The Download

What's up in emerging technology

Business Impact

Job of the future: Embalming your online persona

The woman organizing our messy digital lives to survive us.
Connectivity

Specialized chips are threatening to take over cryptocurrencies, and they look unstoppable

The Chinese firm Bitmain dominates the market for tailor-made mining hardware and shows no sign of slowing down.
Connectivity

Subcutaneous Fitbits? These cows are modeling the tracking technology of the future

Livestock Labs is getting bio-monitors under cows’ skin in hopes of helping farmers spot disease earlier, and it wants to bring its tech to people, too.
Intelligent Machines

The White House says a new AI task force will protect workers and keep America first

Saying the US is ahead of other nations in AI, the administration touts actions it has already taken to promote the technology.
Sustainable Energy

California’s rooftop solar rule is a pricey path to emissions reductions

A solar panel on every house might sound good, but it isn’t smart climate policy.
Intelligent Machines

AI program gets really good at navigation by developing a brain-like GPS system

DeepMind’s neural networks mimic the grid cells found in human brains that help us know where we are.
Connectivity

Google’s new tools will make your life more convenient—for a price

Don’t forget that forking over more and more of your data remains part of the bargain.
Intelligent Machines

How uncertainty could help a machine hold a more eloquent conversation

AI startup Gamalon developed a clever new way for chatbots and virtual assistants to converse with us.
Rewriting Life

Before he died, this biohacker was planning a CRISPR trial in Mexico

Aaron Traywick and his company, Ascendance Biomedical, are connected to a website advertising a gene-therapy trial for lung cancer.

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.

Register Now

From Our Current Issue

May/June 2018

The future of trust?

Chinese entrepreneurs have some creative responses to the government’s crackdown on crypto

Last September’s official restrictions have unleashed a wave of below-the-radar innovation.

Is the crypto world sexist? That might be the wrong question.

“Inclusion happens when people in power use that power to bring people in rather than keep people out.”

Watch Video

More videos

Blood-Delivering Drones 04:23

How the SEC will affect ICOs 04:05

"Tezos tokens are akin to Amazon AWS credits" 00:25

"Bitcoin is like Coca-Cola" 01:11

Valuing an asset in the crypto world 00:27

Crypto assets versus cryptocurrencies 01:24

How the market is pricing each unit of Bitcoin's transaction volume 00:41

Why now? 01:55

How banks use blockchains 02:03

Zero-knowledge proofs, ZK-Snarks, and CryptoKitties 01:23

Intelligent Machines

Blood-Delivering Drones 04:23

In Rwanda, an early commercial test of unmanned aerial vehicles is delivering urgently needed medical supplies.

More Videos

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2018

Dueling neural networks. Artificial embryos. AI in the cloud. Welcome to our annual list of the 10 technology advances we think will shape the way we work and live now and for years to come.

See the Collection

Business Impact

How technology advances are changing the economy and providing new opportunities in many industries.

All Topics

  1. How is America preparing for the future of work?

    Three questions on retraining and the future of work with economist Jay Shambaugh.
    by Erin Winick

  2. Facebook may stop the data leaks, but it’s too late: Cambridge Analytica’s models live on

    Long after the training data has been deleted, the models can continue being improved and used to influence future voters.
    by Jacob Metcalf

  3. From the factory floor to the OR, robots can make great teammates

    Julie Shah is figuring out the best ways for us to interact with our future robotic colleagues.
    by Erin Winick
More from Business Impact
View from the Marketplace

On-Device Processing and AI Go Hand-in-Hand

In partnership with Qualcomm

Partner Video

The World of AI: Actually, Italian

Presented by Italian Trade Agency

Briefing Paper

How to Unlock the Power of IoT with Real-Time Monitoring

In association with AppDynamics

Webcast

Optimizing Assets: Using AI to Rethink Maintenance and Repair

Presented by IBM

Features

Sustainable Energy

The scientist still fighting for the clean fuel the world forgot

A decade of investment in advanced biofuels led nowhere, but Jay Keasling remains undaunted.

by James Temple

Rewriting Life

A stealthy Harvard startup wants to reverse aging in dogs, and humans could be next

Biologist George Church says the idea is to live to 130 in the body of a 22-year-old.
Connectivity

In blockchain we trust

To understand why blockchain matters, look past the wild speculation at what is being built underneath, argue the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency and its newly published follow-up, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything.

Intelligent Machines

Artificial intelligence and robots are transforming how we work and live.

All Topics

  1. 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

  2. The world’s first quantum software superstore—or so it hopes—is here

    Zapata Computing plans to build the algorithms for companies that want to experiment with quantum computers.
    by Martin Giles

  3. The White House says a new AI task force will protect workers and keep America first

    Saying the US is ahead of other nations in AI, the administration touts actions it has already taken to promote the technology.
    by Will Knight
More from Intelligent Machines