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 growing signs of trouble for the multibillion-dollar global carbon market, as investigative stories and studies continue to erode the credibility of the business world’s go-to tool for cleaning up climate emissions. The promise of offsets...

Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997.  Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet…

It’s a stormy holiday weekend, and you’ve just received the last notification you want in the busiest travel week of the year: the first leg of your flight is significantly delayed. You might expect this means you’ll be sitting on hold with airline customer service for half an hour. But this time, the process looks a little different: You have a brief text exchange with the airline’s 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. What are the hardest problems in tech we should be more focused on as a society? Technology is all about solving big thorny problems, yet one of the hardest things is knowing where…

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. Last week, I worked with my colleague Antonio Regalado, our senior editor for biomedicine, to break a truly inspiring and honestly kind of wild story: Chinese scientists used gene therapy to restore hearing ability in children who were...

For all of history we’ve turned to technology, again and again, to help us solve our hardest problems. Technology gave us warmth and light when it was cold and dark. It helped us pull fish from the sea and crops from the earth so we would not be hungry. It enabled us to cross over the oceans and fly through the skies, shrinking vast distances down to routine travel. It’s given us vaccines and...

Technology is all about solving big thorny problems. Yet one of the hardest things about solving hard problems is knowing where to focus our efforts. There are so many urgent issues facing the world. Where should we even begin? So we asked dozens of people to identify what problem at the intersection of technology and society that they think we should focus more of our energy on. We queried...

Over the past few years, the treatment of some hard-to-treat blood cancers has been revolutionized by therapies based on engineered T cells, which leverage the patient’s own immune system to destroy cancerous cells. But until recently researchers haven’t had much luck developing these T-cell therapies—called CAR T—for solid tumors, which make up the vast majority of cancer...

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. Three things to know about the White House’s executive order on AI The US has set out its most sweeping set of AI rules and guidelines yet in an executive order issued by…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This week everyone is talking about AI. The White House just unveiled a new executive order that aims to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI systems. It’s the most far-reaching bit of AI regulation the US has produced yet, and my colleague Tate...

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 US has set out its most sweeping set of AI rules and guidelines yet in an executive order issued by President Joe Biden today. The order will require more transparency from AI companies about how their...

Tracking a Big Mac hamburger’s journey from ranch to fast-food restaurant isn’t easy. Today’s highly segmented beef supply chain consists of a wide array of ranches, feedlots, packers, processors, distribution centers, and restaurants, each with its own set of carefully collected data. Yet in today’s complex digital world, organizations need more visibility than ever to manage inventory,...

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. Joy Buolamwini: “We’re giving AI companies a free pass” AI researcher and activist Joy Buolamwini is best known for a pioneering paper she co-wrote with Timnit Gebru in 2017 which exposed how commercial…

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Dozens of states sued Meta on October 24, claiming that the company knowingly harms young users. The case is a pretty big deal and will almost certainly have…

This is an excerpt from Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini, published on October 31 by Random House. It has been lightly edited.  The term “x-risk” is used as a shorthand for the hypothetical existential risk posed by AI. While my research supports the idea that AI systems should not be integrated into weapons systems because of...

Joy Buolamwini, the renowned AI researcher and activist, appears on the Zoom screen from home in Boston, wearing her signature thick-rimmed glasses.  As an MIT grad, she seems genuinely interested in seeing old covers of MIT Technology Review that hang in our London office. An edition of the magazine from 1961 asks: “Will your son get into college?”  I can tell Buolamwini finds...

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. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, on his hopes and fears for the future of AI Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s cofounder and chief scientist, is no longer focusing on building the next generation of his…

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. We don’t usually delve into war and politics here in The Checkup, but this week is an exception. The spreading human devastation of the Israel-Gaza conflict has led to tensions and strife in the...

Here’s the easy game Li Xincheng has been playing at home. Her mother says a few words. Then the six-year-old, nicknamed Yiyi, repeats what she heard. “Clouds, one by one, blossomed in the mountains,” says her mother, Qin Lixue, while covering her mouth so Yiyi can’t read her lips. “Clouds, one, one, blossomed in big mountains” Yiyi replies. It’s hard to believe that Yiyi...

Ilya Sutskever, head bowed, is deep in thought. His arms are spread wide and his fingers are splayed on the tabletop like a concert pianist about to play his first notes. We sit in silence. I’ve come to meet Sutskever, OpenAI’s cofounder and chief scientist, in his company’s unmarked office building on an unremarkable street in…

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. Three people were gene-edited in an effort to cure their HIV. The result is unknown. The news: The gene-editing technology CRISPR has been used to change the genes of human babies, to modify…

Sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks, underpinned by artificial intelligence (AI), are poised to combine communication and computing in a hyperconnected world of digital and physical experiences that will transform daily lives, experts predict. “In the past, we talked about internet of things, but with 6G, we talk about intelligent or smart internet of things,” says Qin Fei, president of...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Welcome back to The Spark! I’m June Kim, a new fellow reporting on climate at Tech Review. Casey is off enjoying a well-deserved break, so this week I will be filling in for her. But rest assured, we are back with some fun news about a classic...

The PFAS sample slides around the inside of the plastic jar when I swirl it, dark and murky, like thin maple syrup. For many, these toxic so-called “forever chemicals” amount to something of a specter, having crept into our lives—and bodies—quietly for more than half a century. In the environment, PFAS are clear and odorless.…