Why bigger EVs aren’t always better
There are a lot of reasons to be nervous about the ever-expanding footprint of vehicles, from pedestrian safety and road...
World
The messy quest to replace drugs with electricity
Starting in the 1990s, research by Linda Watkins, a neuroscientist leading a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder, suggested...
Industry- and AI-focused cloud transformation
“As applications move to the cloud, more and more opportunities are getting unlocked,” says Vinod Mamtani, vice president and general...
AI-readiness for C-suite leaders
Preparing an organization’s data for AI, however, unlocks a new set of challenges and opportunities. This MIT Technology Review Insights...
The Download: the minerals powering our economy, and Chinese companies’ identity crisis
It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized ethereal world, ruled by digital startups, artificial...
The Download: autocorrect’s surprising origins, and how to pre-bunk electoral misinformation
—This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published...
The quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete
If Huang Zhenyu’s mastery of a complex alphanumeric code weren’t impressive enough, consider the staggering speed of his performance. He...
The Download: head transplants, and filtering sounds with AI
An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but the pitch is...
Splashy breakthroughs are exciting, but people with spinal cord injuries need more
What’s exciting to me about this latest study is that the tech gave the participants skills they could use beyond...
That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday.
Aging bypass What is certain is that head transplantation—or body transplant, as some prefer to call it—is a subject of...
Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through
That complexity is a problem when AI models need to work in real time in a pair of headphones with...
The Download: Nick Clegg on electoral misinformation, and AI’s carbon footprint
Quote of the day “The AI revolution starts with Nvidia, and in our view, the AI party is just getting...
AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.
As AI has become more integrated into our world, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the technology’s rising electricity...
Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level”
As voters will head to polls this year in more than 50 countries, experts have raised the alarm over AI-generated...
The Download: how criminals use AI, and OpenAI’s Chinese data blunder
Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld.Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that...
OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models
In fact, among the few long Chinese tokens in GPT-4o that aren’t either pornography or gambling nonsense, two are “socialism...
Five ways criminals are using AI
That’s because AI companies have put in place various safeguards to prevent their models from spewing harmful or dangerous information....
The Download: how to test AI, and treating paralysis
Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure...
Join me at EmTech Digital this week!
Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul for the second AI Safety Summit this week and Google and OpenAI’s launches...
A device that zaps the spinal cord gave paralyzed people better control of their hands
The stimulation won’t work in the small percentage of people who have no remaining connection between the brain and spine...