Recommended from Around the Web (Week ending August 29, 2015)
Digital Surveillance ‘Worse than Orwell’, Says New UN Privacy Chief
The UN’s new privacy chief says a Geneva Convention-style international treaty is needed to protect rights against digital surveillance.
—Tom Simonite, San Francisco bureau chief
Should Cops Be Allowed to Take Control of Self-Driving Cars?
How much power should law enforcement have over self-driving cars?
—Tom Simonite
The Pope and the Planet
In the New York Review of Books, author and activist Bill McKibben writes movingly about Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. “Pope Francis, in a moment of great crisis, speaks … to who we could be individually and more importantly as a species. As the data suggest, this may be the only option we have left.”
—Richard Martin, senior editor, energy
The Terrible Teens
The science behind why teenagers are so difficult.
—Megan Barnett, deputy editor
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t
An interesting take on the disruption that digital distribution has unleashed on the creative industry.
—Will Knight, senior editor, AI
Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site
Analyzing IP addresses and activity patterns suggests that “the world of Ashley Madison was … like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.”
—Linda Lowenthal, copy chief
Who’s Doing the Talking on Twitter?
Twitter’s stalled growth may be the beginning of the end of the dream that the Internet could provide the “global town square.”
—Nanette Byrnes, senior editor, Business Reports
Keep Reading
Most Popular
Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.
OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora
The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.
Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.
Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.
This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language
A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.