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6 articles from Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories

In defense of California

About a year after graduating from college, I packed my possessions into a rental van I’d split with a near stranger and departed my home state of Ohio. We steered onto I-70 West, bound for San Francisco. At the time, I was less drawn to California in any specific way than determined to escape a state that was too conservative, homogenous, and religious for my tastes. Plus, oof, the winters....

Eight case studies on regulating biometric technology show us a path forward

Amba Kak was in law school in India when the country rolled out the Aadhaar project in 2009. The national biometric ID system, conceived as a comprehensive identity program, sought to collect the fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs of all residents. It wasn’t long, Kak remembers, before stories about its devastating consequences began to spread. “We were suddenly hearing reports of how...

This know-it-all AI learns by reading the entire web nonstop

Back in July, OpenAI’s latest language model, GPT-3, dazzled with its ability to churn out paragraphs that look as if they could have been written by a human. People started showing off how GPT-3 could also autocomplete code or fill in blanks in spreadsheets. In one example, Twitter employee Paul Katsen tweeted “the spreadsheet function to rule them all,” in which GPT-3 fills out columns...

Create your own moody quarantine music with Google’s AI

The Google Magenta team, which makes machine-learning tools for the creative process, has made models that help you compose melodies, and tools that help you sketch cats. Mostly because it’s fun, but also to explore how AI can make creation more accessible. Its latest project now gives anyone a chance to make quarantine tunes to vibe to—no music training necessary.  Lo-Fi Player, designed...

The “staged rollout” of gene-modified babies could start with sickle-cell disease

In a high-level report precipitated by the birth of CRISPR babies in China in 2018, scientists say the technology’s next medical use should be narrowly restricted to prospective parents who can’t otherwise have a healthy child, such as Black couples who both have sickle-cell disease. The 200-plus-page report, from the US National Academies and the UK Royal Society, says “heritable genome...