The Download: introducing: the 125th Anniversary issue

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.

Introducing: the 125th Anniversary issue

With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines. Instead, we decided to try to use history as a way to explore what things may look like over the next 125 years. 

The longer you report on tech, the more you realize how often we get the future wrong. Predictions have a way of not coming true. The things that seem so clear now can shift and change, rearranging themselves into wholly new forms we never thought of.

But also, predictions that we laugh off as having been so wrong often have a way of coming true eventually. Throughout this latest edition of MIT Technology Review you’ll find some of our best bets as to what the future may hold. We may not get it exactly right, but we think we’re at least pointing toward where things are headed.

Here’s a selection of some of the most fascinating stories from the magazine:

+ What the future and its emerging technologies hold for those born today, from intelligent digital companions for life, to virtual first dates.

+ What the rare earth metal neodymium shows us about our clean-energy future, and the resources we’ll need to create and maintain it.

+ Delve into the challenges archivists face as they try to preserve information about our current lives for those living far off in the future.

+ Why it’s looking likely that something will be developed in the coming decades that will help us live longer, in better health.

+ Read our investigation into the ways we may all play God in the coming years, thanks to the ability to change our very DNA.

+ How the rise of AI porn could change our expectations of relationships.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

An AI startup created a hyperrealistic deepfake of MIT Technology Review’s senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkilä that was so believable, even she thought it was really her at first. This technology is impressive, to be sure. But it raises big questions about a world where we increasingly can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake.

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast. In partnership with News Over Audio, we’ll be making a selection of our stories available, each one read by a professional voice actor. You’ll be able to listen to them on the go or download them to listen to offline.

We’re publishing a new story each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, including some taken from our most recent print magazine.

Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Hackers from China infiltrated US internet providers to spy on users 
They penetrated multiple providers with millions of customers. (WP $)
+ The group exploited a bug in a California startup to hack the companies. (Bloomberg $)
+ It appears as though they hoped to pivot into other networks on the servers. (TechCrunch)

2 The crypto industry is rallying around Telegram
Enthusiasts have pledged to support its founder following his arrest. (NYT $)
+ Pavel Durov may be held in France until tonight. (FT $)
+ Conservatives are also big fans of the app. (404 Media)
+ Child safety watchdogs say Telegram ignored their warnings about illegal material on its platform. (NBC News)

3 OpenAI is working on a problem-solving AI
To solve math problems it has never encountered before. (The Information $)
+ Google DeepMind’s AI systems can solve these sorts of problems too. (MIT Technology Review)

4 SpaceX has delayed its first private spacewalk mission
It had been scheduled to take off in the early hours of this morning. (BBC)
+ If successful, the mission will go further into space than we’ve been in 50 years. (Vox)

5 Police officers are using AI tools to write crime reports
But what if the chatbots get crucial details wrong? (Associated Press)
+ After all, we know AI has a hallucination problem. (Vice)
+ Why does AI hallucinate? (MIT Technology Review)

6 Homeland security really wants to use face recognition at the border
Authorities have approached private vendors to capture drivers’ faces. (The Intercept)
+ The US wants to use facial recognition to identify migrant children as they age. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Persecuted Venezuelan journalists are using AI avatars
To avoid arrest amid a media crackdown led by the country’s disputed president. (The Guardian)

8 The UK is embracing China’s EVs
In stark contrast to the US and Europe. (Economist $)
+ Europe’s best-selling Chinese EV maker has a surprising name. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Black holes are getting colorful
The team that captured the first image of one has a new color vision frequency to play around with. (Inverse)
+ This is the first image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Mavis Beacon taught millions of people to touch type
Decades after the height of her fame, a documentary attempts to track her down. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“If you don’t upskill, obviously, AI will replace you.”

—Arsenio Balisacan, secretary of the Philippines’ National Economic and Development Authority, has a warning for the country’s workers, Bloomberg reports.

The big story

Inside the hunt for new physics at the world’s largest particle collider

February 2024

In 2012, using data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, researchers discovered a particle called the Higgs boson. In the process, they answered a nagging question: Where do fundamental particles, such as the ones that make up all the protons and neutrons in our bodies, get their mass?

But now, more than a decade later, there is a sense of unease. That’s because there are still so many unanswered questions about the fundamental constituents of the universe. 

So researchers are trying something new. They are repurposing detectors to search for unusual-looking particles, squeezing what they can out of the data with machine learning, and planning for entirely new kinds of colliders. Read the full story.

—Dan Garisto

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ We all know sleep is important, but did you know just how important?
+ Why we love souvenirs so much—even the tacky ones.
+ The Indigenous Yaghan people have multiple words for the sea.
+ Don’t call it a comeback, Enya never went away.