The Download: robot-packed meals, and the looming fertility crisis
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. Robot-packed meals are coming to the frozen-food aisle What’s happening: Advances in artificial intelligence are coming to your freezer, in the form of robot-assembled prepared meals. Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup, has…
IVF alone can’t save us from a looming fertility crisis
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. I’ve just learned that July 11 is World Population Day. There are over 8 billion of us on the planet, and there’ll probably be 8.5 billion of us…
Robot-packed meals are coming to the frozen-food aisle
Advances in artificial intelligence are coming to your freezer, in the form of robot-assembled prepared meals. Chef Robotics, a San Francisco–based startup, has launched a system of AI-powered robotic arms that can be quickly programmed with a recipe to dole out accurate portions of everything from tikka masala to pesto tortellini. After experiments with leading…
The Download: automating warehouse tasks, and problems with recycling plastics
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. AI is poised to automate today’s most mundane manual warehouse task Before almost any item reaches your door, it traverses the global supply chain on a pallet. More than 2 billion pallets are…
AI is poised to automate today’s most mundane manual warehouse task
Before almost any item reaches your door, it traverses the global supply chain on a pallet. More than 2 billion pallets are in circulation in the United States alone, and $400 billion worth of goods are exported on them annually. However, loading boxes onto these pallets is a task stuck in the past: Heavy loads…
Here’s the problem with new plastic recycling methods
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Look on the bottom of a plastic water bottle or takeout container, and you might find a logo there made up of three arrows forming a closed loop shaped like a triangle.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/11/1094844/plastic-reycling-problem/
The Download: defining AI, and China’s driverless ambitions
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. What is AI? AI is sexy, AI is cool. AI is entrenching inequality, upending the job market, and wrecking education. The AI boom will boost the economy, the AI bubble is about to…
Housetraining robot dogs: How generative AI might change consumer IoT
As technology goes, the internet of things (IoT) is old: internet-connected devices outnumbered people on Earth around 2008 or 2009, according to a contemporary Cisco report. Since then, IoT has grown rapidly. Researchers say that by the early 2020s, estimates of the number of devices ranged anywhere from the low tens of billions to over…
The Chinese government is going all-in on autonomous vehicles
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. There’s been so much news coming out of China’s autonomous-vehicle industry lately that it’s hard to keep track. The government is finally allowing Tesla to bring its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature to…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/10/1094811/chinese-government-policy-autonomous-vehicles/
The Chinese government is going all-in on autonomous vehicles
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. There’s been so much news coming out of China’s autonomous-vehicle industry lately that it’s hard to keep track. The government is finally allowing Tesla to bring its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature to…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/10/1094811/chinese-government-policy-autonomous-vehicles/
The Chinese government is going all-in on autonomous vehicles
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. There’s been so much news coming out of China’s autonomous-vehicle industry lately that it’s hard to keep track. The government is finally allowing Tesla to bring its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature to…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/10/1094811/chinese-government-policy-autonomous-vehicles/
The Download: planning a honeymoon with AI, and deepfakes in 2024
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. Can AI help me plan my honeymoon? —Melissa Heikkilä I’m getting married later this summer and am feverishly planning a honeymoon together with my fiancé. It has been at times overwhelming trying to…
Can AI help me plan my honeymoon?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I’m getting married later this summer and am feverishly planning a honeymoon together with my fiancé. It has been at times overwhelming trying to research and decide between what seem like…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/09/1094774/can-ai-help-me-plan-my-honeymoon/
The Download: vacation planning with AI, and smaller models
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 to use AI to plan your next vacation Planning a vacation should, in theory, be fun. But it can also be time-consuming and stressful, particularly if you don’t know where to begin.…
How to use AI to plan your next vacation
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Planning a vacation should, in theory, be fun. But drawing up a list of activities for a trip can also be time-consuming and stressful, particularly if you don’t know where to begin. Luckily tech companies have been competing to create tools that can help…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/08/1094733/how-to-use-ai-to-plan-your-next-vacation/
The Download: AI agents, and how to detect a lie
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. What are AI agents? When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned to a new…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/05/1094718/the-download-ai-agents-and-how-to-detect-a-lie/
What are AI agents?
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. When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/05/1094711/what-are-ai-agents/
AI lie detectors are better than humans at spotting lies
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Can you spot a liar? It’s a question I imagine has been on a lot of minds lately, in the wake of various televised political debates. Research has…
The Download: recycling clothing, and fish-friendly hydropower
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 polyester-dissolving process could make modern clothing recyclable The news: Less than 1% of clothing is recycled. Most of the rest ends up dumped in a landfill or burned. A team of researchers…
What new hydropower tech says about climate action
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. For nearly two years, I’ve been thinking about a set of photos of fish I saw at a conference. The presentation was from our ClimateTech event in 2022, when we invited scientists,…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/04/1094670/hydropower-fish-climate-action/