The Download
What's up in emerging technology
Facebook’s disappearing message saga is the act of a company in turmoil
Tesla’s solar business is adding extra financial worries to its long list of headaches
Facebook had plans to break into medical data sharing
300 genes found at the root of cancers could spur more personalized treatments
China has a new plan to create an army of AI researchers
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Waymo tests for the weirdest possible situations 01:23
Blood-Delivering Drones 04:23
Secret cryptomining 01:57
We need everyone involved in AI 00:47
Agriculture and machine learning 01:27
AI for photo editing 02:32
AI Savants 02:09
Bias in AI 00:58
Is 3-D Printing Finally Becoming the Manufacturing Tool It Was Hyped Up to Be? 34:20
Yasmin Green: Using Technology to Make the World a Better Place 04:04
Intelligent Machines
Waymo tests for the weirdest possible situations 01:23
At EmTech Digital 2018, Astro Teller of X describes the types of “insane amount of testing” Waymo does to prepare for the unexpected.
Connectivity
The next generation of ICOs will actually have to follow the rules
The SEC is cracking down on ICOs. But blockchain-based fund-raising won’t die—it will just evolve.
Business Impact
The digital athletes of the future: Earning $1.6 million behind a keyboard
Clement Ivanov is one of the top Dota 2 players in the world.
Rewriting Life
This stem-cell implant could halt an incredibly common cause of blindness
The dream of a stem-cell revolution hasn’t yet materialized—but a small study appears to have used the technology to ward off macular degeneration.
Rewriting Life
MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading
A startup called Nectome collected $200,000 from people hoping to become digitally immortal through suicide.
Connectivity
Your own devices will give the next Cambridge Analytica far more power to influence your vote
Greater connectivity, more data, and auto-generated content will make today’s manipulation techniques look primitive.
Intelligent Machines
Why getting back to the moon is so damn hard
The $20 million Lunar X Prize was supposed to send startups into space. The cost turned out to be far higher than the reward—but the competitors were never really in it for the trophy.
Rewriting Life
DNA tests for IQ are coming, but it might not be smart to take one
Scientists have linked hundreds of genes to intelligence. One psychologist says it’s time to test school kids.
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
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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.
Sustainable Energy
Can we sustainably provide food, water, and energy to a growing population during a climate crisis?
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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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At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system
Here are the real reasons we’re not building clean energy anywhere near fast enough.
by James Temple
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Relying on renewables alone significantly inflates the cost of overhauling energy
Evidence points to the need for a broader range of clean power beyond just wind and solar.
by James Temple
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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.
by MIT Technology Review Insights
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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Here’s how the US needs to prepare for the age of artificial intelligence
Government indifference toward AI could let the US lose ground to rival countries. But what would a good AI plan actually look like?
by Will Knight
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Zipline launches the world’s fastest commercial delivery drone
The California-based startup’s new machine takes to the skies just as the US is about to loosen rules governing drone operations.
by Martin Giles
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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
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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