The Download: introducing: the 125th Anniversary issue
With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines. Instead, we decided to try to use history as a way to explore what things may look like over the next 125 years.
The longer you report on tech, the more you realize how often we get the future wrong. Predictions have a way of not coming true. The things that seem so clear now can shift and change, rearranging themselves into wholly new forms we never thought of.
But also, predictions that we laugh off as having been so wrong often have a way of coming true eventually. Throughout this latest edition of MIT Technology Review you’ll find some of our best bets as to what the future may hold. We may not get it exactly right, but we think we’re at least pointing toward where things are headed.
Here’s a selection of some of the most fascinating stories from the magazine:
+ What the future and its emerging technologies hold for those born today, from intelligent digital companions for life, to virtual first dates.
+ What the rare earth metal neodymium shows us about our clean-energy future, and the resources we’ll need to create and maintain it.
+ Delve into the challenges archivists face as they try to preserve information about our current lives for those living far off in the future.
+ Why it’s looking likely that something will be developed in the coming decades that will help us live longer, in better health.
+ Read our investigation into the ways we may all play God in the coming years, thanks to the ability to change our very DNA.
+ How the rise of AI porn could change our expectations of relationships.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary
An AI startup created a hyperrealistic deepfake of MIT Technology Review’s senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkilä that was so believable, even she thought it was really her at first. This technology is impressive, to be sure. But it raises big questions about a world where we increasingly can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake.
