The Download: introducing: the 125th Anniversary issue
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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. Introducing: the 125th Anniversary issue With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines.…
From the publisher
The magazine you now hold in your hands is 125 years old. Not this actual issue, of course, but the publication itself, which launched in 1899. Few other titles can claim this kind of heritage—the Atlantic, Harper’s, Audubon (which is also turning 125 this year), National Geographic, and Popular Science among them. MIT Technology Review…
Job title of the future: Weather maker
Much of the western United States relies on winter snowpack to supply its rivers and reservoirs through the summer months. But with warming temperatures, less and less snow is falling—a recent study showed a 23% decline in annual snowpack since 1955. By some estimates, runoff from snowmelt in the western US could decrease by a…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/28/1096738/digital-forest-ranger-future-jobs/
AI’s growth needs the right interface
If you took a walk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco’s epicenter of AI froth, and asked the first dude-bro you saw wearing a puffer vest about the future of the interface, he’d probably say something about the movie Her, about chatty virtual assistants that will help you do everything from organize your email to book…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/28/1096515/ai-interfaces-ux-growth/
A hundred years of curiosity
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Any facet of Josef Eisinger’s remarkably wide-ranging century of life would be enough to shape the entire identity of another person. If you were to ask how his experience has intersected with history, for example, he might tell you about escaping the Nazis’ reign of terror in his native Austria by fleeing to Britain by…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/27/1095661/a-hundred-years-of-curiosity/
The power of purpose-built cloud infrastructure
While AI is accelerating cloud adoption, organizations’ reasons for migrating their systems and applications to the cloud remain relatively consistent: a desire to lower capital expenditures, increase agility in a fast-paced business environment, and improve availability of business-critical resources. Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report underscores organizations’ consistent desire to make the most of…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/27/1102940/the-power-of-purpose-built-cloud-infrastructure/
The Download: living for longer, and sex in the age of AI
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. Maybe you will be able to live past 122 How long can humans live? This is a good time to ask the question. The longevity scene is having a moment, thanks to a…
The Download: living for longer, and sex in the age of AI
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. Maybe you will be able to live past 122 How long can humans live? This is a good time to ask the question. The longevity scene is having a moment, thanks to a…
Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity
By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Digital scientists will have perfect memory of every research paper ever published and think a million times faster than we can. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics…
What will AI mean for economic inequality?
Prominent AI researchers expect the arrival of artificial general intelligence anywhere between “the next couple of years” and “possibly never.” At the same time, leading economists disagree about the potential impact of AI: Some anticipate a future of perpetually accelerating productivity, while others project more modest gains. But most experts agree that technological advancement, however…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/27/1096133/ai-economic-inequality-jobs-low-income/
A skeptic’s guide to humanoid-robot videos
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. We are living in “humanoid summer” right now, if you didn’t know. Or at least it feels that way to Ken Goldberg, a roboticist extraordinaire who leads research in the field at the University of…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/27/1103035/a-skeptics-guide-to-humanoid-robot-videos/
Readying business for the age of AI
Rapid advancements in AI technology offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance business operations, customer and employee engagement, and decision-making. Executives are eager to see the potential of AI realized. Among 100 c-suite respondents polled in WNS Analytics’ “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI” report, 76% say they are already implementing or planning to implement generative…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/26/1096349/readying-business-for-the-age-of-ai/
Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology
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Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually…
Maybe you will be able to live past 122
The UK’s Office of National Statistics has an online life expectancy calculator. Enter your age and sex, and the website will, using national averages, spit out the age at which you can expect to pop your clogs. For me, that figure is coming out at 88 years old. That’s not too bad, I figure, given…
Move over, text: Video is the new medium of our lives
The other day I idly opened TikTok to find a video of a young woman refinishing an old hollow-bodied electric guitar. It was a montage of close-up shots—looking over her shoulder as she sanded and scraped the wood, peeled away the frets, expertly patched the cracks with filler, and then spray-painted it a radiant purple.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/24/1096621/video-cultural-impact-learning-communication/
The Download: simulating solar geoengineering, and AI-enabled accessibility
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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. Andrew Ng’s new model lets you play around with solar geoengineering to see what would happen AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the…
AI could be a game changer for people with disabilities
As a lifelong disabled person who constantly copes with multiple conditions, I have a natural tendency to view emerging technologies with skepticism. Most new things are built for the majority of people—in this case, people without disabilities—and the truth of the matter is there’s no guarantee I’ll have access to them. There are certainly exceptions…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/23/1096607/ai-people-with-disabilities-accessibility/
Andrew Ng’s new model lets you play around with solar geoengineering to see what would happen
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AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the dials of a solar geoengineering model, exploring what might happen if nations attempt to counteract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere. The concept of solar geoengineering was born from the realization that the planet has…
Tech that measures our brainwaves is 100 years old. How will we be using it 100 years from now?
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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. This week, we’re acknowledging a special birthday. It’s 100 years since EEG (electroencephalography) was first used to measure electrical activity in a person’s brain. The finding was revolutionary.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/22/1097185/tech-brainwaves-100-years/
The Download: the future of human evolution, and touch sensing for robots
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. Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world—and making an edited baby is fully illegal in most countries surveyed by…