This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Brain implants helped create a digital avatar of a stroke survivor’s face The news: A woman who lost her ability to speak after a stroke 18 years ago was able to replicate her voice and even convey a limited range of facial expressions via a computer avatar. A pair of papers published in Nature yesterday about experiments that restored speech to women via brain implants show just how quickly this field is advancing. How they did it: Both teams used recording devices implanted into the brain to capture the signals controlling the small movements that provide facial expressions. Then they used AI algorithms to decode them into words, and a language model to adjust for accuracy. One team, led by Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, even managed to capture emotions. The caveats: Researchers caution that these results may not hold for other people, and either way, we are still a very long way from tech that’s available to the wider public. Still, these proofs of concept are hugely exciting. . —Cassandra Willyard How new batteries could help your EV charge faster The news: Chinese battery giant CATL has a new fast-charging battery—one that the company says can add up to 400 kilometers (about 250 miles) of range in 10 minutes. That’s faster than virtually all EV charging today, and CATL claims the new cells, which it plans to produce commercially by the end of 2023, will “open up an era of EV superfast charging.” Why it matters: Although EVs are increasingly popular, drivers can be held back by worries about the limited range of their batteries, and the need to charge for upwards of half an hour. Innovation in battery materials, if matched with progress in charging infrastructure, could help mimic the convenience of gas-powered cars and encourage adoption of EVs. —Casey Crownhart If you want to learn more about why fast charging is so crucial to the future of EVs, and what it’ll take to speed things up, read of The Spark, Casey’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things energy and climate. to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 India’s moon landing was a success Great news for all of us, as it means we’ll learn more about the moon’s largely unexplored south pole. ()+ Here’s why it’s significant, and what’ll come next. ( $)+ India seems to be replacing Russia as a space power. ( $)2 Greece is battling its biggest wildfires yetIt’s having to tackle scores of simultaneous blazes across the country. ( $)+ Why Lahania’s wildfires were so dreadful. ( $)+ Locals say the inferno began after firefighters left a ‘contained’ fire. ( $)+ The G20 pledged to end fossil fuel subsidies—then quadrupled them. ( $)+ Norway has opened the world’s biggest floating wind farm. ()3 Google is trying to have it both ways with AI and copyrightIt’s acknowledging musicians deserve to be paid for their data… but not publishers. ()+ Some of the thorniest questions about AI will be answered in court. ( $)+ How judges, not politicians, could dictate America’s AI rules. ()4 Nvidia posted insanely good financial resultsIt’s now the sixth-most valuable public company in the world, as it profits from the AI boom. ( $)5 AI is everywhere… yet also nowhereCEOs talk a good game, but drill into the details, and it’s yet to make any real impact for the vast majority of companies. ( $)+ Artificial intelligence is infiltrating health care. We shouldn’t let it make all the decisions. ()6 Instagram is still riddled with criminal activityIt’s not only failing to moderate the sale of guns, drugs, and counterfeit cash—it’s actively promoting and profiting from it. ()7 TikTok Shop is hemorrhaging money in the USBut whether the $500 million it’s spent so far this year is really a loss or an investment remains to be seen. ( $)8 How to talk to your kids about social mediaStep one? Set a good example yourself. ( $)+ How to log off. ()9 It’s official: gifs just aren’t cool these daysI’m as gutted as you are. ()10 Netflix has given up asking for its DVDs back If you’ve still got a DVD player, you’ve still got a short window of time to nab some free discs. () Quote of the day “They are going to grow up in a world where this is the norm.” —Yazmin Bahena, a middle school social studies teacher, tells the New York Times why she thinks schools are better off teaching students how to use AI tools than banning them. The big story The next act for messenger RNA could be bigger than covid vaccines February 2021 Many covid vaccines were built and tested in under a year, thanks to a previously unproven technology made 20 years earlier: messenger RNA. In the near future, researchers believe, shots that deliver temporary instructions into cells could also lead to vaccines against herpes and malaria, better flu vaccines. But researchers also see a future well beyond vaccines. They think the technology will permit cheap gene fixes for cancer, sickle-cell disease, and maybe even HIV. . —Antonio Regalado We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + You may not be ready to hear this, but is almost upon us.+ Tanaka Tatsuya creates adorable miniature . + We all know exercise is great, but starting can be daunting. to ease yourself into it. + I’d wholeheartedly welcome a slice of into my life.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, . The first time I took a road trip in an electric vehicle, I didn’t mind the charging very much. I wasn’t in a rush, and there was an In-N-Out Burger near the fast charger where I stopped. By the time I’d finished my fries, the car was pretty much ready to go. But a person can only eat so much fast food—if my journey had been much longer and I needed to stop more than once, the pit stop might not have felt quite so convenient. Especially when, by comparison, gas stations can get internal-combustion vehicles back on the road in just a few minutes. But fast charging might be getting even faster soon. Last week, the world’s largest EV-battery maker announced plans to make new battery cells that can charge nearly twice as quickly as the competition. It could be a big deal, . But there’s more to charging than just batteries, so let’s dive into fast charging: Why is it so crucial, and what will it take to speed things up? Charging up Charging speed is “very important” for EV uptake, especially as EVs start to gain ground in the market against gas-powered cars, says , an analyst for BNEF, an energy research firm. But despite its crucial role, . A lack of reliable charging infrastructure is one of the main barriers to EV adoption, according to the International Energy Agency. Existing stations are still too sparse in many parts of the world, including major EV markets like the US and Europe. The state of , the kind that can add up to 80% of a vehicle’s range in under 30 minutes, is especially rough. The US added about 6,300 fast chargers to its stock in 2022, bringing the total to around 28,000, . It’s a big number, but not nearly enough—by 2025, the country will need to quadruple the total number of installed chargers (including both fast and slow varieties) from 2022 levels to meet expected demand from all the EVs coming onto the roads, Things are going better in other parts of the world. Globally, about , and nearly all that growth happened in China. But even today’s fastest chargers still can’t come close to competing with a trip to the gas station. So in addition to getting more infrastructure built and keeping chargers reliably online, some companies want to speed up charging even more. Speeding up So how fast could charging really get? What I find interesting about progress in this area is that it’s a bit of a dance between charger technology and battery technology. You need both to actually speed up charging times at all. Take Tesla’s supercharger network, the most established in the US. (I’ll note here that I interned at Tesla for a few months in 2016, but I don’t have any ties to the company today.) Tesla Superchargers installed today top out at 250 kilowatts of peak power. That’s pretty speedy—for some vehicles, it can translate to adding 200 miles (or 320 kilometers) of range in about 15 minutes. The fourth version of the automaker’s chargers will reportedly have a . But a more powerful charger doesn’t necessarily mean faster charging. While there are vehicles on the roads today that can charge at this increased power level, like the Lucid Air, Tesla doesn’t make any—not yet, at least. Managing a battery’s charging speed isn’t quite as simple as just connecting a more powerful plug. As a battery charges, there are lithium ions shuttling around inside. If ions in the battery are moving faster than they can make it into the electrode, for example, they can start turning into lithium metal, which quickly destroys the capacity of the battery and can shorten its lifetime. So getting fast charging going is as much about battery chemistry as it is about charging infrastructure. And while many research efforts and technology announcements have been focused on boosting energy density—the amount of energy that can be packed into a battery of a given weight and size—there’s been a growing focus on charging speed recently, says , a senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy. That’s where recent news from battery giant CATL comes in. The company announced last week that its batteries could handle charging rates that would roughly double Tesla’s today. There are a lot of details that aren’t clear yet from this initial announcement—we don’t know what these batteries will cost, what their energy density will be, or how long they’ll last. But if the company can follow through on its promise to mass-produce these ultra-fast-charging batteries at the end of this year, it could mean a new era for EV charging. Related reading The US still needs to install a lot more chargers to take advantage of growing support for EVs, There’s been a long history of opposing technology in EV chargers in the US, but Tesla is gobbling up the competition, Some companies still think that avoiding charging altogether and could play a role in getting more EVs on the road. Another thing We’ve got a brand-new print magazine out! This issue takes on ethics, and it touches on everything from to . I’d highly recommend , an examination from my colleague Jessica Hamzelou about who gets to access experimental medical treatments. There’s also a range of stellar climate and environment stories inside, including a look at how could help scientists understand Earth’s climate cycles and this peek at —with salt marshes. There’s also a story about , and , the first such official in the world. I hope you’ll give it a read. Keeping up with climate Dairy farms in Texas are a huge source of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas. This investigation peeks into just how massive the problem is, and how scientists are trying to track it better. () We’ve come full circle, back to ships propelled by the wind. High-tech devices are being installed on massive ships to cut down on fuel consumption and emissions. One such vessel just completed the first leg of its maiden voyage. () New innovation hubs are popping up in unexpected places in the US, like Moses Lake, Washington. Here’s why legislation is helping this and other towns become hot spots for battery companies. () Grid storage is crucial to helping reach clean-energy goals. But New York is having trouble with some installations catching fire. () → Fire risk is why some companies are turning to alternative chemistries, like aqueous iron-based batteries. () Officials will be discharging treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant this week. The plan is controversial, but officials say that all the water being released will follow safety standards. () Automakers are slipping behind on goals for electric trucks. While the largest manufacturers project that electric versions of their vehicles will make up at least half of sales by 2030, there’s a long way to go. () → Here’s why the grid is ready for fleets of electric trucks. () Biogas producers are pushing methane from agricultural waste as a renewable fuel. But whether or not it can actually cut emissions is a bit complicated. ()

“What do you think of my artificial voice?” asks a woman on a computer screen, her green eyes widening slightly. The image is clearly computerized, and the voice is halting, but it’s still a remarkable moment. The image is a digital avatar of a person who lost her ability to speak after a stroke 18 years ago. Now, as part of an experiment involving a brain implant and AI algorithms, she can speak with a replication of her own voice and even convey a limited range of facial expressions via her avatar. A today from two independent research teams show just how quickly this field is advancing—though these proofs of concept are still a very long way from tech that’s available to the wider public. Each study involved a woman who had lost her ability to speak intelligibly–one after a brain-stem stroke and the other because of ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease. The participants each had a different type of recording device implanted in her brain, and both managed to speak at a rate of about 60 to 70 words per minute. That’s roughly half the rate of normal speech, but more than four times faster than had been previously reported. One team, led by Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, also captured the brain signals controlling the small movements that provide facial expressions, allowing them to create the avatar that represented the study participant’s speech in close to real time. The papers “represent really elegant and rigorous science and engineering for the brain,” says Judy Illes, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was not involved in either study. Illes especially appreciated the addition of an expressive avatar. “Communication is not just about words between people. It’s about words and messages that are communicated through tonality, expression, accent, context,” she says. “I think it was creative and quite thoughtful to try to bring that component of personhood to what is really fundamental science, engineering, neurotechnology.” Chang and his team have been working on the problem for more than a decade. In 2021, they demonstrated that they could capture brain activity from a person who had suffered a brain-stem stroke and translate those signals into written words and sentences, albeit slowly. In the latest paper, the team used a larger implant with double the number of electrodes—a device about the size of a credit card—to capture signals from the brain of another patient, named Ann, who lost her ability to speak after a stroke nearly two decades ago. The implant doesn’t record thoughts. Instead it captures the electrical signals that control the muscle movements of the lips, tongue, jaw, and voice box—all the movements that enable speech. For example, “if you make a P sound or a B sound, it involves bringing the lips together. So that would activate a certain proportion of the electrodes that are involved in controlling the lips,” says Alexander Silva, a study author and graduate student in Chang’s lab. A port that sits on the scalp allows the team to transfer those signals to a computer, where AI algorithms decode them and a language model helps provide autocorrect capabilities to improve accuracy. With this technology, the team translated Ann’s brain activity into written words at a rate of 78 words per minute, using a 1,024-word vocabulary, with an error rate of 23%. Chang’s group also managed to decode brain signals directly into speech, a first for any group. And the muscle signals it captured allowed the participant, via the avatar, to express three different emotions—happy, sad, and surprised—at three different levels of intensity. “Speech isn’t just about communicating just words but also who we are. Our voice and expressions are part of our identity,” Chang says. The trial participant hopes to become a counselor. It’s “my moonshot,” she told the researchers. She thinks this kind of avatar might make her clients feel more at ease. The team used a recording from her wedding video to replicate her speaking voice, so the avatar even sounds like her.The second team, led by researchers from Stanford, first posted its results as a . The researchers gave a participant with ALS, named Pat Bennett, four much smaller implants—each about the size of an aspirin—that can record signals from single neurons. Bennett trained the system by reading syllables, words, and sentences over the course of 25 sessions. The researchers then tested the technology by having her read sentences that hadn’t been used during training. When those sentences were drawn from a vocabulary of 50 words, the error rate was about 9%. When the team expanded the vocabulary to 125,000 words, which encompasses much of the English language, the error rate rose to about 24%. Speech using these interfaces isn’t seamless. It’s still slower than normal speaking, and while an error rate of 23% or 24% is far better than previous results, it’s still not great. In some instances, the system replicated sentences perfectly. In others, “How is your cold?” came out as “Your old.” But scientists are convinced they can do better. “What’s exciting is that as you add more of these electrodes, the decoder performance keeps going up,” says Francis Willett, a neuroscientist and author on the Stanford paper. “If we can get more electrodes and more neurons, then we should be able to be even more accurate.” The current systems aren’t practical for home use. Because they rely on wired connections and a bulky computer system to handle the processing, the women can’t use the brain implants to communicate outside of the experiment. “There’s a whole lot of work still there to turn this knowledge into something useful for people with unmet needs,” says Nick Ramsey, a neuroscientist at the UMC Utrecht Brain Center in Amsterdam and author of an . Illes also cautions that each team is reporting results from a single individual, and they may not hold for other people, even those with similar neurological conditions. “This is a proof of concept,” she says. “We know that brain injury is really messy and highly heterogeneous. Generalizability even within the stroke population or the ALS population—it’s possible, but it’s not certain.” But it does open up the possibility of a technological solution for people who lose the ability to communicate. “What we’ve done is to prove that it’s possible and that there is a pathway to do it,” Chang says. Being able to speak is crucial. The participant in Chang’s study used to rely on a letterboard to communicate. “My husband was so sick of having to get up and translate the letterboard for me,” she told researchers. “We didn’t argue, because he didn’t give me a chance to argue back. As you can imagine, this frustrated me greatly!”

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Ethics issue As technology is embedded deeper and further into our lives, it’s becoming increasingly important for us to properly grapple with ethical concerns. For example, how do we nurture the development of AI in a way that avoids societal harm? Who should get access to cutting-edge, experimental drugs? If a machine tells soldiers when to pull the trigger, who is responsible? These are just some of the questions we explore in the latest edition of our print magazine. If nothing else, this issue is guaranteed to make you think. It’s worth diving in and cover-to-cover, but if you’re pressed for time, I’d recommend kicking off with these knock-out pieces: + This looks at the tricky, painful questions that surround who ought to get access to which experimental medical treatments (it can be a far harder decision than you might imagine.) + An about All Tech Is Human, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting ethics and responsibility in tech, which forms a sort of non-religious congregation for our modern times. + This delves into the complex and messy ethics of making war with machines—a pressing topic as cutting-edge tech is being tested in Ukraine, often with little-to-no oversight. + This examines the occasionally heated debates that go on behind the scenes in the open source community, and where it seems to be heading next. + Our online lives are plagued with scams, hacks and fraud. And technology is never going to magically fix that—it’s down to us, as this explains. The fascinating evolution of typing Chinese characters Back in the ’80s, there was no way of processing Chinese characters on personal computers. It posed a tricky problem to fix, but one Chinese engineer named Wang Yongmin had a stab. He developed the first popular way to input Chinese characters into a computer in 1983, by breaking down a character into different strokes and assigning several strokes to each letter on the QWERTY keyboard. It was handy, but came with a big downside: users need to memorize which keys correspond to which strokes, so the learning curve is quite steep. The next step in the evolution of Chinese IMEs was the invention of typing by phonetic spelling in the ‘90s. But that also came with its own trouble, as hundreds of Chinese characters can share the same phonetic spelling. Eventually, far more efficient predictive keyboard software came along in 2006, and now that forms the foundation for how Chinese people interact with technologies and each other. But again (you guessed it) there’s a problem: these apps are a privacy nightmare. . —Zeyi Yang This story is from China Report, Zeyi’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on what’s happening in China. to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 India is about to try to land on the moon If it succeeds, it’ll become the first country to reach the lunar south pole. ( $)+ If you’re a fan of high-stakes space livestreams, watch it right now. () 2 Meta released an AI model that can translate a ton of languagesThese sorts of tools are improving at a dizzying pace. ()+ Meta’s new AI models can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages. ()3 The US is fighting extreme weather on many frontsFloods, wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves are making for a turbulent time in every corner of the country. ()+ Climate change is redrawing the disaster map. ()4 What did the €600 million Human Brain Project achieve? It didn’t manage to simulate the whole human brain (a tall order)—but it still stacked up some useful findings. ()+ How big science failed to unlock the mysteries of the human brain. () 5 Elon Musk is ridiculously powerful Ignore all the noise around X, and look at his intergovernmental reach via projects like Starlink. ( $)6 Inside the AI porn marketplace where everyone is for saleGenerative AI tools make it terrifyingly easy to create non-consensual images of anyone. ()+ Tips for ‘jailbreaking’ AI are already everywhere online. ( $)+ Scammers used ChatGPT to spam X with dodgy links. ( $)+ Three ways AI chatbots are a security disaster. ()7 LinkedIn is kinda… cool nowIf corporate blandness is as bad as it gets, it still beats the unappealing alternatives. ( $)8 What we can learn from Taiwan’s myopia epidemic Poor eyesight is a growing problem around the world, but there are ways to stop it becoming even worse. ( $)9 ‘Subliminals’ claim to transform teens’ lives These videos could make you better and more attractive. They might also do nothing. Or even make you feel worse. ( $)10 Your encrypted apps might not be as private as you thinkThe devil, as always, is in the details. ( $) Quote of the day “Because he’s following his principles, he is literally now subsisting on bread and water.” —Spare a thought for Sam Bankman-Fried, alleged to have defrauded people out of billions of dollars via his company FTX, who his lawyer says isn’t getting the vegan diet he requested, reports. The big story The fight for “Instagram face” FLORENCIA SOLARI August 2022 Through beauty filters, platforms like Instagram are helping users achieve increasingly narrowing beauty standards—though only in the digital world—at a stunningly rapid pace. There is evidence that excessive use of these filters online has harmful effects on mental health, especially for young girls. “Instagram face” is a recognized aesthetic: ethnically ambiguous with the flawless skin, big eyes, full lips, small nose, and perfectly contoured curves made accessible in large part by filters. And while Instagram has banned filters that encourage plastic surgery, massive demand for beauty augmentation on social media is complicating matters. . —Tate Ryan-Mosley We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + Do I need more salt in my diet? Probably not. Do I still want to try a salted anyway? Uh, yes.+ The origin of the word may be more literal than I’d imagined. + Photographer Ken Hermann’s are amazing. + Constantly surrounded by screens? Don’t forget to breathe. ( $)

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The idea of downloading a third-party keyboard to your phone may seem unnecessary to most people, but in China it’s the norm. Chinese is the only modern language that’s logographic, meaning that the way a character is written can be completely separate from its pronunciation (Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have their variations of the Chinese characters). Because of that, relying on a default keyboard would be incredibly difficult. So today, 800 million people in China use smart keyboard software that predicts what a user wants to type. But a strong reliance on this technology also presents a security risk: most keyboard apps transmit keystrokes to the cloud to enable better text prediction, creating an opportunity for the content to be intercepted if the apps don’t have strong enough encryption protocols. This week, I on one such encryption loophole found in Sogou, one of China’s most popular third-party keyboard apps. A group of researchers at the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, managed to intercept almost everything they typed into Sogou by deploying a two-decade-old exploit. Not only can this kind of software endanger people’s personal and financial information, but—perhaps more important—it can compromise otherwise encrypted messages in apps like Signal, and allow them to be caught by police or malicious actors. For more information on this particular loophole and the broader implications, you can read the story . But for the newsletter, I want to take you all on a geeky journey into the history of keyboard apps—or input method editors (IMEs), as they are formally called. IMEs are so ubiquitous and fundamental today that it’s easy to forget how much hard work was put into their creation. And they’re a fascinating example of how innovations can bridge the gap between the digital world and the real world. In the ’80s, there was no way of processing Chinese characters with the personal computers on the market. Even after the laborious process of , a big question remained: How do you type those characters? Particularly, how do you match the tens of thousands of Chinese characters to the 26 letters on a QWERTY keyboard? The first attempt was vastly different from the keyboard apps today, and centered on how Chinese characters are written. In August 1983, exactly 40 years ago, a Chinese engineer named Wang Yongmin developed the first popular way to input Chinese characters into a computer: Wubi. He did it by breaking down a Chinese character into different strokes and assigning several strokes to each letter on the QWERTY keyboard. The diagram above shows how each key is matched with three to 12 character components. The texts at bottom are poems to help users remember the combinations. For example, the Chinese character for dog, 犬, has several shapes in it: 犬, 一, 丿, and丶.These shapes were matched with the keys D, G, T, and Y, respectively. So when a user typed “DGTY,” a Wubi input software would match that to the character 犬. A guide on how the character 犬 should be typed into Wubi software. Wubi was able to match every Chinese character with a keystroke combination using at maximum four QWERTY keys. It’s considered one of the fastest ways to type Chinese, but the downside is also pretty obvious: users need to memorize which keys correspond to which strokes, so the learning curve is quite steep. (One way people have remembered the keyboard designations? !) The next step in the evolution of Chinese IMEs was the invention of typing by phonetic spelling. It may be hard to believe, but pinyin, the modern way of spelling each Chinese word in a standardized Latin alphabet, was only created in the 1950s. In the ’80s and ’90s, China started to experiment with teaching kids pinyin in school before teaching them how to write Chinese characters. One result was that pinyin became an easier and more widely accepted way to match Chinese characters to the Latin letters on a keyboard. To stick with the example of the character 犬 (dog), its pronunciation was standardized as quǎn, so typing Q, U, A, N on the standard keyboard would get you this character on your screen. A large number of pinyin-based IMEs were invented in the ’90s. The most prominent was Zhineng ABC, developed in 1993 by Zhu Shoutao, a computer science professor at Peking University. After Microsoft integrated Zhineng ABC as one of the default IMEs in Windows PCs, it became the most widely used one in the country. But typing by pinyinalso has its problems: dozens or hundreds of Chinese characters can share the same phonetic spelling. If you type QUAN, the computer has no way to tell which of 81 characters is the one you want. There are at least 81 Chinese charactershat are spelled quan.LELEKETANG So every time you typed a word in Zhineng ABC, you still needed to select the correct character from a long list of potential candidates. How Zhineng ABC displayed words for users to choose from. Luckily, they were always displayed in the same order, meaning you’d start to remember where characters you frequently used appeared in the little window. I can confirm this, as I learned to type with Zhineng ABC. The last character in my name is 毅, spelled yi; and yi happens to be the sound with the most possible matches in Chinese, with hundreds of characters spelled the same way (thanks, Mom and Dad). It was etched in my mind that when I wanted to type 毅 in Zhineng ABC, I needed to scroll to the fourth page and choose the sixth option. Obviously, that’s not efficient. In fact, it’s actually slower to type in Zhineng ABC than in Wubi. But the next generation of keyboard apps quickly surpassed its predecessors. In 2006, Sogou was released, essentially combining the foundation of pinyin typing and the tech of a search engine. Just as search engines recommend content that’s closest to what people are asking about, keyboard software can predict what users may want to type. With Sogou, the candidate characters and words are no longer displayed in a permanent order; the order changes based on a user’s typing history and what’s in the news. For example, now that I’ve typed 毅 a few times in this newsletter already, Sogou remembers that and puts it at the top whenever I type yi. Many other innovative IMEs were invented around the same time as Sogou. Some tried to combine the methods based on shapes with those based on spelling. Others enabled users to write a Chinese character directly on the device, since trackpads and touch screens were coming into use. But over time, these methods were slowly given up in favor of the much more efficient typing in smart keyboard apps like Sogou, which became the foundation of how Chinese people interact with technologies and each other. They became a necessity for people’s everyday lives—but this unfortunately opened everyone to a greater security risk. Even if more people knew about these vulnerabilities, it’s hard to imagine Chinese users would ever ditch the apps; instead, maybe it’s time users start demanding better security practices and more transparency from these companies. (There are many more fascinating aspects to the historical relationship between the Chinese language and technology. For example, people in Taiwan and Hong Kong have developed their own ways of typing Chinese characters. For a great introduction, I’d recommend the book by Jing Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale.) What else do you want to know about Chinese keyboard apps? Ask me any questions at zeyi@technologyreview.com. Catch up with China 1. A landmark agreement between the US and China to cooperate on science and technology is set to expire on August 27 after being in effect for 44 years. Its end would deal a heavy blow to the future of scientific research. () 2. Xiong’an, the Chinese city near Beijing that’s being built as a flagship smart city, is experiencing particularly devastating rain this summer, leaving some people to wonder if the choice of location was a mistake. () Just how bad was the rain in and around Beijing? One county recorded 1.6 years’ worth of rain in just three days. () 3. Huawei will provide surveillance systems for the Taliban to install across Afghanistan. () 4. To balance the increasing demand for burial space and the declining supply of land, Beijing is turning its cemeteries vertical and digital. () 5. A Chinese artist is re-creating the old houses demolished in the country’s modernization process, one miniature at a time. () 6. One Chinese AI-powered chatbot allowed users to create an ideal partner to talk to every day. When the app went out of business, the users were heartbroken. () 7. Dozens of Chinese companies are developing their own version of “miracle” weight-loss drugs like Wegovy that are popular in the West. () 8. American intelligence agencies issued a warning that their Chinese and Russian counterparts are now targeting space companies and their employees. () Lost in translation During the height of the pandemic, almost every Chinese province was building 方舱 (fangcang), makeshift hospitals where covid patients were quarantined. So what happened to them? combed through hundreds of government procurement reports across the country and found that local governments are spending millions of dollars to dismantle or repurpose them—or, in some cases, to build more of them. At least four makeshift hospitals are being shut down and the land returned to its original use, and the construction of five new ones has been halted. Equipment and construction materials from those hospitals are now being resold online at low prices. Meanwhile, 24 existing hospitals are being transformed into permanent medical or disease prevention centers. But there are 10 new hospitals still being built, with a total budget of $17 million. One possible explanation is that the local governments’ annual budgets were already set at the beginning of this year to cover the construction of fangcang. One more thing How smart can and should a public restroom be? , a big screen displays real-time information about which stalls and urinals are occupied and which are not. I understand the idea is to guide a passenger to an empty spot faster, but hear me out—maybe not everything needs to be “smartified.”

Chemists from MIT and Duke University have discovered a counterintuitive way to make polymers stronger. Working with polyacrylate elastomers, which are polymer networks made from strands of acrylate held together by linking molecules, the researchers found that they could increase the materials’ resistance to tearing up to nearly tenfold by using a weaker type of linker to join some of the polymer building blocks. Polymers like these are commonly used in car parts and as the “ink” for 3D-printed objects. The researchers are now exploring applications of the approach to other materials, such as rubber. “If you could make a rubber tire 10 times more resistant to tearing, that could have a dramatic impact on the lifetime of the tire and on the amount of microplastic waste that breaks off,” says Jeremiah Johnson, a professor of chemistry at MIT and one of the senior authors of the . A significant advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t appear to alter any other physical properties of the polymers, such as resistance to breaking down when heated. “Polymer engineers know how to make materials tougher, but it invariably involves changing some other property of the material that you don’t want to change. Here, the toughness enhancement comes without any other significant change in physical properties—at least that we can measure,” says Stephen Craig, a professor of chemistry at Duke University and another senior author. The project was a follow-­­up to a 2021 study in which Craig, Duke professor Michael Rubinstein, and MIT professor Bradley Olsen measured the strength of star polymer networks, which are made from two types of building blocks: a star shape with four arms and a linker that binds to the end of each arm, creating a net-like structure. As expected, when weaker end-linkers were used to hold the polymer strands together, the material became weaker. In the new work, the researchers investigated a different type of network in which polymer strands are cross-linked to other strands in random locations instead of being joined at the ends. This time, using weaker linkers made the material much more resistant to tearing. The reason, the researchers believe, is that the weaker bonds are randomly distributed as junctions between otherwise strong strands throughout the material. When this material is stretched to the breaking point, any cracks propagating through it try to avoid the stronger bonds and go through the weaker bonds instead. This means the crack has to break more bonds than it would if all of the bonds were the same strength. “Even though those bonds are weaker, more of them end up needing to be broken, because the crack takes a path through the weakest bonds, which ends up being a longer path,” Johnson says. In fact, polyacrylates that incorporated some weaker linkers were nine to 10 times harder to tear than polyacrylates made with stronger cross-linking molecules, even when the weak cross-linkers made up only about 2% of the material. “For two materials to have the same structure and same properties at the network level, but have an almost order-of-magnitude difference in tearing, is quite rare,” Johnson says.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type . QWERTY keyboards are inefficient as many Chinese characters share the same latinized spelling. As a result, many switch to smart, localized keyboard apps to save time and frustration. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones. But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole. . —Zeyi Yang Why we should all be rooting for boring AI Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. It hopes they could improve intelligence and operational planning. But those might not be the right use cases, . Generative AI tools, such as language models, are glitchy and unpredictable, and they make things up. They also have massive security vulnerabilities, privacy problems, and deeply ingrained biases. Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. The DoD’s best bet is to apply generative AI to more mundane things like Excel, email, or word processing. . This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. to receive it in your inbox every Monday. The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules. By analyzing those cores, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Now, a new European-led initiative hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. But that impressive feat is still only the first step. Once they’ve done that, they’ll have to figure out how they’re going to extract the air from the ice. . —Christian Elliott This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine, set to go live tomorrow. today for as low as $8/month to ensure you receive full access to the new Ethics issue and in-depth stories on experimental drugs, AI assisted warfare, microfinance, and more. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 How AI got dragged into the culture warsFears about ‘woke’ AI fundamentally misunderstand how it works. Yet they’re gaining traction. () + Why it’s impossible to build an unbiased AI language model. ()2 Researchers are racing to understand a new coronavirus variant It’s unlikely to be cause for concern, but it shows this virus still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. ()+ Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand. ()+ Why we can’t afford to stop monitoring it. ()3 How Hilary became such a monster stormMuch of it is down to unusually hot sea surface temperatures. ( $)+ The era of simultaneous climate disasters is here to stay. ()+ People are donning cooling vests so they can work through the heat. ( $)4 Brain privacy is set to become important Scientists are getting better at decoding our brain data. It’s surely only a matter of time before others want a peek. ( $)+ How your brain data could be used against you. ()5 How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chipsToday it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models. ( $)+ The chips it’s selling to China are less effective due to US export controls. ()+ These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. ()6 Inside the complex world of dissociative identity disorder on TikTok Reducing stigma is great, but doctors fear people are self-diagnosing or even imitating the disorder. ()7 What TikTok might have to give up to keep operating in the USThis shows just how hollow the authorities’ purported data-collection concerns really are. ()8 Soldiers in Ukraine are playing World of Tanks on their phonesIt’s eerily similar to the war they are themselves fighting, but they say it helps them to dissociate from the horror. ( $)9 Conspiracy theorists are sharing mad ideas on what causes wildfiresBut it’s all just a convoluted way to try to avoid having to tackle climate change. ( $)10 Christie’s accidentally leaked the location of tons of valuable art Seemingly thanks to the metadata that often automatically attaches to smartphone photos. ( $) Quote of the day “Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?” —An anonymous air traffic controller warns that staffing shortages in their industry, plus other factors, are starting to threaten passenger safety, the reports. The big story Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present VICTOR KERLOW October 2022 Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer. It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. . —Rebecca Ackermann We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + Watch Andrew Scott’s of the 1965 commencement address ‘Choose One of Five’ by Edith Sampson.+ Here’s how Metallica makes sure its live performances ROCK. ()+ Cannot deal with this utterly ludicrous . + Learn about a weird and wonderful new instrument called a .

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, . I’m back from a wholesome week off picking blueberries in a forest. So we published last week about the messy ethics of AI in warfare is just the antidote, bringing my blood pressure right back up again. Arthur Holland Michel does a great job looking at the around warfare and the military’s increasing use of artificial-intelligence tools. There are myriad ways AI could fail catastrophically or be abused in conflict situations, and there don’t seem to be any real rules constraining it yet. Holland Michel’s story illustrates how little there is to hold people accountable when things go wrong. Last year I wrote about how the war in Ukraine for defense AI startups. The latest hype cycle has only added to that, as companies—and now the military too—race to embed generative AI in products and services. Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. The department sees tons of potential to “improve intelligence, operational planning, and administrative and business processes.” But Holland Michel’s story highlights why the first two use cases might be a bad idea. Generative AI tools, such as language models, are and unpredictable, and they . They also have , , and . Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. Everyone agrees that humans should make the final call, but that is made harder by technology that acts unpredictably, especially in fast-moving conflict situations. Some worry that the people lowest on the hierarchy will pay the highest price when things go wrong: “In the event of an accident—regardless of whether the human was wrong, the computer was wrong, or they were wrong together—the person who made the ‘decision’ will absorb the blame and protect everyone else along the chain of command from the full impact of accountability,” Holland Michel writes. The only ones who seem likely to face no consequences when AI fails in war are the companies supplying the technology. It helps companies when the rules the US has set to govern AI in warfare are mere , not laws. That makes it really hard to hold anyone accountable. Even the AI Act, the EU’s sweeping upcoming regulation for high-risk AI systems, exempts military uses, which arguably are the highest-risk applications of them all. While everyone is looking for exciting new uses for generative AI, I personally can’t wait for it to become boring. Amid that people are starting to lose interest in the technology, companies might find that these sorts of tools are better suited for mundane, low-risk applications than solving humanity’s biggest problems. Applying AI in, for example, productivity software such as Excel, email, or word processing might not be the sexiest idea, but compared to warfare it’s a relatively low-stakes application, and simple enough to have the potential to actually work as advertised. It could help us do the tedious bits of our jobs faster and better. Boring AI is unlikely to break as easily and, most important, won’t kill anyone. Hopefully, soon we’ll forget we’re interacting with AI at all. (It wasn’t that long ago when machine translation was an exciting new thing in AI. Now most people don’t even think about its role in powering Google Translate.) That’s why I’m more confident that organizations like the DoD will find success applying generative AI in administrative and business processes. Boring AI is not morally complex. It’s not magic. But it works. Deeper Learning AI isn’t great at decoding human emotions. So why are regulators targeting the tech? Amid all the chatter about ChatGPT, artificial general intelligence, and the prospect of robots taking people’s jobs, regulators in the EU and the US have been ramping up warnings against AI and emotion recognition. Emotion recognition is the attempt to identify a person’s feelings or state of mind using AI analysis of video, facial images, or audio recordings. But why is this a top concern? Western regulators are particularly concerned about China’s use of the technology, and its potential to enable social control. And there’s also evidence that it simply does not work properly. Tate Ryan-Mosley dissected the thorny questions around the technology in last week’s edition of Bits and Bytes Meta is preparing to launch free code-generating softwareA version of its new that is able to generate programming code will pose a stiff challenge to similar proprietary code-generating programs from rivals such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The open-source program is called Code Llama, and its launch is imminent, according to The Information. () OpenAI is testing GPT-4 for content moderationUsing the language model to moderate online content could really help alleviate the mental toll content moderation takes on humans. OpenAI says it’s seen some promising first results, although the tech does not outperform highly trained humans. A lot of , such as whether the tool can be attuned to different cultures and pick up context and nuance. () Google is working on an AI assistant that offers life adviceThe generative AI tools could function as a life coach, offering up ideas, planning instructions, and tutoring tips. () Two tech luminaries have quit their jobs to build AI systems inspired by beesSakana, a new AI research lab, draws inspiration from the animal kingdom. Founded by two prominent industry researchers and former Googlers, the company plans to make multiple smaller AI models that work together, the idea being that a “swarm” of programs could be as powerful as a single large AI model. ()

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This startup has engineered a clever way to reuse waste heat from cloud computing The idea of using the wasted heat of computing to do something else has been mooted plenty of times before. Now, UK startup Heata is actually doing it. When you sign up, it places a server in your home, where it connects via your Wi-Fi network to similar servers in other homes—all of which process data from companies that pay it for cloud computing services. Each server prevents one ton of carbon dioxide equivalent per year from being emitted and saves homeowners an average of £250 on hot water annually, a considerable discount in a country where many inhabitants struggle to afford heat. The clever thing is that it provides a way to use electricity twice—providing services to the rapidly growing cloud computing industry and also providing domestic hot water—at a time when energy efficiency matters more than ever. . —Luigi Avantaggiato Tiny faux organs could crack the mystery of menstruation A group of scientists are using new tools akin to miniature organs to study a poorly understood—and frequently problematic—part of human physiology: menstruation. Heavy, sometimes debilitating periods strike at least a third of people who menstruate at some point in their lives, causing some to regularly miss work or school. Anemia threatens about two-thirds of people with heavy periods. Many people desperately need treatments to make their period more manageable, but it’s difficult for scientists to design medications without understanding how menstruation really works. That understanding could be in the works, thanks to endometrial organoids—biomedical tools made from bits of the tissue that lines the uterus. The research is still very much in its infancy. But organoids have already provided insights into why menstruation is routine for some people and fraught for others. Some researchers are hopeful that these early results mark the dawn of a new era. . —Saima Sidik Both of the stories featured today are from the new ethics-themed print magazine issue of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on Wednesday. to read it, if you don’t already! The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Canadian leaders are calling on Meta to reverse its news banThey say the block has been preventing people from getting access to crucial information about wildfires. ( $)+ 850 people are still missing after the Maui wildfires, its mayor has said. ()Lahaina’s governor says the state ‘tipped too far’ in trying to preserve water. ( $) 2 Stars are inking deals to license their AI doubles It creates new ways to make money—but also a hefty dose of anxiety for the future. ( $)+ People are hiring out their faces to become deepfake-style marketing clones. ()+ Despite early excitement, a lot of companies are struggling to meaningfully deploy AI. ()+ Most Americans want AI development to go more slowly. ()3 Russia’s bid to return to the moon failedIts Luna 25 spacecraft slammed into the moon’s surface yesterday. ( $)4 Cruise has to halve its robotaxi fleet after two crashes in San FranciscoJust over a week after it gained approval to operate at all hours in the city. ()+ Lidar on a chip will be crucial to the future of fully autonomous driving. ()5 Why some ships are getting back their sailsShipping accounts for 2.1% of global CO2 emissions—using wind instead of fuel could help to cut that. ()+ How ammonia could help clean up global shipping. ()6 Musk says X will no longer have a block functionThough it will remain for direct messages. ()+ A glitch broke links from before 2014 on X. ()+ Musk’s antics are starting to wear thin among some of his fans. ( $)+ Tesla is suing two former employees for allegedly leaking data. ( $)7 Here’s the trouble with getting your news from influencersIf you’re relying on a single creator, what happens when they’re wrong? ()8 Can video games help people with ADHD?As stimulant shortages drag on, people are starting to seek out help wherever they can. ( $)+ We may never fully know how video games affect our wellbeing. ()9 Haptic suits let you feel music through your skinGroovy! ( $) 10 How Apple won US teens overA recent survey found 87% have iPhones, and they’re unlikely to switch. ( $)+ Switching on subtitles is all the rage too. () Quote of the day “I used to think, ‘I’m concerned for my children and grandchildren.’ Now it’s to the point where I’m concerned about myself.” —Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, Canada, tells the how he feels about scientists’ most dire climate predictions coming true. The big story This fuel plant will use agricultural waste to combat climate change MOTE February 2022 A startup called Mote plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide, starting from 2024. It’s among a growing number of efforts to commercialize a concept first proposed two decades ago as a means of combating climate change, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, or BECCS. It’s an ambitious plan. However, there are serious challenges to doing BECCS affordably and in ways that reliably suck down significant levels of carbon dioxide. . —James Temple We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + Amused by a 2001 BBC news that refers to camera phones as a “gimmick.”+ It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but this sounds delicious to me. + Fan of Dave Grohl? I thoroughly recommend reading his . + Today I discovered you can deter seagulls from stealing by staring them down.

Moving quickly and carefully in two layers of gloves, Florian Krauss sets a cube of ice into a gold-plated cylinder that glows red in the light of the aiming laser. He steps back to admire the machine, covered with wires and gauges, that turns polar ice into climate data. If this were a real slice of precious million-year-old ice from Antarctica and not just a test cube, he’d next seal the extraction vessel under a vacuum and power on the 150-megawatt main laser, slowly causing the entire ice sample to sublimate directly into gas. For Krauss, a PhD student at the University of Bern in Switzerland, this would unlock its secrets, exposing the concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide trapped within. To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules. By analyzing those bubbles and the ice’s other contents, like dust and water isotopes, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Fischer (right) and Krauss with their LISE apparatus.COURTESY PHOTO Europe’s Beyond EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) initiative, now in its third year, hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. This would extend the climate record all the way back to the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, a mysterious period that marked a major change in the frequency of Earth’s climatic oscillations—cycles of repeating glacial and warm periods. Successfully drilling a core that old—a years-long endeavor—might be the easy part. Next, scientists must painstakingly free the trapped air from that ice. Krauss and his colleagues are developing an innovative new way to do that. “We’re not interested in the ice itself—we’re just interested in the air samples included, so we needed to find a new way to extract the air from the ice,” he says. Melting isn’t an option because carbon dioxide easily dissolves into water. Traditionally, scientists have used mechanical extraction methods, grinding up samples of individual layers of ice to free the air. But grinding wouldn’t be effective for the Beyond EPICA ice in the university’s storage freezer, which is kept at 50 °C below zero. The oldest ice at the very bottom of the core will be so compressed, and the individual annual layers so thin, that bubbles won’t be visible—they’ll have been pressed into the lattice of ice crystals, forming a new phase called clathrate. “At the very bottom, we expect 20,000 years of climate history compressed in only one meter of ice,” says Hubertus Fischer, head of the past climate and ice core science group at Bern. That’s a hundredth the thickness of any existing ice core record. The new method Krauss and Fischer are developing is called deepSLice. (A pizza menu is taped to the side of the device right under the laser warning labels, a gift from a pizzeria in Australia with the same name.) DeepSLice has two parts. The Laser-Induced Sublimation Extraction Device, or LISE, fills half a room in the team’s lab space. LISE aims a near-infrared laser continuously at a 10-centimeter slice of ice core so that it turns directly from solid to gas under extremely low pressure and temperature. The sublimated gas then freezes into six metal dip tubes cooled to 15 K (-258 °C), each containing the air from one centimeter of ice core. Finally the samples are loaded into a custom-made absorption spectrometer based on quantum cascade laser technology, which shoots photons through the gas sample to measure concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide simultaneously. Another big advantage of this system is that it takes a lot less ice (and work) than the old method of analysis, in which scientists measured methane by melting ice (it doesn’t dissolve into water) and measured carbon dioxide by grinding ice. DeepSLice offers “a unique capability that nobody else has,” says Christo Buizert, an ice core scientist at the University of Oregon and the ice analysis lead for COLDEX (the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration)—the US equivalent of Beyond EPICA, which is currently in a “friendly race” with the Europeans to drill a continuous core down to 1.5-million-­year-old ice. “What they’re trying to do, sublimating ice—people have been trying this for a long time, but it’s one of the most challengingways to extract gases from ice,” Buizert says. “It’s a very promising way, because you get 100% of the gases out, but it’s very difficult to do. So the fact that they’ve managed to get it working is very impressive.” Krauss and Fischer still have about three years before they get their hands on that section of critical ice. There are still kinks to iron out, like how to recapture the samples from the spectrometer for additional analysis, but they think they’ll be ready when it finally arrives in freezer containers on a ship from Antarctica via Italy. “Our latest results showed us we are on a good track, and actually, we achieved the precision we wanted to,” Krauss says. “So I’m sure it’s going to be ready.” Christian Elliott is a science and environmental reporter based in Chicago.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The future of open source is still very much in flux When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn’t have known that the machine would ignite a revolution. While the early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software, much to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at the university. A few years later, Stallman released GNU, an operating system designed to be a free alternative to one of the dominant operating systems at the time: Unix. The free-software movement was born, with a simple premise: for the good of the world, all code should be open, without restriction or commercial intervention. Forty years later, tech companies are making billions on proprietary software, and much of the technology around us is inscrutable. But while Stallman’s movement may look like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry. . —Rebecca Ackermann Rebecca’s story is from the next upcoming issue of our print magazine, which is all about ethics. If you don’t subscribe already, to receive a copy when it publishes. What we can learn from the cancer drug shortage If you’ve been following health headlines, you may have heard that many prescription drugs are in short supply. ADHD medicines and steroids have also been hard to find. But for cancer patients, the lack of common chemotherapy drugs could mean the difference between life and death. The current cancer drug crisis stems from a quality control incident in an Indian pharmaceutical manufacturing plant last fall. When it halted production, it was the first domino to fall in a chain that would lead to a nationwide shortage of cancer therapy drugs—and the impact on patients has been profound. . —Cassandra Willyard This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter, which Cassandra is writing while Jessica Hamzelou is on sabbatical. to receive it in your inbox every Thursday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 AI-generated text is surfacing in academic journalsThe problem is, it’s still incredibly difficult to detect reliably. ( $)+ Meta wants to challenge OpenAI with new code-generating software. ( $)+ AI-text detection tools are really easy to fool. () 2 Bitcoin is plunging againPrices have plummeted after traders raced to sell up. ()+ One potential reason? SpaceX has sold its crypto holdings. ( $)+ The NFT ecosystem is spiraling into chaos. ()+ Bored Ape owners are furious that their purchases turned out to be bad investments. () 3 The world’s forests are rapidly dying Even including trees that scientists believed were virtually indestructible. ()+ Inside the quest to engineer climate-saving “super trees.” ()4 Boogaloo Facebook pages keep returning from the deadFollowers of the movement, who are preparing for a future US Civil War, have grown wise to the company’s algorithmic detection methods. () 5 Neurological device startups are boomingBut many of them face a long wait for regulatory approval. ( $)+ A brain implant changed her life. Then it was removed against her will. () 6 We need to change the way we recycle our wasteUnsurprisingly, AI is being touted as a solution. ( $)+ AI has a bad track record when it comes to climate change. ( $)+ Why you might recycle a battery—and how to do it. () 7 A Chinese company has pulled the plug on its romantic chatbot Leaving dedicated female fans completely heartbroken. ()+ Tinder and other dating apps are no longer background-checking users. () 8 Financial influencers want to educate their audiencesAnd they’ve got the qualifications to back it up. ( $)+ If you want to make money from influencing, don’t rely on Amazon. ( $) 9 The cult of Elon Musk is built on romance novel tropesJust ask his long-suffering ex-wife. () 10 Counterfeit cheese is on the rise But microchips are one high-tech way of making sure that fromage is the real deal. () Quote of the day “It thinks it’s a road and it ain’t, because it ain’t got a brain and it can’t tell that it’s freshly poured concrete.” —Paul Harvey, a San Francisco resident, tells news site about a driverless car that managed to lodge itself in wet concrete. The big story This chemist is reimagining the discovery of materials using AI and automation October 2021 Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a Mexico City–born, Toronto-based chemist, has devoted much of his life to contemplating worst-case scenarios. What if climate change proceeds as expected, or gets significantly worse? Could we quickly come up with the materials we’ll need to cheaply capture carbon, or make batteries from something other than costly lithium? Materials discovery—the science of creating and developing useful new substances—often moves at a frustratingly slow pace. The typical trial-and-error approach takes an average of two decades, making it too expensive and risky for most companies to pursue. Aspuru-Guzik’s objective—which he shares with a growing number of computer-­savvy chemists—is to shrink that interval to a matter of months or years. And advances in AI, robotics, and computing are bringing new life to his vision. . —Simon Lewsen We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + The music of Brian Eno and soap: what more do you need for a start to your weekend?+ Scandinavia may be the happiest area on earth, but they also love a bit of .+ This list of the best (as chosen by an astrophysicist) is fun.+ Good luck to , who’ll face Spain in the final of the women’s soccer World Cup on Sunday! + Oh, to be a chasing a sunbeam.

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, . If you’ve been following health headlines in recent months, you may have heard that many prescription drugs are in short supply. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a piece about the scarcity. Certain have also been hard to find. But many of the headlines that caught my eye have focused on. For cancer patients, shortages could mean the difference between life and death. Last week, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) released the to assess the severity of these shortages. Drug shortages are nothing new, but results from more than 1,000 pharmacists suggest that the current crisis is particularly concerning. More than 99% of respondents, nearly all of them pharmacists who work for hospitals or health systems, reported that they were facing drug shortages. In some cases, shortages are annoying but manageable. “We’re talking about things that we can easily substitute for something else. Or we can provide a different dosage or a different route of administration,” says Michael Ganio, senior director ofPharmacy Practice and Quality at ASHP. But in this latest survey, nearly a third of respondents said that current shortages had forced their hospital to ration, delay, or cancel treatments or procedures. “That’s significant,” he adds. The current cancer drug crisis stems from an incident last fall. Many of the pharmaceuticals sold in the US are manufactured overseas. In November, the Food and Drug Administration toured one of those plants in India, a facility owned by Intas Pharmaceuticals. Inspectors observed numerous violations related to quality control and data integrity. As a result, the plant halted production. It was the first domino to fall in a chain that would lead to a nationwide shortage of cancer therapy drugs.. Before the shutdown, Intas produced about 50% of US’s supply of cisplatin, a common cancer drug used to treat testicular, ovarian, bladder, head and neck, lung, and cervical cancers. When the plant halted production, other manufacturers weren’t able to ramp up enough to avoid a shortfall. Manufacturers don’t have that kind of surge capacity. If a company consistently produces 10% of the market share, “what is their incentive to have capacity to produce 30 or 40%?” says , a health policy researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As cisplatin became scarce, oncologists switched to carboplatin, another common cancer therapy, which Intas also produced. With Intas no longer producing carboplatin and increasing demand, that medicine is now also in short supply. It was “like a ripple effect in the supply chain,” Socal says. A in May revealed that a whopping 93% were experiencing shortages of carboplatin. The impact on patients has been profound. Some have gotten smaller doses. Others have had to skip or delay treatments. are advising doctors to reserve cisplatin and carboplatin for patients who have a chance at a cure. “This shortage will lead to people dying,” Ravi Rao, an oncologist at a cancer center in Fresno, California,. “There’s just no way around it. You cannot remove these lifesaving drugs and not have bad outcomes.” Even if Intas comes back on line and the shortage eases, the system will still be vulnerable. Socal likens the drug manufacturing system to a person with a chronic illness. Flare-ups may come and go, but we “still have that chronic condition underlying all of our supply chain.” Generic drugs are especially vulnerable to shortages because profits are so slim. Cisplatin and carboplatin both cost less than $25 a vial. “The free market is pushing for this race to the bottom,” Socal says. When prices—and therefore profits—are so low, manufacturers don’t have any incentive to invest in improving manufacturing practices for these drugs, which might include upgrading equipment, expanding capacity, and creating redundancies. The same typically isn’t true for name-brand medications, which are still under patent and thus produced by a single company. “There’s a lot of economic incentive to keep those production lines up and running.” Ganio says. There are ways to blunt the impact of shortages. Better planning could help. Currently, drug shortages happen with very little warning and the market is forced to react. But AI could provide an early warning system for drug shortages to help manufacturers and pharmacies plan ahead. One supply chain management company, TraceLink, has developed a product designed to do just that. The tool uses real-time data from the supply chain to predict drug shortages and their duration. According to TraceLink, the system can provide predictions up to 90 days in advance with greater than 80% accuracy. Things like the Intas shutdown, however, might be difficult to predict. When FDA inspectors record violations, the agency doesn’t always make the findings publicly available in a timely manner, Ganio says. “An FDA inspection report or warning letter often lags by several months.” Advanced manufacturing tech could also help curb shortages. That might include things like 3D printing of drugs, automated monitoring to identify equipment that might not be working properly, and continuous manufacturing rather than batch production, which is more efficient, but expensive to implement, Ganio says. But these tech fixes won’t address the root of the problem. Generic manufacturers need more incentives to focus on quality, not just cost. “The only information that is [currently] available to anyone in the supply chain is the price,” Socal says. If drug purchasers had a metric related to quality—for example, higher grades for manufacturers that have never had quality issues, and lower grades for plants that have had manufacturing violations—they could incorporate that into their purchasing decisions. That might be something the FDA could help implement. . Or purchasers themselves could require that companies disclose their ratings in their contracts. None of the proposed fixes will be easy or simple, but they’re urgently needed. “Lives are at stake,” Socal says. “Public health in America is really depending on a working and dependable drug supply chain.” Read more from Tech Review’s archive Portable manufacturing systems could provide on demand meds in the event of a shortage, like a backup generator for the pharmaceutical industry, . Back in 2013, Karen Weintraub wrote about the race between two Biotech giants to . Can AI help pharma develop better drugs? from earlier this year. (He also wrote about the quest .) From around the web After the death of a clinical trial participant by suicide, regulators suspended human research at The New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the lead researcher, a Columbia professor, resigned. Here’s what might have gone wrong. () A new study finds that older adults who were hospitalized for Covid have twice the risk of death in the month after discharge as older adults who were hospitalized because of the flu. But it’s not clear whether that’s due to the nature of the viruses or to differences in immunity. () More than half of people who need medication for addiction aren’t getting it. () Covid hospitalizations are on the rise again. Sigh. () The Smithsonian has a collection of more than 30,000 human body parts, many of them taken without consent from Black and indigenous people. Why haven’t they returned them? ()

Using heat generated by computers to provide free hot water was an idea born not in a high-tech laboratory, but in a battered country workshop deep in the woods of Godalming, England. “The idea of using the wasted heat of computing to do something else has been hovering in the air for some time,” explains Chris Jordan, a 48-year-old physicist, “but only now does technology allow us to do it adequately. “This is where I prototyped the thermal conductor that carries heat from computer processors to the cylinder filled with water,” he says, opening his workshop door to reveal a 90-liter electric boiler. “We ran the first tests, and we understood that it could work.” Jordan is cofounder and chief technology officer of , an English startup that has created an innovative cloud network where computers are attached to the boilers in people’s homes. View of Godalming, Surrey, UK. Over 4 million people in the UK struggle to afford heat. LUIGI AVANTAGGIATO Next to the boiler is a computer tagged with a sticker that reads: “This powerful computer server is transferring the heat from its processing into the water in your cylinder.” A green LED light indicates that the boiler is running, Jordan explains. “The machine receives the data and processes it. Thus we are able to transfer the equivalent of 4.8 kilowatt-hours of hot water, about the daily amount used by an average family.” When you sign up with Heata, it places a server in your home, where it connects via your Wi-Fi network to similar servers in other homes—all of which process data from companies that pay it for cloud computing services. Each server prevents one ton of carbon dioxide equivalent per year from being emitted and saves homeowners an average of £250 on hot water annually, a considerable discount in a region where 13% of the inhabitants struggle to afford heat. The Heata trial, funded by a grant from Innovate UK, a national government agency, has been active in Surrey County for more than a year. To date, 80 units have been installed, and another 30 are slated to have a boiler to heat by the end of October. Heata’s CTO, Chris Jordan, in his workshop. A laser cutter produces insulation for the Heata unit, which harnesses excess heat from cloud computing. A batch of heat pipes at Heata Labs. Dave, a radio engineer, tests the operation of the server at Heata Labs. Parts of the Heata unit before assembly.LUIGI AVANTAGGIATO Andrew, a mechanical engineer, installs the Heata unit in an apartment in Surrey. At 75% utilization, the Heata unit will provide around 80% of an average UK household’s hot water. Homeowner James Heather on his Heata: “We no longer need the energy for cooling the compute units, and we don’t need the energy for heating our hot water either, because we’re using the waste heat from the unit to do it.” Heata’s solution is “particularly elegant,” says Mike Pitts, deputy challenge director of Innovate UK, calling it a way to “use electricity twice—providing services to a rapidly growing industry (cloud computing) and providing domestic hot water.” The startup is now part of Innovate UK’s Net Zero Cohort, having been identified as a key part of the push to achieve an economy where carbon emissions are either eliminated or balanced out by other technologies. Heata’s process is simple yet introduces a radical shift toward sustainable management of data centers: instead of being cooled with fans, which is expensive and energy intensive, computers are cooled by a patented thermal bridge that transports the heat from the processors toward the shell of the boiler. And rather than operating with a data center located in an energy-intensive location, Heata works as an intermediary for computing: it receives workloads and distributes them to local homes for processing. Businesses that need to process data are using the Heata network as a sustainable alternative to traditional computing. The company has created what Heata’s designer and cofounder Mike Paisley describes as a diffuse data center. Rather than cooling a building that holds many servers, he explains, “our model of sustainability moves data processing [to] where there is need for heat, exploiting thermal energy waste to provide free hot water to those who need it, transforming a calculation problem into a social and climatic advantage.” The people involved in the Heata experiment are diverse in age and household composition, and their reasons for participating are varied: a need to save on bills, a love for the environment, an interest in helping combat climate change, and fascination with seeing a computer heat the water. The Heata team among the trees at Wood Farm, Godalming, where the idea originated.LUIGI AVANTAGGIATO Among the satisfied customers is Helen Whitcroft, mayor of Surrey Heath. “We started reducing our carbon footprint many years ago by installing photovoltaic panels,” she says. “We recently bought batteries to store the energy we produce. Curiosity also moved us: it didn’t seem possible that a computer could heat water, but it works.” Luigi Avantaggiato is an Italian documentary photographer.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines In recent years, intelligent autonomous weapons—weapons that can select and fire upon targets without any human input—have become a matter of serious concern. Giving an AI system the power to decide matters of life and death would radically change warfare forever. But intelligent autonomous weapons that fully displace human decision-making have (likely) yet to see real-world use. Even the “autonomous” drones and ships fielded by the US and other powers are used under close human supervision. However, these systems have become sophisticated enough to raise novel questions—ones that are trickier to answer than the well-­covered wrangles over killer robots. What does it mean when a decision is only part human and part machine? And when, if ever, is it ethical for that decision to be a decision to kill? . —Arthur Holland Michel If you’re interested in reading more about AI’s role in making life or death decisions, check out my colleague Will Douglas Heaven’s exploring the relationship between mortality and automation. What’s changed in the US since the breakthrough climate bill passed a year ago? When President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law one year ago this week, he set aside an estimated $369 billion to fight climate change. Researchers and others involved in climate have been speculating about what that vast amount of cash will all mean ever since. Casey Crownhart, our climate reporter, dug into what has changed since then, and what’s next for the breakthrough climate law. . Casey’s story is from The Spark, her weekly climate newsletter. to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Intel is abandoning its attempted Israeli chipmaker purchaseIt was essentially scuttled by Chinese regulators. ( $)+ China missed a crucial deadline to approve the deal. ( $)+ The US-China chip war is still escalating. ()2 Google is testing a chatbot that offers life adviceBut how seriously you take its suggestions (if it’s ever released) is up to you. ( $)+ The therapists using AI to make therapy better. () 3 Amazon’s first aiders are pushing injured employees to keep workingStaff claim their reports of serious injuries are being overlooked. ( $)4 An algorithm-less TikTok is on the horizonBut is TikTok still TikTok without its hyper-personalized recommendations? ( $)+ New York City has jumped on the TikTok ban hype train. () 5 A US court has attempted to ban an abortion drugWhile the case lacks legal merit, it’s still a thorn in the side of health providers. ()+ For now, the ruling doesn’t affect access to mifepristone. ()+ Texas is trying out new tactics to restrict access to abortion pills online. () 6 A pig kidney transplant has worked for more than a monthThe gene-edited transplant into a brain-dead person could help pave the way to more resilient, safer organs. ( $)+ Meet the pigs that could solve the human organ transplant crisis. () 7 Computing is a major climate villainHowever, researchers are confident that achieving net-zero carbon emissions is possible. ( $)+ We’re getting a better idea of AI’s true carbon footprint. () 8 Southeast Asia’s taxi drivers are born influencersThe natural storytellers are spellbinding online audiences. () 9 Beijing’s cemeteries are going digital Traditional headstones are out, digital screens are in. ( $)+ What happens when you donate your body to science. () 10 Chefs aren’t worried about chatbots Even though others in the hospitality industry are growing increasingly curious. ()+ Nutritionally speaking, ChatGPT’s recipes are somewhat lacking. ( $) Quote of the day “It’s the Wild West. There is literally no capacity.” —Eric Jonas, who is in the process of starting an AI drug discovery company, is just one of many startup workers struggling to procure crucial AI chips amid a global shortage, he tells . The big story Stitching together the grid will save lives as extreme weather worsens July 2022The blistering heat waves that set temperature records across much of the US this summer strained electricity systems, and threatened to knock out power in vulnerable regions of the country. While the electricity largely stayed online, heavy use of energy-sucking air-conditioners and the intense heat contributed to scattered problems and close calls. The nation’s isolated and antiquated grids are in desperate need of upgrades. One solution would be to more tightly integrate the country’s regional grids, stitching them together with more long-range transmission lines, allowing power to flow between regions to where it’s needed more urgently. However, that’s a mission that’s fraught with challenges. . —James Temple We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + A dinner party for ?! Sign me up.+ For fans of The White Lotus’ iconic theme tune, this by the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is incredible.+ Enjoy these for the ages.+ in a dessert? If you say so.+ There’s nothing this won’t try and shred—even if it needs a bit of help sometimes.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, . I don’t know if there’s a single conversation I’ve had about climate technology over the past year that didn’t reference the Inflation Reduction Act at least once. I’m probably an exception to the rule, though. As a climate reporter, I’m firmly in the camp of people who think about climate change all the time—but not everyone does. And if you haven’t heard of this law, you’re not alone. According to a new poll, In case you fall into this group, let me hit the high points for you: It’s often referred to as the IRA for short Signed into law by President Biden on August 16, 2022 (a year ago today!) Included an estimated $369 billion in funding for climate change Made up of grants, loans, and a whole lot of tax credits That’s a metric boatload of money, and people in climate have been speculating about what it will all mean ever since we got the first version of the bill more than 365 days ago. I just about where things stand with US climate tech policy after one year of the IRA. , and for the newsletter this week let’s consider what’s changed and what’s next for the breakthrough climate law. Manufacturing Then: My colleague James Temple and I , which was then still a bill, as soon as the draft text was released in late July 2022. It was clear at the time that this would be a very big deal for US climate action: Ryan Fitzpatrick, director of the climate and energy program at Third Way, said it’s an ambitious and politically pragmatic bill designed to boost US manufacturing, provide support where job sectors are shifting, and build out the infrastructure needed to shift to cleaner, modern energy systems. “This would be the largest investment of its kind in American history,” he said. Now: While a lot of the funding still hasn’t made it out the door yet, there are early signs that this boost in US manufacturing is well underway. There’s a constant flurry of companies citing the IRA while announcing massive investments in new manufacturing facilities in the US for clean technologies. Take First Solar, the largest US solar panel manufacturer. Just two weeks after the IRA became law last year, the company and build a $1.2 billion factory in the Southeast, directly citing the climate law in its announcement. A few weeks ago, the company made and build yet another billion-dollar factory. In total, companies have announced over in climate technology manufacturing since the IRA was signed into law. Electric vehicles Then: There were early concerns that could limit how many vehicles would wind up qualifying for them, limiting their effectiveness. The rules lay out that consumers would only get the full $7,500 credit for a new EV if the vehicle is made from materials and batteries from the US (or free trade agreement partners). The rules attached to the credits were aimed at boosting US production of battery minerals, components, and cells. At the time, it wasn’t totally clear exactly how everything would get interpreted, and just how restrictive these would wind up being. Now: We’ve gotten some clarity on most of the EV tax credits, and it seems like the agency has largely erred on the side of allowing more vehicles to qualify. But even today, there are looming questions on this major program. Namely, there’s a bit that excludes EVs that have a “foreign entity of concern” involved in their supply chain starting in 2024. That term hasn’t really been defined yet—though there’s a chance that China, which dominates several parts of the EV supply chain, will fall into that category. Check out for more on what that could mean for battery prices and EV ownership. I’d also recommend looking back at a newsletter from my colleague Zeyi Yang about how Greenhouse gas emissions Then: The number I heard over and over last year was 40%—experts said that the IRA would cut US emissions by 40% from 2005 levels by 2030. It was more than what the country was on track for (around a 30% to 35% cut) but less than what the country needs to do to meet international targets (a 50% reduction). Thinking about how modeling experts go from hundreds of billions of dollars to an expected emissions cut broke my brain a little, so I dove into the weeds and spoke with several of them for a story last August about how . At the time they said that we can assume that lower prices means more uptake of products like EVs and solar panels, and we know how much those products cut emissions. But they also pointed out that there are still a lot of complicating factors. People don’t always behave rationally, for example. It can also be hard to tease out how much policies push people to adopt new products that are already getting pretty cheap on their own. That all means we should probably take these predictions with a bit of caution. Now: The emissions effects from the IRA’s policies are still mostly projections. We won’t know for a while exactly how well all this money translates into climate action. But early signs in manufacturing and EV uptake are very positive. For even more on how well the IRA might work, and what’s coming next for the breakthrough legislation, Related reading For more on what’s in the IRA and what experts thought at the time, check out our , as well as my follow-up stories on the and how emissions modelers worked to figure out (now a senior economist for the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers), published last November, lays out how the IRA ties climate action with economic success. My colleague James TempleThere was () concern that investing in carbon capture could extend the life of fossil fuel plants. But James points out that the subsidies could be crucial in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like steel and cement. Another thing The US just invested over $1 billion in carbon removal. The funding is mostly going to two direct air capture hubs—one in Texas and the other in Louisiana. By some estimates, we may need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year to stay below 2 °C of global warming. That’s a daunting figure, one that could require trillions of dollars to pull off. For more on this funding and how carbon removal fits into climate goals, Keeping up with climate Last week, wildfires tore through the island of Maui in Hawaii, killing and burning hundreds of acres. Climate change is making Hawaii drier, putting the islands at greater risk for harmful fires. () One of the clearest outcomes of climate change is rising temperatures. There are great data visualizations in this story outlining how that heat affects so many parts of our society, as well as ecosystems around the world. () A judge just ruled that the state of Montana must consider climate change when approving new oil and gas projects. The ruling comes after a group of young people sued the state, arguing that climate change infringed on their rights to a healthful environment. () The western US is getting dry, and this LA Times opinion piece lays out why it might be time to ditch “nonfunctional grass” in the state. I say let’s take this one step further and pull more lawns out in favor of native wildflower patches. () There’s been another delay on the details of the most anticipated pieces of the massive US climate bill—a tax credit program for hydrogen fuel. Don’t expect the rules, which could decide whether this program helps or hurts emissions, until at least October. () The phrase “circular economy” is used so much in marketing, especially in plastics, that it’s basically lost all meaning. Here’s how the term has been warped into quasi-greenwashing mush. () Plans to build offshore wind farms in New Jersey are running up against local opposition, despite the fact that turbines would be placed 15 miles offshore. () The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just upgraded its forecast for hurricane season: the Atlantic has a 60% chance of an above-normal season, with 14 to 21 named storms expected and between two and five major hurricanes. () Just for fun It’s not often that physics hype enters the mainstream online consciousness, but buzz about room-temperature superconductors briefly took over my social media over the past few weeks. Researchers in South Korea found a material, dubbed LK-99, that they said displayed superconductivity—meaning it can conduct electricity perfectly, without losing any. It would have been huge, if true. Unfortunately, it’s been a few weeks, and no other researchers have been able to replicate the findings. For more on the hope and hype and what all this says about technology and climate progress, check out

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The rise of the tech ethics congregation Just before Christmas last year, a pastor preached a gospel of morals over money to several hundred members of his flock. But the leader in question was not an ordained minister, nor even a religious man. Polgar, 44, is the founder of All Tech Is Human, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting ethics and responsibility in tech. His congregation is undergoing dramatic growth in an age when the life of the spirit often struggles to compete with cold, hard, capitalism. Its leaders believe there are large numbers of individuals in and around the technology world, often from marginalized backgrounds, who wish tech focused less on profits and more on being a force for ethics and justice. But attempts to stay above the fray can cause more problems than they solve. . —Greg M. Epstein How a half-trillion dollars is transforming climate technology One year ago, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law, marking the most significant action on climate change to date from the federal government. The legislation set aside hundreds of billions of dollars to support both new and existing technologies in an effort to slash costs for clean technologies and cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. Experts say the IRA has already begun making waves, most visibly through a steady stream of announcements unveiling new manufacturing facilities in the US. However, the legislation’s most significant effects are still to come, as many of the programs are designed to last for a decade or longer. And there are even some remaining questions about how key pieces of the bill will play out. . —Casey Crownhart China’s car companies are turning into tech companies This year, car buyers in China are being bombarded with claims about how advanced Navigation on Autopilot systems are coming to their city. These software systems are not quite fully autonomous driving, but they let cars stop, steer, and accelerate by themselves. Both EV makers and AI startups have published aggressive roadmaps for national rollouts of their services. Their willingness to embrace software subscription models illustrates how auto companies are rapidly turning into tech companies—and nowhere is that transformation happening faster than in China. . —Zeyi Yang Zeyi’s story is from China Report, his weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things happening in China’s tech sector. to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Google is preparing for a major AI offensive this fallIts overarching aim? To flatten OpenAI. ( $)+ Google is throwing generative AI at everything. () 2 Tech is broken—can collective action fix it? Forcing tech workers to confront their own impact on the world could give the industry a much-needed shakeup. () 3 OpenAI has been testing GPT-4 for content moderationBut we don’t know just how reliable it is at this stage. ( $)+ Catching bad content in the age of AI. () 4 Twitter has been slowing links to sites Elon Musk dislikesWhich seems very much in keeping with his calm, rational approach to things he disagrees with. ( $)+ Throttling traffic to rival organizations is a worrying abuse of power. ()+ X is very much into legal threats these days. ( $) 5 Weaning nations off coal is easier said than done However, South Africa shows how former coal-powered plants can be transformed into green hubs. ( $)+ Putting the oceans to work soaking up carbon is another bright idea. ()+ Yes, we have enough materials to power the world with renewable energy. () 6 China is developing its own cut-price weight loss drugsWhich is likely to catch the eye of cost-aware healthcare providers in the west. ( $)+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? () 7 Streaming is getting a whole lot more expensiveThe days of cheap TV are well and truly over. ()+ It’s going to be a real test of loyalty for customers. ( $)+ Where there’s a will to save money, there’s a way. ( $) 8 Brazil’s gig economy workers have a common foe: each otherA wave of new opportunities ushered in by AI is turning employees against industry newcomers. () 9 We’ve become a nation of online returners You bought it, you break it, you still get your money back. ( $)+ Amazon’s own brands are in serious decline. ( $) 10 When AI meets architecture The construction industry has long resisted tech’s siren call—until now. ( $) Quote of the day “Everyone is going to be racing against the clock continuously.” —Ramandeep Randhawa, senior vice dean for the USC Marshall School of Business, says universities are better prepared for the rapid changes ushered in by ChatGPT this year, reports. The big story Alina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab. June 2021Alina Chan started asking questions in March 2020. She was chatting with friends on Facebook about the virus then spreading out of China. She thought it was strange that no one had found any infected animal. She wondered why no one was admitting another possibility, which to her seemed very obvious: the outbreak might have been due to a lab accident.Chan is a postdoc in a gene therapy lab at the Broad Institute, a prestigious research institute affiliated with both Harvard and MIT. Throughout 2020, Chan relentlessly stoked scientific argument, and wasn’t afraid to pit her brain against the best virologists in the world. Her persistence even helped change some researchers’ minds. . —Antonio Regalado We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + Today marks 46 years since Elvis Presley died—which is a great excuse to revisit his amazing .+ In more music trivia, : 65 years young today!+ The internet’s fixation with can be traced back much further than you may think.+ A meat-based dessert sounds like it shouldn’t work on paper, but is truly delicious.+ This is very cool—AI has recreated a clip of Pink Floyd’s purely by analyzing people’s brain activity while they listened to it.

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. This year, car buyers in China are constantly bombarded with claims about how advanced Navigation on Autopilot (NOA) systems are coming to their city. These software systems are not quite fully autonomous driving—your hands are still supposed to be holding the wheel—but they let cars stop, steer, and accelerate in the city by themselves. Both EV makers and AI startups have published aggressive roadmaps for national rollouts of their city NOA services, claiming their customers in dozens or hundreds of Chinese cities will soon be able to experience being driven by their cars through narrow city streets. This morning, I published a story that took a closer look at how city NOAs have become the industry darling in 2023, including how they actually perform and the difficulty in educating drivers on using the system responsibly. . But during my interview with Zhang Xiang, a Chinese auto industry analyst and visiting professor at Huanghe Science and Technology College, one comment stuck out to me. “The auto industry is very competitive now. Consumers are expecting those vehicles to be tech products, like smartphones. It’d be hard for auto brands to sell their cars if they didn’t advertise their products this way,” he said. Zhang’s observation is consistent with what I saw this year, particularly when I went to the massive auto show this April in Shanghai. Not only was everyone boasting about their brand’s autonomous driving capabilities, but companies were also showcasing all kinds of other advanced software features. For example, SenseTime, an AI company, uses facial recognition tech to monitor driver fatigue and also to identify children left in the car; SAIC Volkswagen is using augmented reality to display map information on the windshield; Baidu is incorporating its generative AI model in the in-car audio chatbot for route planning. NIO, one of the frontrunner companies in China’s homegrown EV industry, has embraced the subscription model. By paying 380 RMB ($52) a month, NIO owners can get the basic version of an NOA system in their cars, which works on highways and major urban roads. In the future, they will be able to pay double the amount for a more advanced version. Meanwhile, as batteries make up the majority of the costs and upkeep of an EV model, NIO also launched a monthly service in China and a monthly battery-rental subscription in Europe. All of these examples show that we are increasingly seeing auto companies turn into tech companies. Beyond horsepower and exterior/interior design, companies are now also competing on who can adapt the latest technology into a consumer-facing product. , this trend is spearheaded by Tesla, with traditional auto brands slowly playing catch-up. But that transition is happening even faster in China. Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a business consulting firm that specializes in transportation, breaks down the ongoing auto industry evolution into four phases: electrification, smartification, servicification, and autonomization. (While the first two are easy to understand, the third phase means the auto companies’ business models revolve around selling services, and the fourth phase means the proliferation of robotaxis.) As I , China has managed to achieve a significant lead with the development and adoption of EVs, through a mix of different factors like government subsidies and battery tech innovations. That enables the Chinese auto industry to hop on the next phase earlier than everyone else. “The United States and Europe are in phase one, electrification; China is in phase two, smartification,” Tu says. The third phase is not far away, he believes. “Once more and more EVs on Chinese roads have ADAS [advanced driver-assistance systems]—the free systems and the premium systems—then we will get to servicification. Then they will start adding more features and trying to charge you,” he says. Chinese car companies aren’t just becoming tech companies, Chinese tech companies are also turning into car companies. Autonomous driving tech is one of now that it has transitioned from a search engine to an AI company. Xiaomi, one of China’s smartphone giants, has spent nearly a billion dollars on becoming an EV company. Even Huawei, forced by US sanctions to reinvent itself, is now targeting smart cars as its next strategic focus. With these tech juggernauts joining the race, Chinese car companies are being forced to up their tech game to have a chance of competing. At the end of the day, is that a good thing? I’m not sure. The heated competition is pushing Chinese auto companies to offer more advanced tech products at more affordable prices, and consumers stand to benefit from that. At the same time, it also brings in the difficult problems that the tech industry has failed to address: data security, privacy invasion, AI biases and failures, and potentially more. But it does seem like this is an inevitable trend. In that sense, whatever’s happening in China now will be a valuable lesson for the industry in other countries. What do you think of the trend of automakers turning into tech companies? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com. Catch up with China 1. With domestic adoption of the digital yuan stalled, Beijing is increasingly pushing for its use in international trade settlement. () 2. The Biden administration released new rules that ban US private equity and venture capital investment in Chinese AI, quantum computing, and semiconductor companies. () Afterward, Beijing issued a document of 24 guidelines on how to attract more foreign investment, including strengthening the enforcement of intellectual property rights. () Foreign investment in China is already at its lowest point in decades. () 3. The best place to buy a Tesla is in China, where they are 50% cheaper than in Europe and the US, after several rounds of price cuts. () 4. International students are more likely to be accused of cheating by AI writing detection tools, new Stanford research finds. () 5. China’s internet regulator was busy last Tuesday: it released one regulation restricting the use of facial recognition tech to protect privacy () and another that mandates all mobile apps available in the country must register their business details with the government (). 6. The Village Basketball Association, a national league for amateur players from the countryside, has become the latest sports sensation in China. () 7. Taiwanese chip giant TSMC is investing $3.8 billion to build a new factory in Germany. () 8. After Taiwan’s justice department announced that being filmed smoking marijuana abroad is a prosecutable offense, an activist filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk to show the rule’s overreach. () Lost in translation An anti-corruption campaign is shaking up China’s healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. , China’s top anti-corruption regulator has in recent months been publicizing cases of bribery in the healthcare field. Most hospitals are publicly owned in China, and the investigations focus on pharmaceutical companies allegedly bribing hospital executives to secure procurement contracts through sponsoring their research, hosting academic conferences, and paying kickbacks. While these practices are not new, the campaign this year seems to be particularly serious. At least 160 top hospital executives in China have been placed under investigation so far—that’s already twice as many as in all of 2022. Because these bribes would often be recorded as marketing expenses in the companies’ accounting books, companies with sky-high marketing spending are under particularly strict scrutiny right now. In 2022, nearly 40 of the top 66 pharmaceutical companies in China spent half of their annual revenues on marketing, according to their financial disclosures. One more thing Don’t you just long for some VR-powered propaganda education when you are exercising on a stationary bike? A Chinese company recently of its “Red VR Rides” educational device, which allows the user to read about the Chinese Communist Party’s history while pedaling. In fact, there are quite a few Chinese VR companies that have released similar products in the past. This niche industry is apparently thriving.

For Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders, any inconvenience big or small is a problem to be solved—even death itself. And a new genre of products and services known as “death tech,” intended to help the bereaved and comfort the suffering, shows that the tech industry will try to address literally anything . Xiaowei Wang, a technologist, author, and organizer based in Oakland, California, finds that disturbing. “It’s so gross to view people like that—to see situations and natural facts of life like dying as problems,” Wang said during lunch and beers on the back patio of an Oakland brewery in late March. To research a forthcoming book on the use of tech in end-of-life care, Wang has trained as a “death doula” and will soon start working at a hospice. This approach to exploring technology, grounded in its personal and political implications, exemplifies a wider vision for fellow tech workers and the industry at large—a desire that it grant more power and agency to those with diverse backgrounds, become more equitable instead of extractive, and aim to reduce structural inequalities rather than seeking to enrich shareholders. To realize this vision, Wang has launched a collaborative learning project called Collective Action School in which tech workers can begin to confront their own impact on the world. The hope is to promote more labor organizing within the industry and empower workers who may feel intimidated to challenge gigantic corporations. Wang came to prominence as an editor at Logic magazine, an independent publication amid early Trump-era anxiety and concerns about the growing powers of technology. Dismissing utopian narratives of progress for prescient analysis of tech’s true role in widening inequity and concentrating political power, the founders—who also included Ben Tarnoff, Jim Fingal, Christa Hartsock, and Moira Weigel—vowed to stop having “stupid conversations about important things.” (In January, it was relaunched as “the first Black, Asian, and Queer tech magazine,” with Wang and J. Khadijah Abdurahman as co-editors.) Collective Action School, initially known as Logic School, is an outgrowth of the magazine. It’s emerged at a time when scandals and layoffs in the tech industry, combined with crypto’s troubles and , have made Big Tech’s failings all the more visible. In courses offered via Zoom, Wang and other instructors guide roughly two dozen tech workers, coders, and project managers through texts on labor organizing, intersectional feminist theory, and the political and economic implications of Big Tech. Its second cohort has now completed the program At our lunch, Wang was joined by three former students who helped run that last session: Derrick Carr, a senior software engineer; Emily Chao, a former trust and safety engineer at Twitter; and Yindi Pei, a UX designer. All shared a desire to create something that could lead to more concrete change than existing corporate employee resource groups, which they say often seem constrained and limited. And while Big Tech may obsess over charismatic founders, Collective Action School runs in a collective fashion. “I enjoy operating under the radar,” Wang said. Wang, who uses the pronoun “they,” moved from China to Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1990, at age four. Drawn to science and technology at a young age, they made friends in early online chat rooms and built rockets and studied oceanography at science camps. They also started questioning social norms early on; their mom tells of getting a call from the middle school principal, explaining that Wang had started a petition for a gender-inclusive class dress code. Years later, they enrolled at Harvard to study design and landscape architecture—at one point . A few years after graduating in 2008, Wang moved to the Bay Area. They worked at the nonprofit Meedan Labs, which develops open-source tools for journalists, and the mapping software company Mapbox, a rapidly scaling “rocket ship” where an employee—sometimes Wang—had to be on call, often overnight, to patch any broken code. Unsatisfied, Wang left in 2017 to focus on writing, speaking, and research, earning a PhD in geography at Berkeley. “The person who did my [Mapbox] exit interview told me, ‘You have this problem where you see injustice and you can’t stand it,’” Wang says. “She told me, ‘Sometimes you need to put that to bed if you want to stay in this industry.’ I can’t.” Many in tech, Wang says, have a fundamental belief in constant improvement through corporate innovation; for these people, technology means “you push a button and something in your life is solved.” But Wang, who practices Buddhism and reads tarot cards, sees things differently, believing that life is all about natural cycles humans can’t control and should accept with humility. For Wang, tech can be rural communities hacking open-source software, or simply something that brings pure joy. At Logic, Wang penned a popular column, , which included scenes from their family’s hometown of ​​Guangzhou, China, and the explosion of innovation in the country. It led to a book titled : And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, a striking exploration of technology’s impact on rural China. During the book editing process, Wang went on a Buddhist retreat, where a teacher remarked that we’re all “,” limited to our own small portholes of perception. This insight, says Wang, helped frame the final draft. But it also became a metaphor for an entire approach to research and writing on technology: focused, careful consideration of many viewpoints, and the capacity to imagine something better. Collective Action School, funded in part by the Omidyar Network and a grant from the arts and coding nonprofit Processing Foundation, came together in 2020 as was on the rise. Kickstarter employees’ union drive in 2020 was followed by , Amazon, and Apple, as well as industry-wide campaigns such as (led in part by former Logic editor Tarnoff) and the . But because Wang avoids the spotlight and believes that only strong communities can remedy the tech industry’s ills, the school is organized in a more experimental way. Collective Action School offers an antithesis to the “golden ticket” mentality of tech work, with an approach that’s more focused on collective action and culture. Each cohort begins with a “week zero” meeting to get acquainted as a group. Then, for 13 weeks, participants attend sessions covering labor movements, the political economy of innovation, and the impact of technology on marginalized groups. The funding covers all tuition costs for all students. As Pei, one of the co-organizers, puts it, the school offers an antithesis to the “golden ticket” mentality of tech work, with an approach that’s more focused on collective action and culture. Each week, participants read from a lengthy syllabus and welcome a guest speaker. Past guests include Clarissa Redwine from the Kickstarter union’s oral history project, former Google employees and of the Distributed AI Research Institute, and Erin McElroy, cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Then they work on a final project; one of the first was , which used augmented reality to highlight the lost Black history of Pittsburgh. For developing it, creator Adrian Jones was named the school’s “community technologist,” a role that comes with a one-year grant to expand the idea. about trust and safety issues, and Pei has been working on an affordable housing website for San Francisco. The organizers see Collective Action School as a community-building project, and open-source syllabus, that can grow with each new cohort. Eventually, the aim is to expand the reach of the school with chapters based in other areas, adding in-person meetings and creating a larger network of workers sharing similar values and aims. That strategy fills a need within larger tech and labor organizing, says Gershom Bazerman, who volunteers with the Tech Workers Coalition and Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. Tech workers have long been told they’re unique, but recent political fights between workers and leadership—with employees pushing back against contributing to projects used by the US military or immigration enforcement—have set off a wave of ground-up organizing informed by social concerns. Groups like Collective Action School can be a “bridge” between workers seeking such change. While the readings and interactions aren’t creating a utopia, they are creating a space for students to learn, meet, and commit to more change. Wang hopes they find solidarity and, ideally, bring these ideas and experience back to their companies and coworkers (or find the resources and momentum to move to a job or field more aligned with their values). Some in this year’s cohort live and work in the Global South and have faced layoffs, so classmates created a cost-of-living support fund to help. Carr has called the experience an “antidote to a specific accumulated toxin” that comes from working in Big Tech. That may be true, but Collective Action School, along with other recent organizing efforts, also sets out to redefine the experience of working within the industry. “We’re not saying we’re making the perfect safe learning space,” says Wang. “We had a container in which we could have fun, learn from each other, and then grow. I think that’s really rare and special. It’s like committing to each other.” Patrick Sisson, a Chicago expat living in Los Angeles, covers technology and urbanism.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The race to lead China’s autonomous driving market Chinese car companies all seem fixated on one goal: launching their own autonomous navigation services in more and more cities as quickly as possible. In just the past six months, nearly a dozen Chinese car companies have announced ambitious plans to roll out Navigation on Autopilot products to multiple cities across the country. But many of these features remain hard to access for those who don’t live in the pilot cities or own the high-end models. And the fierce competition the major players find themselves in is also having unintended side effects—confusing some customers and arguably putting other drivers at risk. . —Zeyi Yang What happened to the microfinance organization Kiva? Since it was founded in 2005, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Kiva has helped everyday people make microloans to borrowers around the world. It connects lenders in richer communities to fund all sorts of entrepreneurs, from bakers in Mexico to farmers in Albania. Its overarching aim is helping poor people help themselves.But back in August 2021, Kiva lenders started to notice that information that felt essential in deciding who to lend to was suddenly harder to find. Now, lenders are worried that the organization now seems more focused on how to make money than how to create change. . —Mara Kardas-Nelson This story is from the next upcoming issue of our print magazine, which is all about ethics. If you don’t subscribe already, to receive a copy when it publishes. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Young climate activists have successfully sued Montana The judge agreed that the state’s pro-fossil fuel policies contributed to climate change. ()+ The US just invested more than $1 billion in carbon removal. () 2 How Binance fumbled its grip on the crypto industryJust a few months ago, it was poised to lead. Now, it’s struggling under the weight of regulatory expectations. ( $)+ It’s applied for protection from the US financial regulator. ()+ No one seems to know who’s in control of the stablecoin TrueUSD. ( $)+ Meanwhile, things are looking bleak for Sam Bankman-Fried. ( $) 3 Chinese hackers infiltrated the US government more deeply than realizedIt appears that new victims are being notified that their emails were compromised. ( $) 4 Writers are fighting back against literary AI projectsThey’ve managed to shutter one startup, and others may follow.( $)+ Digital book lending is becoming increasingly controversial. ( $)+ How to spot AI-generated text. () 5 How to handle being accused of cheating by an AIFirst step: don’t panic. ( $)+ International students are being victimized by AI detection systems. ()+ ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it. () 6 Another fundamental particle could be hiding in plain sightPhysicists have detected a gap in the Standard Model that could indicate a new type of particle. () 7 Giant black holes litter our early universe The James Webb Space Telescope is shedding light on just how many. ()+ How the James Webb Space Telescope broke the universe. () 8 Nigeria’s tech workers are flooding its second citiesThey’re ditching big hubs like Lagos in favor of cheaper locations, and locals are paying the price. ()+ The country’s doctors are on the move, too. ( $) 9 LED lights are getting better and better Which is just as well, given that the US has banned most incandescent bulbs. ()+ Bright LEDs could spell the end of dark skies. () 10 Threads is losing its appeal alreadyEngagement has plummeted following a promising first few weeks. ()+ At least some Twitter accounts are good for something. () Quote of the day “Humans are underrated.” —Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at MIT, explains to why ChatGPT isn’t good enough to take our jobs just yet. The big story How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users April 2022 In December 2021, residents of the village of Gunungguruh, Indonesia, were curious when technology company Worldcoin turned up at a local school. It was pitched as a “new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible,” in exchange for an iris scan and other personal data. Gunungguruh was not alone in receiving a visit from Worldcoin. MIT Technology Review has interviewed over 35 individuals in six countries who either worked for or on behalf of Worldcoin, had been scanned, or were unsuccessfully recruited to participate. Our investigation reveals wide gaps between Worldcoin’s public messaging, which focused on protecting privacy, and what users experienced. We found that the company’s representatives used deceptive marketing practices, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. . —Eileen Guo and Adi Renaldi We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + This about one of the most sampled sounds in hip hop scratched my itch for musical nerdery. + These drone are amazing. + Loved this ode to . ($)+ Fan of The Bear? You might enjoy this to recreate the dishes featured.+ How to get the perfect peanut butter on your brownies.

Just before Christmas last year, a pastor preached a gospel of morals over money to several hundred members of his flock. Wearing a sport coat, angular glasses, and wired earbuds, he spoke animatedly into his laptop from his tiny glass office inside a co-working space, surrounded by six whiteboards filled with his feverish brainstorming. Sharing a scriptural parable familiar to many in his online audience—a group assembled from across 48 countries, many in the Global South—he explained why his congregation was undergoing dramatic growth in an age when the life of the spirit often struggles to compete with cold, hard, capitalism. “People have different sources of motivation [for getting involved in a community],” he sermonized. “It’s not only money. People actually have a deeper purpose in life.” Many of the thousands of people who’d been joining his community were taking the time and energy to do so “because they care about the human condition, and they care about the future of our democracy,” he argued. “That is not academic,” he continued. “That is not theoretical. That is talking about future generations, that’s talking about your happiness, that’s talking about how you see the world. This is big … a paradigm shift.” The leader in question was not an ordained minister, nor even a religious man. His increasingly popular community is not—technically—a church, synagogue, or temple. And the scripture he referenced wasn’t from the Bible. It was Microsoft Encarta vs. Wikipedia—the story of how a movement of self-­motivated volunteers defeated an army of corporate-funded professionals in a crusade to provide information, back in the bygone days of 2009. “If you’re young,” said the preacher, named David Ryan Polgar, “you’ll need to google it.” Polgar, 44, is the founder of , a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting ethics and responsibility in tech. Founded in 2018, ATIH is based in Manhattan but hosts a growing range of in-person programming—social mixers, mentoring opportunities, career fairs, and job-seeking resources—in several other cities across the US and beyond, reaching thousands. Such numbers would delight most churches. David Polgar, the founder of All Tech Is Human, on stage at a recent Responsible Tech Mixer event in New York City.COURTESY OF ALL TECH IS HUMAN Like other kinds of congregations, ATIH focuses on relationship-­building: the staff invests much of its time, for example, in activities like curating its “Responsible Tech Organization” list, which names over 500 companies in which community members can get involved, and growing its responsible-tech talent pool, a list of nearly 1,400 individuals interested in careers in the field. Such programs, ATIH says, bring together many excellent but often disconnected initiatives, all in line with the ATIH mission “to tackle wicked tech & society issues and co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest.” The organization itself doesn’t often get explicitly political with op-eds or policy advocacy. Rather, All Tech Is Human’s underlying strategy is to quickly expand the “responsible-tech ecosystem.” In other words, its leaders believe there are large numbers of individuals in and around the technology world, often from marginalized backgrounds, who wish tech focused less on profits and more on being a force for ethics and justice. These people will be a powerful force, Polgar believes, if—as the counterculture icon Timothy Leary famously exhorted—they can “find the others.” If that sounds like reluctance to take sides on hot-button issues in tech policy, or to push for change directly, Polgar calls it an “agnostic” business model. And such a model has real strengths, including the ability to bring tech culture’s opposing tribes together under one big tent. But as we’ll see, attempts to stay above the fray can cause more problems than they solve. Meanwhile, All Tech Is Human is growing so fast, with over 5,000 members on its Slack channel as of this writing, that if it were a church, it would soon deserve the prefix “mega.” The group has also consistently impressed me with its inclusiveness: the volunteer and professional leadership of women and people of color is a point of major emphasis, and speaker lineups are among the most heterogeneous I’ve seen in any tech-related endeavor. Crowds, too, are full of young professionals from diverse backgrounds who participate in programs out of passion and curiosity, not hope of financial gain. Well, at least attendees don’t go to ATIH for direct financial gain; as is true with many successful religious congregations, the organization serves as an intentional incubator for professional networking. Still, having interviewed several dozen attendees, I’m convinced that many are hungry for communal support as they navigate a world in which tech has become a transcendent force, for better or worse. Growth has brought things to a turning point. ATIH now stands to receive millions of dollars—including funds from large foundations and tech philanthropist demigods who once ignored it. And Polgar now finds himself in a networking stratosphere with people like Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, among other prominent politicos. Will the once-humble community remain dedicated to centering people on the margins of tech culture? Or will monied interests make it harder to fight for the people Christian theologians might call “the least of these”? Techno-solutionism and related ideas can function as a kind of theology, justifying harm in the here and now with the promise of a sweet technological hereafter. I first started looking into ATIH in late 2021, while researching my forthcoming book Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation (MIT Press, 2024). The book project began because I’d been coming across a striking number of similarities between modern technological culture and religion, and the parallels felt important, given my background. I am a longtime (nonreligious) chaplain at both Harvard and MIT. After two decades immersed in the world of faith, back in 2018 I gave up on what had been my dream: to build a nonprofit “godless congregation” for the growing population of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated. Having started that work just before social media mavens like Mark Zuckerberg began to speak of “,” I ultimately lost faith in the notion of building community around either religion or secularism when I realized that technology had overtaken both. Indeed, tech seems to be the dominant force in our economy, politics, and culture, not to mention a daily obsession that can increasingly look like from which some might plausibly seek the help of a higher power to recover. Tech culture has long been known for its prophets (Jobs, Gates, Musk, et al.), and tech as a whole is even increasingly oriented around moral and ethical messages, such as Google’s infamous “Don’t be evil.” The tech-as-religion comparison I’ve found myself drawing is often unflattering to tech leaders and institutions. Techno-solutionism and related ideas can function as a kind of theology, justifying harm in the here and now with the promise of a sweet technological hereafter; powerful CEOs and investors can form the center of a kind of priestly hierarchy, if not an outright caste system; high-tech weapons and surveillance systems seem to threaten an apocalypse of biblical proportions. When I discovered ATIH, I was pleasantly surprised to find a potentially positiveexample of the sort of dynamic I was describing. I am the sort of atheist who admits that certain features of religion can offer people real benefits. And ATIH seemed to be succeeding precisely because it genuinely operated like a secular, tech-­ethics-focused version of a religious congregation. “It does work that way,” Polgar acknowledged in February 2022, in the first of our several conversations on the topic. Since then, I’ve continued to admire ATIH’s communal and ethical spirit, while wondering whether communities devoted explicitly to tech ethics might just help bring about a reformation that saves tech from itself. Along with admiration, I’ve also sought to determine whether ATIH is worthy of our faith. Why a congregation? I discovered ATIH’s events in late 2021, first through the online Responsible Tech University Summit, a day-long program dedicated to exploring the intersections of tech ethics and campus life. (One of ATIH’s signature programs is its , which involves, among other things, a growing group of over 80 student “university ambassadors” who represent the organization on their campuses.) All the organization’s programs are organized around typical tech ethics themes, like “the business case for AI ethics,” but participants attend as much for the community as for the topic at hand. Sarah Husain, who’d worked on Twitter’s Trust and Safety team until it was eliminated by Elon Musk, told me at a May 2022 event that several colleagues in her field had spoken highly of ATIH, recommending she attend. Chana Deitsch, an undergraduate business student who participates in ATIH’s mentorship program, says it not only helps with job leads and reference letters but provides a sense of confidence and belonging. Alex Sarkissian, formerly a Deloitte consultant and now a Buddhist chaplaincy student, feels that the organization has potential “to be a kind of spiritual community for me in addition to my sangha [Buddhist congregation].” I’ve encountered mainly earnest and insightful members like these, people who come together for serious mutual support and ethical reflection and—non-trivially—funaround a cause I’ve come to hold dear. Granted, few ATIH participants, in my observation, hold C-level tech positions, which could undermine the organization’s claims that it has the ability to unite stakeholders toward effectual action … or perhaps it simply signifies a populism that could eventually put sympathizers in high places? Despite my skepticism toward both theology and technology, ATIH has often given me the feeling that I’ve found my own tech tribe. Growing pains Polgar is a nerdily charismatic former lawyer who has been developing the ideas and networks from which the organization sprouted for over a decade. As a young professor of business law at a couple of small, under-resourced colleges in Connecticut in the early 2010s, he began pondering the ethics of technologies that had recently emerged as dominant and ubiquitous forces across society and culture. Adopting the title “tech ethicist,” he began to write a series of missives on digital health and the idea of “co-creating a better tech future.” His 2017 Medium post “All Tech Is Human,” about how technology design should be informed by more than robotic rationality or utility, generated enthusiastic response and led to the formal founding of the organization a year later. The ATIH concept took a while to catch on, Polgar told me. He worked unpaid for three years and came “close to quitting.” But his background inspired perseverance. Born in 1979 in Cooperstown, New York, Polgar was a philosophical kid who admired Nikola Tesla and wanted to be an inventor. “Why can’t I start something big,” he remembers thinking back then, “even from a little place like this?” Despite their growing influence, Polgar and the organization continue to emphasize their outsider status. ATIH, he argues, is building its following in significant part with people who, for their interest in ethical approaches to technology, feel as unjustly ignored as he and many of his upstate peers felt in the shadow of New York City. ATIH’s model, says the organization’s head of partnerships, Sandra Khalil, is to offer not a “sage on the stage” but, rather, a “guide on the side.” Khalil, a veteran of the US Departments of State and Homeland Security, also came to the organization with an outsider’s pugnacity, feeling “severely underutilized” in previous roles as a non-lawyer intent on “challenging the status quo.” Polgar, however, hardly shrinks from opportunities to influence tech discourse, whether through media interviews with outlets like the BBC World News or by joining advisory boards like TikTok’s content advisory council. ATIH admits, in its “,” that it draws both from grassroots models, which it says “have ideas but often lack power,” and from “top-down” ones, which can “lack a diversity of ideas” but “have power.” The organization does not ask for or accept membership fees from participants, relying instead on major donations solicited by Polgar and his team, who control decision-making. There hasn’t seemed to be a significant call for more democracy—yet. The founder as a god? Part of why I’m insisting ATIH is a congregation is that the group assembled around Polgar demonstrates a religious zeal for organizing and relationship-building as tools for advancing positive moral values. Case in point: Rebekah Tweed, ATIH’s associate director, once worked in an actual church, as a youth pastor; now she applies a skill set my field calls “pastoral care” to creating mutually supportive space for ethically minded techies. In 2020, Tweed volunteered on ATIH’s first major public project, the Responsible Tech Guide, a crowdsourced document that highlighted the hundreds of people and institutions working in the field. After she formally joined the organization, it landed its first big-time donation: $300,000 over two years from the Ford Foundation, to pay her salary as well as Polgar’s. They were its first full-time employees. Polgar was repeatedly rebuffed in early attempts to recruit large gifts, but of late, the growing ATIH team has received significant support from sources including Melinda French Gates’s Pivotal Ventures and about half a million dollars each from Schmidt Futures (the philanthropic fund of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt) and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (yet another tech billionaire’s fortune). Can an organization that serves a truly inclusive audience afford to get in bed with Fortune 500 companies and/or multibillionaires who will inevitably be motivated by a desire to seem ethical? The question is: Can an organization that serves a truly inclusive audience, emphasizing humanity and ethics in its own name, afford to get in bed with Fortune 500 companies like Google and Microsoft and/or multibillionaires who will inevitably be motivated by a desire to seem ethical and responsible, even when they decidedly are not? Or rather, can it afford not to do so, when growth means the organization’s staff can grow (and earn a living wage)? And could such tensions someday cause a full-blown schism in the ATIH community? The potential challenges first came to light for me at a May 2022 summit in New York. For the first time in several large ATIH events I had personally observed, the meeting featured an invited speaker employed by one of the world’s largest tech companies: Harsha Bhatlapenumarthy, a governance manager at Meta and also a volunteer leader in a professional association called Trust and Safety. Not a “sage on the stage” but a “guide on the side”: ATIH head of partnerships Sandra Khalil moderates an event in London.LIZ ISLES/ALL TECH IS HUMAN Bhatlapenumarthy—whose panel was called “Tech Policy & Social Media: Where are we headed?”—avoided addressing any of her employer’s recent controversies. Instead of offering any meaningful comment in response to Meta’s troubles over its handling of things from pro-anorexia content to election misinformation, she spoke only vaguely about its ethical responsibilities. The company, she said, was focused on “setting the content moderator up for success.” Which is an interesting way to describe a situation in which Meta had, for example, recently been sued for union busting and human trafficking by content moderators in Kenya. Several attendees were taken aback that Bhatlapenumarthy’s advocacy for her powerful employer went essentially unchallenged during the panel. Among them was Yael Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global head of election integrity operations for political advertising and the summit’s closing speaker. In a fireside chat immediately following the panel in which Bhatlapenumarthy participated, Eisenstat, who’d been a whistleblower against her former employer, eloquently dismissed Bhatlapenumarthy’s non-remarks. “I believe [Meta] doesn’t want this on their platform,” she said, referring to violent and deceptive content, “but they will not touch their business model.” Eisenstat added that she would feel “more encouraged” if companies would stop “holding up the founder as a god.” Eisenstat added to me later, by private message, that “sending a more junior-level employee to speak one-directionally about Meta’s vision of responsible tech is somewhat disingenuous.” In inviting such a speaker, couldn’t ATIH reasonably be understood to be implicated in the offense? If Bhatlapenumarthy’s presence as a seeming mouthpiece for Big Tech talking points had been an isolated incident, I might have ignored it. But a few months later, I found myself wondering if a concerning pattern was emerging. Digital Sunday school In September 2022, I attended Building a Better Tech Future for Children, an ATIH event cohosted with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit research and innovation lab associated with the legendary children’s TV show Sesame Street. This struck me as a shrewd partnership for ATIH: every congregation needs a Sunday school. A community organization aspiring to the advancement of humanity and the betterment of the world will inevitably turn its thoughts to educating the next generation according to its values. After a keynote from Elizabeth Milovidov, senior manager for digital child safety at the Lego Group, on designing digital experiences with children’s well-being in mind came a panel featuring speakers from influential players such as the Omidyar Network and TikTok, as well as young activists. The group discussed the risks and harms facing young people online, and the general tone was optimistic that various efforts to protect them would be successful, particularly if built upon one another. “Digital spaces can be a positive source in the lives of young people,” said the moderator, Mina Aslan. Also on the panel was Harvard Medical School professor Michael Rich, a self-proclaimed “mediatrician”—a portmanteau of “media’’ and “pediatrician.” Rich made good points—for example, stressing the importance of asking kids what they’re hoping for from tech, not just talking about the risks they confront. But one comment triggered my spider-sense: when he said that today’s tech is like his generation’s cigarettes, in that you can’t just tell kids “Don’t do it.” The analogy between tobacco and social media is at best a bizarre one to draw. Millions of young people became smokers not just through peer pressure, but because for decades, Big Tobacco’s whole business model was built on undue corporate influence and even outright lying, including paying influential doctors and scientists to downplay the death they dealt. Surely ATIH’s leadership would want to avoid any hint that such practices would be acceptable in tech? Tobacco eventually became among the most heavily regulated industries in history, with results including, famously, the US surgeon general’s warnings on tobacco ads and packages. Now the current surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, has warned there is “growing evidence” that social media is “associated with harm to young people’s mental health.” But on the panel (and in his commentary elsewhere), Rich only briefly acknowledged such potential harms, forgoing talk of regulating social media for the idea of cultivating “resilience” in the industry’s millions of young customers. To be clear, I agree with Rich that it is a losing strategy to expect young people to completely abstain from social media. But I fear that tech and our broader society alike are not taking nearly enough ethical responsibility for protecting children from what can be powerful engines of harm. And I was disappointed to see Rich’s relatively sanguine views not only expressed but centered at an ATIH meeting. How much responsibility? How much responsibility should a “responsible tech” organization like ATIH take—or not—for inviting speakers with corporate ties, especially when it is not fully open with its audience about such ties? How obligated is ATIH to publicly interrogate the conclusions of such speakers? Rich’s response to questions I’d asked after his panel was, essentially, that parents ought to channel their energies into making “better choices” around tech, which—conveniently for some of the doctor’s corporate sponsors—lays the responsibility for children’s safety on the parents instead of the tech industry. His lab, I later learned, raised nearly $6 million in 2022, at least partly through grants from Meta, TikTok, and Amazon. When TikTok CEO Shou Chew testified before the US Congress in March 2023, he cited Rich’s lab—and only Rich’s lab—as an example of how TikTok used science and medicine to protect minors. Does this represent a conflict of interest—and therefore a serious ethical failing on the part of both Rich and ATIH for platforming him? I don’t know. I do worry, though, that there’s something inhumane in Rich’s emphasis on building kids’ “resilience” rather than interrogating why they should have to be so resilient against tech in the first place. What kind of institution does ATIH want to be? One that pushes back against the powerful, or one that upholds a corporate-friendly version of diversity, allowing its wealthy sponsors to remain comfortable at (almost) all times? As the Gospel of Matthew says, no man (or organization of “humans”) can serve two masters. Asking around ATIH’s network about my concerns, I found ambivalence. “I do believe it is possible to do research sponsored by companies ethically,” said Justin Hendrix, an occasional ATIH participant and editor of Tech Policy Press, a wonky journal in which academics and others tend to critique established tech narratives. “But it is right to scrutinize it for signs of impropriety.” “I see your concern,” Polgar later told me when I asked him about my apprehensions. Raising his brow with a look of surprise when I wondered aloud whether Rich’s funding sources might have affected the commentary he offered for ATIH’s audience, Polgar made clear he did not agree with all the doctor’s views. He also admitted it is his “worst fear” that his organization might be co-opted by funding opportunities that make it harder “to be a speaker of truth.” “Don’t become a parody of yourself,” he said, seeming to turn the focus of his homily inward. Team human Several months after the Sesame Workshop event, I attended a crowded mixer at ATIH’s now-regular monthly venue, the Midtown Manhattan offices of the VC firm Betaworks, with a very different kind of speaker: the tech critic Douglas Rushkoff, a freethinker who has often spoken of the need for a kind of secular faith in our common humanity in the face of tech capitalism’s quasi-religious extremism. Polgar is a longtime admirer of his work. “All tech bros are human,” Rushkoff cracked, launching into . Fresh off a publicity tour for a book about tech billionaires buying luxury bunkers to escape a potential doomsday of their own making, Rushkoff provided a starkly antiauthoritarian contrast to the speakers I’d taken issue with at the earlier events. Ultimately, I don’t know whether ATIH will succeed in its attempts to serve what Rushkoff would call “team human” rather than becoming an accessory to the overwhelming wealth tech can generate by seeming to make humanity commodifiable and, ultimately, redundant. I do, however, continue to believe that building a more humane tech future will require communal support, because none of us can do it alone. I chose the theme of tech agnosticism for my book in part because I am often reminded that I truly don’t know—and neither do you—when or where tech’s enormous powers might actually do the good they purport to do. But I suspect we’re going to need a lot more of what Neil Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly, an early exploration of the theme of tech-as-­religion and a precursor to the techlash, called “loving resistance fighters.” While I lack prophetic abilities to know whether Polgar and co. will help spark such a resistance, the potential is genuinely there. In a participatory congregation, one can always worry about co-­option, as even Polgar himself admits he does; but isn’t it also the responsibility of each of us to actively help keep our communities accountable to their own ethical values? Let’s maintain our skepticism, while hoping the ethical tech congregation gives us continued reason to keep the faith. Greg M. Epstein serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and MIT and as the convener for ethical life at MIT’s Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life.