Happy birthday, baby! What the future holds for those born today
DAVID BISKUP If getting from point A to point B is becoming difficult, maybe you can travel without going anywhere....
World
DHS plans to collect biometric data from migrant children “down to the infant”
As Boyd explained at a conference in June, the key question for OBIM is, “If we pick up someone from...
The Download: a new AI risk database, and studying Jupiter’s mysterious moon
What’s new: Adopting AI can be fraught with danger. Systems could be biased, or parrot falsehoods, or even become addictive....
A new public database lists all the ways AI could go wrong
These findings may have implications for how we evaluate AI, as we currently tend to focus on ensuring a model...
The Download: greener steel, and join us for EmTech 2024
+ Riki Banerjee, CTO of brain-computer interface company Synchron, will give us an inside look at the future of minimally...
How the auto industry could steer the world toward green steel
“The relatively high value of cars, especially of premium brands, also means they can absorb the short-term green premium of...
The Download: how we’re using AI, and Trump’s campaign hack
When the generative AI boom started with ChatGPT in late 2022, we were sold a vision of superintelligent AI tools...
Here’s how people are actually using AI
Two years on, most of those productivity gains haven’t materialized. And we’ve seen something peculiar and slightly unexpected happen: People...
The Download: robotic table tennis, and future space habitats
What’s new: Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play table tennis at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the...
Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis
The system is far from perfect. Although the table tennis bot was able to beat all beginner-level human opponents it...
This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit
There’s another way to make something compact for launch: inflate it in orbit. NASA has already done this—its experimental BEAM...
Watch a video showing what happens in our brains when we think
This is what the activity looked like: “This is basically the brain thinking,” says Rapoport. “You’re seeing the physical manifestation...
Advancing to adaptive cloud
A complex multi-cloud deployment can make it difficult for IT teams to perform mission-critical tasks, such as applying security patches,...
The Download: AC habits, and Starliner’s stranded astronauts
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The Starliner astronauts may not return...
Your AC habits aren’t unique. Here’s why that’s a problem.
People across the city, county, and even the state are probably doing the same thing. And like me, they might...
The Download: AIDS denialism, and AI safety mechanisms
Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in...
What to know about China’s push for hydrogen-powered transportation
So when I learned that in parts of China, companies are putting hydrogen-powered bikes on the road for anyone to...
How covid conspiracy theories led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism
Before they promoted bunk information on HIV and AIDS, Rogan, Kennedy, and Rodgers were spreading fringe theories about the coronavirus’s...
AI “godfather” Yoshua Bengio has joined a UK project to prevent AI catastrophes
Safeguarded AI’s goal is to build AI systems that can offer quantitative guarantees, such as a risk score, about their...
The Download: climate-friendlier air conditioners, and fighting explicit deepfakes
Cooling represents 20% of global electricity demand in buildings, a share that’s expected to rise as the planet warms and...