MIT Technology Review

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 does AI hallucinate? The World Health Organization's new chatbot launched on April 2 with the best of intentions. The virtual avatar named SARAH, was designed to dispense health tips about how 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. Knock, knock. Who's there? An AI with generic jokes. Researchers from Google DeepMind asked 20 professional comedians to use popular AI language models to write jokes and comedy performances. Their results...

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 World Health Organization's new chatbot launched on April 2 with the best of intentions. A fresh-faced virtual avatar backed by GPT-3.5, SARAH (Smart AI Resource Assistant...

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 cost of building the perfect wave For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. While this hunt has taken surfers from...

For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. It's not just aquestion of size, but also of shape, surface conditions, and duration-ideally in a beautiful natural environment. While this hunt has taken surfers from tropical coastlines reachable only by boat to swells breaking off...

AI is good at lots of things: spotting patterns in data, creating fantastical images, and condensing thousands of words into just a few paragraphs. But can it be a useful tool for writing comedy? New research suggests that it can, but only to a very limited extent. It's an intriguing finding that hints at 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. Biotech companies are trying to make milk without cows The outbreak of avian influenza on US dairy farms has started to make milk seem a lot less wholesome. Milk that's raw, or unpasteurized,...

It's game night, and I'm crossing my fingers, hoping for a hurricane. I roll the die and it clatters across the board, tumbling to a stop to reveal a tiny icon of a tree stump. Bad news: I just triggered deforestation in the Amazon. That seals it. I failed to stop climate change-at least this...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. The outbreak of avian influenza on US dairy farms has started to make milk seem a lot less wholesome. Milk that's raw, or unpasteurized, can actually infect mice...

A London-based nonprofit is poised to become one of the world's largest financial backers of solar geoengineering research. And it's just one of a growing number of foundations eager to support scientists exploring whether the world could ease climate change by reflecting away more sunlight. Quadrature Climate Foundation, established in 2019 and funded through the...

MIT Technology Review's How To series helps you get things done. If you post or interact with chatbots on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or WhatsApp, Meta can use your data to train its generative AI models beginning June 26, according to its recently updated privacy policy. Even if you don't use any of Meta's platforms, it...

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 gamification took over the world It's a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow...

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's often one overlooked member in a duo. Peanut butter outshines jelly in a PB&J every time (at least in my eyes). For carbon capture and storage technology, the storage part tends...

It's a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one? Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it's an eminently reasonable question...

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. Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here's how that will work. At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product...

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. If you've ever been to Taiwan, you've likely run into Gogoro's green-and-white battery-swap stations in one city or another. With 12,500 stations around the island, Gogoro has built a sweeping network that allows...

Pump jacks and pipelines clutter the Elk Hills oil field of California, a scrubby stretch of land in the southern Central Valley that rests above one of the nation's richest deposits of fossil fuels. Oil production has been steadily declining in the state for decades, as tech jobs have boomed and legislators have enacted rigorous...

At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product lineup with artificial intelligence. The key feature, which will run across virtually all of its product line, is Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI-based capabilities that promises to deliver personalized AI services while keeping sensitive data...

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 battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Every year, some 22,000 Americans a year are killed as a result of serious medical errors in hospitals, many of them on operating tables. There have been cases where surgeons have...

On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid took a sudden drop, a signal that some power plants had been disconnected in the disaster. The grid was now struggling to meet...

The rise of generative AI, coupled with the rapid adoption and democratization of AI across industries this decade, has emphasized the singular importance of data. Managing data effectively has become critical to this era of business-making data practitioners, including data engineers, analytics engineers, and ML engineers, key figures in the data and AI revolution. Organizations...

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. Propagandists are using AI too-and companies need to be open about it -Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on...

In January 2022, NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was approaching the end of its one-million-mile trip from Earth. But reaching its orbital spot would be just one part of its treacherous journey. To ready itself for observations, the spacecraft had to unfold itself in a complicated choreography that, according to its engineers' calculations,...

At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new first" in its corporate history. It wasn't an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists-including players from Russia, China,...

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. This AI-powered black box" could make surgery safer The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes. These mistakes kill some...

The first time Teodor Grantcharov sat down to watch himself perform surgery, he wanted to throw the VHS tape out the window. My perception was that my performance was spectacular," Grantcharov says, and then pauses-until the moment I saw the video." Reflecting on this operation from 25 years ago, he remembers the roughness of...

On Tuesday, the FDA asked a panel of experts to weigh in on whether the evidence shows that MDMA, also known as ecstasy, is a safe and efficacious treatment for PTSD. The answer was a resounding no. Just two out of 11 panel members agreed that MDMA-assisted therapy is effective. And only one panel member...

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. This classic game is taking on climate change -Casey Crownhart There are two things I love to do at social gatherings: play board games and talk about climate change. Don't I sound like...

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 two things I love to do at social gatherings: play board games and talk about climate change. Don't I sound like someone you should invite to your next dinner party?...

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 simple circuit could offer an alternative to energy-intensive GPUs On a table in his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, physicist Sam Dillavou has connected an array of breadboards via a...

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. Have you ever thought about the miraculous fact that despite the myriad differences between languages, virtually everyone uses the same QWERTY keyboards? Many languages have more or fewer than 26 letters in...

On a table in his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, physicist Sam Dillavou has connected an array of breadboards via a web of brightly colored wires. The setup looks like a DIY home electronics project-and not a particularly elegant one. But this unassuming assembly, which contains 32 variable resistors, can learn to sort data...

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 I learned from the UN's AI for Good" summit -Melissa Heikkila Last week, Geneva played host to the UN's AI for Good Summit. The summit's big focus was how AI can be...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Greetings from Switzerland! I've just come back from Geneva, which last week hosted the UN's AI for Good Summit, organized by theInternational Telecommunication Union.The summit's big focus was how AI can...

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 MDMA MDMA has been banned in the United States for more than three decades. But now, this potent mind-altering drug is poised to become a badly needed therapy for PTSD....

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. MDMA, sometimes called Molly or ecstasy, has been banned in the United States for more than three decades. Now this potent mind-altering drug is poised to become...

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 Google's AI Overviews gets things wrong When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that Google will do the googling for you."The...

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 here. When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial-intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that Google will do the googling for you." The new feature, called...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. Here in the US, bird flu has now infected cows in nine states, millions of chickens, and-as of last week-a second dairy worker. There's no indication that the...

If a hiker gets lost in the rugged Scottish Highlands, rescue teams sometimes send up a drone to search for clues of the individual's route-trampled vegetation, dropped clothing, food wrappers. But with vast terrain to cover and limited battery life, picking the right area to search is critical. Traditionally, expert drone pilots use a combination...

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 messy quest to replace drugs with electricity In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor's office. Research into how the nervous system-the highway that carries electrical...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. SUVs are taking over the world-larger vehicle models made up nearly half of new car sales globally in 2023, a new record for the segment. There are a lot of reasons to...

In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor's office. Research into how the nervous system controls the immune response was gaining traction. And that had opened the door to the possibility of hacking into the body's circuitry and thereby controlling a host of chronic diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, asthma,...

For years, cloud technology has demonstrated its ability to cut costs, improve efficiencies, and boost productivity. But today's organizations are looking to cloud for more than simply operational gains. Faced with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape, a complex business environment, and rapid technological change, organizations are increasingly recognizing cloud's potential to catalyze business transformation. Cloud can...

Generative AI, like predictive AI before it, has rightly seized the attention of business executives. The technology has the potential to add trillions of dollars to annual global economic activity, and its adoption for business applications is expected to improve the top or bottom lines-or both-at many organizations. While generative AI offers an impressive 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. Quartz, cobalt, and the waste we leave behind It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized ethereal world, ruled by digital startups, artificial intelligence, and financial services. Yet...

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 the quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete -This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published on...

This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published on May 28 by The MIT Press. It has been lightly edited. ymiw2 klt4 pwyy1 wdy6 o1 dfb2 wdv2 fypw3 uet5 dm2 dlu1 ... A young Chinese man sat down at his QWERTY keyboard 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. That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday. An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but...