

Private, mercenary-style surveillance and hacking groups have used Facebook and Instagram to target 50,000 people in over 100 countries, according to a newly published investigation by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. The existence of private companies that use sophisticated digital tools to pry secrets from people’s work and private lives—sometimes as part of legitimate law enforcement…

Ahmad Fawad Yusufi, 31, was sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a San Francisco playground around 5 a.m. on November 28 when someone walked up to the car, attempted to steal his wallet, and shot him to death. Yusufi, an Afghan immigrant who had arrived in the United States on a special visa…

The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our getaway. But the distance is no more. With all those dead pine trees in thrall to wildfire, the…

Last week, Meta (the umbrella company formerly known as Facebook) opened up access to its virtual-reality social media platform, Horizon Worlds. Early descriptions of the platform make it seem fun and wholesome, drawing comparisons to Minecraft. In Horizon Worlds, up to 20 avatars can get together at a time to explore, hang out, and build…

Next-generation solutions and products are hitting a wall with wi-fi: it’s not fast enough, and latency and connectivity issues mean it’s not reliable enough. What’s an innovator to do? Focus on what’s next: 5G and software-defined networking. Nick McKeown, senior vice president and general manager of the network and edge group at Intel Corporation says…

You can find Dubna, a small town three hours away from Moscow by train, both on a map and in the periodic table: dubnium, element number 105, was discovered at a research center there, and named after the town. A hasteless town, Dubna is defined as much by the surrounding forests as by the water:…

On a Saturday morning in December of 2020, the RRS Discovery floated in calm waters just east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the massive undersea mountain range that runs from the Arctic nearly to the Antarctic. The team onboard the research vessel, mostly from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, used an acoustic signaling system to trigger the…

In January of 2020, agents arrived at Harvard University looking for Charles Lieber, a renowned nanotechnology researcher who chaired the school’s department of chemistry and chemical biology. They were there to arrest him on charges of hiding his financial ties with a university in China. By arresting Lieber steps from Harvard Yard, authorities were sending…

Businesses that want to be digital leaders in their markets need to embrace automation, not only to augment existing capabilities or to reduce costs but to position themselves to successfully maneuver the rapid expansion of IT demand ushered in through digital innovation. “It’s a scale issue,” says John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell…

Fae Saulenas does not want your sympathy. Saulenas, along with her 46-year-old daughter Lauren, spent last winter—their covid winter—in Saugus, Massachusetts, in a house without a working furnace. Saulenas is in her 70s. Lauren, because of brain injuries she experienced in the womb, is quadriplegic, blind, and affected by a seizure disorder, among other disabilities. In…

In a now-famous 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore introduced the business world to the concept of the experience economy. The theory went something like this: businesses had moved through various economic stages—agrarian, industrial, and service—in which the nature of what was sold continued to evolve.…

A double dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine can’t stop the omicron virus, according to labs tests done in in South Africa and Germany, and either a booster or a new vaccine will be needed. The omicron variant was detected in South Africa last month, and because it contains a large number of genetic changes,…

In the two years since OpenAI released its language model GPT-3, most big-name AI labs have developed language mimics of their own. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—as well as a handful of Chinese firms—have all built AIs that can generate convincing text, chat with humans, answer questions, and more. Known as large language models because of…

The global pandemic accelerated the trend toward a work-from-anywhere, distributed workforce. As we approach a post-pandemic world, companies—and employees—expect this trend to become the norm. While IT departments are rapidly configuring and deploying devices, infrastructure, and software to support the shift in a secure and productive way, employees are likewise having to reset priorities and…

There’s enough heat flowing from inside the earth to meet total global energy demand twice over. But harnessing it requires drilling deep underground and transforming that heat into a usable form of energy. That’s difficult and expensive, which is why geothermal power—sometimes called the forgotten renewable—makes up only about 0.3% of electricity generation worldwide. Now,…