The Best of MIT Technology Review

Make Sunsets is already attempting to earn revenue for geoengineering, a move likely to provoke widespread criticism.

My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.

Robot vacuum companies say your images are safe, but a sprawling global supply chain for data from our devices creates risk.

Every year, we pick the 10 technologies that matter the most right now. We look for advances that will have a big impact on our lives and break down why they matter.

An analysis of Musk’s tweets shows him at the center of conversations once kept on the fringes of Twitter.

Anyone looking for an illustration of how rapidly shopping habits changed when covid-19 hit needed only to glance at the top 10 search terms on Amazon in the week of April 12 to 18. In place of former…

The company's star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models, which are key to Google's business.

Perfect Day says it’s figured out how to make ice cream that’s creamy without any animal protein.

Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance.

In recent years, the country has rushed to pursue “intelligent education.” Now its billion-dollar ed-tech companies are planning to export their vision overseas.

Grace Windheim had heard of deepfakes before. But she had never considered how to make one. It was a viral meme using the technology that led her to research the possibility—and discover that it was…

In 2020, AI-synthetic media started moving away from the darker corners of the internet.

A daring effort is under way to create the first children whose DNA has been tailored using gene editing.

Editing the epigenome, which turns our genes on and off, could be the “elixir of life”.

It’s a development that could be useful for applications from outer space to the deep sea.

Galactica was supposed to help scientists. Instead, it mindlessly spat out biased and incorrect nonsense.

A quantum version of the building block behind neural networks could be exponentially more powerful.

«The big advantage of quantum computing is that it allows an exponential increase in the number of dimensions it can process.»

If it fulfills its promise, quantum machine learning could transform AI.

Unless you’re a physicist or an engineer, there really isn’t much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying…

Last month Nature published a damning response written by 31 scientists to a study from Google Health that had appeared in the journal earlier this year. Google was describing successful trials of an…

Hope, hype, and self-experimentation collided at an exclusive conference for ultra-rich investors who want to extend their lives past 100. I went along for the ride.

Two groups have announced powerful new generative models that can design new proteins on demand not seen in nature.

This list represents a glimpse into our collective future.

Is AI that learns on its own the path to truly intelligent machines?

«The new system, called AutoML Zero, tries to build an AI from the ground up using nothing but the most basic mathematical concepts that govern machine learning.»

MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2020 outlines scientific discoveries, available now or in the very near future, that could most profoundly change people’s lives. Included this year: unhackable internet service; individual designer drugs; the proliferation of digital currency; anti-aging treatments; AI molecule searches for better medicines; satellite constellations boosting remote internet access; new uses for quantum computers, tiny, powerful AI apps for phones; bolstering Census privacy; and more accurate climate change forecasts.

Three years ago, the company began building "responsible AI." This is the story of how it failed.

«The researcher’s team also found that users with a tendency to post or engage with melancholy content—a possible sign of depression—could easily spiral into consuming increasingly negative material that risked further worsening their mental health. The team proposed tweaking the content-ranking models for these users to stop maximizing engagement alone, so they would be shown less of the depressing stuff.»

The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.

«Scammers used to make their $$ from naive people. Now they get their payments straight from some of the world's biggest tech companies.»

Dating websites have changed the way couples meet. Now evidence is emerging that this change is influencing levels of interracial marriage and even the stability of marriage itself.

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.