2020 in review

Our best illustrations of 2020

Our artists’ thought-provoking, playful creations bring our stories to life, often saying more with an image than words ever could.

Emily Luong archive page

December 31, 2020

From the MIT Technology Review art team, here are some of our very favorite illustrations of the year:

conceptual illustration of 3 women's silhouetted faces — Is getting pregnant “medically necessary” right now?

10 Breakthrough Technologies: Hyper-personalized medicine

Your biggest questions about coronavirus, answered

tech legislation illo — What the 1930s can teach us about dealing with Big Tech today

race for a cure — The race to find a covid-19 drug in the blood of survivors

This is what it will take to get us back outside

The long, complicated history of “people analytics”

sharing misinformation — How the truth was murdered

10 Breakthrough Technologies: Unhackable internet

YOSHI SODEOKA

conceptual illustration — What AI still can’t do

Conceptual illustration of a student sitting in a window that shows large ethernet cords plugged in around her — The children being left behind by America’s online schooling

conceptual illustration showing 5 figures in a dark empty landscape — Many covid-19 survivors will be left traumatized by their ICU experience

bicycles — Why you don’t really know what you know
We put our team of writers to the test when we asked them to draw a bicycle from memory in 5 minutes. We ended up with such a great group of bikes that we decided to use them for story art.

Why venture capital doesn’t build the things we really need

A rhinocorn -- a cross between a rhino and unicorn. — A radical new technique lets AI learn with practically no data

pig genes operation game — Gene editing has made pigs immune to a deadly epidemi

conceptual illustration showing a police hat with overlapped nueral network that's being dismantled. — Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.

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Yann LeCun has a bold new vision for the future of AI

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The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images

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Illustration by Rose Wong

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