China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Last week, I told you about my adventure at Tencent’s customer service center. But the quest to get my QQ account back wasn’t the only reason I went to Shenzhen. While I was in China, […]
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Everything you need to know about the wild world of alternative jet fuels
Tech Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here. The future of flying might depend on french fries, trash, and sunlight. Aviation accounts for about 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, and once you add in other polluting gases, […]
The Download: urban drone deliveries, and our guide to AI regulations
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Food delivery by drone is just part of daily life in Shenzhen —Zeyi Yang In a buzzy urban area in Shenzhen, China, I watched as a drone descended onto a pickup kiosk to […]
The Download: rub-on gene therapy, and safeguarding email memories
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The FDA just approved rub-on gene therapy that helps “butterfly” children The news: Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration approved sales of the first gene therapy that is directly applied to […]
Suddenly, everyone wants to talk about how to regulate AI
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It feels as though a switch has turned on in AI policy. For years, US legislators and American tech companies were reluctant to introduce—if not outright against—strict technology regulation. Now both have […]
Food delivery by drone is just part of daily life in Shenzhen
My iced tea arrived from the sky. In a buzzy urban area in Shenzhen, China, sandwiched between several skyscrapers, I watched as a yellow-and-black drone descended onto a pickup kiosk by the street. The top of the vending-machine-size kiosk opened up for the drone to land, and a white cardboard box containing my drink was […]
Our quick guide to the 6 ways we can regulate AI
Tech Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here. AI regulation is hot. Ever since the success of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, the public’s attention has been grabbed by wonder and worry about what these powerful AI tools can do. Generative […]
Meta’s new AI models can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages
Meta has built AI models that can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages—a tenfold increase on what’s currently available. It’s a significant step toward preserving languages that are at risk of disappearing, the company says. Meta is releasing its models to the public via the code hosting service GitHub. It claims that […]
Brain waves can tell us how much pain someone is in
Brain signals can be used to detect how much pain a person is experiencing, which could overhaul how we treat certain chronic pain conditions, a new study has suggested. The research, published in Nature Neuroscience today, is the first time a human’s chronic-pain-related brain signals have been recorded. It could aid the development of personalized […]
How to preserve your digital memories
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. I recently published a short story about new policies recently announced by Google and Twitter that allow the companies to remove inactive accounts. Google said the decision […]