The Best of MIT Technology Review

Consumers are getting their first samplings of meat made in the lab.

A massive suite of papers offers a high-res view of the human and non-human primate brain.

If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms.

Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and engineers are grappling with what it would take for AI to become conscious.

CRISPR is being used in an experimental effort to eliminate the virus that causes AIDS.

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

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

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

The West has largely gotten China’s social credit system wrong. But draft legislation introduced in November offers a more accurate picture of the reality.

«In just one example, the province of Liaoning said in August that it’s exploring how to reward blood donation in the financial credit system.)»

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

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.

Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve.

«AI large language models (LLMs), which can ingest a few “prompt” sentences and spit out convincing text in response, promise to unlock even more powerful ways for humans to communicate with machines.»

AI is already being used in the legal field. Is it really ready to be a lawyer?

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”.

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.

Science is about to become much more exciting—and that will affect us all, argues Google's former CEO.

«Moving on to the experimentation step, AI will be able to conduct experiments faster, cheaper, and at greater scale. For example, we can build AI-powered machines with hundreds of micropipettes running day and night to create samples at a rate no human could match. Instead of limiting themselves to just six experiments, scientists can use AI tools to run a thousand.»

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…

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.

A growing group of lawyers are uncovering, navigating, and fighting the automated systems that deny the poor from housing, jobs, and basic services.

Companies already have the systems in place that are needed to evaluate their deeper impacts on the social fabric.

«Facebook’s 2012 “emotional contagion” experiment, which showed that users’ affect (their mood as measured by their behavior on the platform) shifted measurably depending on which version of the product they were exposed to»

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.

Facebook’s parent company is inviting researchers to pore over and pick apart the flaws in its version of GPT-3

One of the godfathers of deep learning pulls together old ideas to sketch out a fresh path for AI, but raises as many questions as he answers.

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.