AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened?
On July 25 last year, in circuit court in Dane County, Wisconsin, a motion was filed to dismiss a criminal case as a result of what defense attorneys described as “institutional bad-faith actions” by a local police department. The evidence was unearthed, in part, because of artificial intelligence. Attorney Jessa Nicholson Goetz had been preparing to defend her client against a sexual assault charge that arose from a 2021 Tinder date. During pretrial motions, Nicholson Goetz’s co-counsel noticed discrepancies around how the lead police investigator was discussing and documenting his use of a body camera, which department policy required him […]
How to stop a state from sinking
There is more than one way to raise a house. Many of the mobile homes, Creole cottages, and other dwellings that have been flagged for flood risk along Louisiana’s low-lying coastline can be separated from their foundations and slowly raised into the sky on hydraulic jacks. While a home is held aloft by temporary support beams, a new, elevated floor is built underneath or the foundation extended upward—think of the pilings you might see supporting a beach house. But for homes like Christa and Alex Bell’s, which consists of two stories and a two-car garage sitting on a concrete slab, […]
How thermal batteries are heating up energy storage
We need heat to make everything from steel bars to ketchup packets. Today, a whopping 20% of global energy demand goes to producing heat used in industry, and most of that heat is generated by burning fossil fuels. In an effort to clean up industry, a growing number of companies are working to supply that heat with a technology called thermal batteries. It’s such an exciting idea that MIT Technology Review readers have officially selected thermal batteries as the reader’s choice addition to our 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. So here’s a closer look at what all the excitement […]
The Download: saving Louisiana from sinking, and the promise of thermal batteries
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. How to stop a state from sinking In a 10-month span between 2020 and 2021, southwest Louisiana saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, more storms are coming, and many areas are not prepared. But some government officials and state engineers are hoping there is an alternative: elevation. The $6.8 billion Southwest Coastal Louisiana Project is betting that raising residences by a few feet, coupled with extensive work to restore coastal […]
The Download: a history of brainwashing, and America’s chipmaking ambitions
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 A brief, weird history of brainwashing On a spring day in 1959, war correspondent Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” Hunter discussed a new concept to the American public: a supposedly scientific system for changing people’s minds, even making them love things they once hated. Much of it was baseless, but Hunter’s sensational tales still became an important part of the disinformation and pseudoscience that […]
The effort to make a breakthrough cancer therapy cheaper
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. CAR-T therapies, created by engineering a patient’s own cells to fight cancer, are typically reserved for people who have exhausted other treatment options. But last week, the FDA approved Carvykti, a CAR-T product for multiple myeloma, as a second-line therapy. That means people are eligible to receive Carvykti after their first relapse. While this means some multiple myeloma patients in the US will now get earlier access to CAR-T, the vast majority of […]
A brief, weird history of brainwashing
On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relished. A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after his book Brain-Washing in Red China introduced a new concept to the American public: a supposedly scientific system for changing people’s minds, even making them love things they once hated. But Hunter wasn’t just a reporter, objectively chronicling conditions in China. As he told the assembled senators, […]
This US startup makes a crucial chip material and is taking on a Japanese giant
It can be dizzying to try to understand all the complex components of a single computer chip: layers of microscopic components linked to one another through highways of copper wires, some barely wider than a few strands of DNA. Nestled between those wires is an insulating material called a dielectric, ensuring that the wires don’t touch and short out. Zooming in further, there’s one particular dielectric placed between the chip and the structure beneath it; this material, called dielectric film, is produced in sheets as thin as white blood cells. For 30 years, a single Japanese company called Ajinomoto has […]
Scaling individual impact: Insights from an AI engineering leader
Traditionally, moving up in an organization has meant leading increasingly large teams of people, with all the business and operational duties that entails. As a leader of large teams, your contributions can become less about your own work and more about your team’s output and impact. There’s another path, though. The rapidly evolving fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have increased demand for engineering leaders who drive impact as individual contributors (ICs). An IC has more flexibility to move across different parts of the organization, solve problems that require expertise from different technical domains, and keep their […]
The Download: AI is making robots more helpful, and the problem with cleaning up pollution
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. Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment? Henry and Jane Evans are used to awkward houseguests. For more than a decade, the couple, who live in Los Altos Hills, California, have hosted a slew of robots in their home. In 2002, at age 40, Henry had a massive stroke, which left him with quadriplegia and an inability to speak. While they’ve experimented with many advanced robotic prototypes in a bid to give Henry more autonomy, it’s […]