The Download
What's up in emerging technology
Facebook still wants to gobble up your data
Bill Gates and Masayoshi Son are backing a plan to have video cameras watch every inch of Earth from space
China is being pushed out of US telecoms
Cambridge Analytica sought to create its own cryptocurrency, because of course it did
New York attorney general to crypto exchanges: Please, tell us more about yourselves
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We need everyone involved in AI 00:47
Takeaways from Tay the sexbot 01:11
Secret cryptomining 01:57
Agriculture and machine learning 01:27
AI for photo editing 02:32
Translating in real time 02:08
AI Savants 02:09
Bias in AI 00:58
The AI "Character Challenge" 01:22
AI advances require 99 percent manual labor 01:37
Intelligent Machines
We need everyone involved in AI 00:47
Rachel Thomas of Fast.ai advocates for everyone to be involved in AI at EmTech Digital 2018.
Rewriting Life
Gene therapy could free some people from a lifetime of blood transfusions
Correcting a genetic mutation lets beta thalassemia patients make healthy blood cells.
Connectivity
Getting e-mail on your skin is actually a thing now, thanks to Facebook
Researchers for the social network taught people to feel 100 words on their arms with a wearable prototype.
Intelligent Machines
Tesla says its factory is safer—but it left injuries off the books
Undercounting injuries is a symptom of a larger problem: Tesla has put electric-car manufacturing above safety concerns, former safety experts say.
Rewriting Life
Pet cloning is bringing human cloning a little bit closer
People are copying pets to preserve a physical, and spiritual, connection to dead children.
Connectivity
America’s cryptocurrency tax policy is confusing everyone
Lack of clarity from the Internal Revenue Service is creating headaches for users of Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
Connectivity
An ex-Google engineer is scraping YouTube to pop our filter bubbles
He’s built a website that lets you see how often YouTube’s algorithm recommends videos, so you can find out where it wants to take you.
June 4-5, 2018
MIT Media Lab
When robots are your colleagues, which human skills will still matter?
Join the conversion at EmTech Next where we talk about the future of work with the world’s leading experts.
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View from the Marketplace
On-Device Processing and AI Go Hand-in-Hand
Executive Briefing
The Path to Professional Salvation for Modern IT Leaders
From Our Current Issue
Sustainable Energy
Can we sustainably provide food, water, and energy to a growing population during a climate crisis?
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How the science of persuasion could change the politics of climate change
Conservatives have to make the case to conservatives, and a growing number of them are.
by James Temple
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This battery advance could make electric vehicles far cheaper
Sila Nanotechnologies has pulled off double-digit performance gains for lithium-ion batteries, promising to lower costs or add capabilities for cars and phones.
by James Temple
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These boots were made for generating power
Embedded in a boot heel, a microfluidic device based on a 19th-century invention harvests energy from human footsteps.
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
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Operational Excellence - Sears Home Services
The tall order of connected devices: how to harness a decade of data to assess that an appliance needs to be fixed before it breaks.
by MIT Technology Review Insights
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Operational Excellence - DTE Energy
It can be done: achieving operational excellence by reducing operating costs while increasing customer satisfaction.
by MIT Technology Review Insights
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Operational Excellence - Golden State Foods
How to enable innovation in operational excellence by thinking big, starting small and going fast.
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Intelligent Machines
Artificial intelligence and robots are transforming how we work and live.
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Reinforcement Learning: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017
By experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do things that no programmer could teach them.
by Will Knight
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With this tool, AI could identify new malware as readily as it recognizes cats
A huge data set will help train algorithms to spot the nasty programs hiding in our computers.
by Jackie Snow
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Tesla says its factory is safer—but it left injuries off the books
Undercounting injuries is a symptom of a larger problem: Tesla has put electric-car manufacturing above safety concerns, former safety experts say.
by Will Evans and Alyssa Jeong Perry
Features
Rewriting Life
Forecasts of genetic fate just got a lot more accurate
DNA-based scores are getting better at predicting intelligence, risks for common diseases, and more.
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The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions
Mistaken extrapolations, limited imagination, and other common mistakes that distract us from thinking more productively about the future.
by Rodney Brooks
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The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI
No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.
by Will Knight
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Forget Killer Robots—Bias Is the Real AI Danger
John Giannandrea, who leads AI at Google, is worried about intelligent systems learning human prejudices.
by Will Knight
Connect with tomorrow's technology today.
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Undoing Aging with Molecular and Cellular Damage Repair
Since the dawn of medicine, aging has been doctors’ foremost challenge.
by Aubrey D. N. J. de Grey
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Human Legacies When Robots Rule the Earth
Machines have been displacing humans on job tasks for several centuries, and for seventy years many of these machines have been controlled by computers.
by Robin Hanson
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Our Extended Sensoria. How Humans Will Connect with the Internet of Things
Mark Weiser predicted the Internet of Things in a seminal article in 1991 about how people would interact with networked computation distributed into the environments and artifacts around them.
by Joseph A. Paradiso