July 8, 2025

Why the US and Europe could lose the race for fusion energy

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and…

Technology

The Download: AI agents’ autonomy, and sodium-based batteries

June 12, 2025
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. Are we ready to hand AI agents the keys? In recent months, a new class of agents has arrived on the scene: ones built using large language models. Any action that can be…

Are we ready to hand AI agents the keys?

June 12, 2025
On May 6, 2010, at 2:32 p.m. Eastern time, nearly a trillion dollars evaporated from the US stock market within 20 minutes—at the time, the fastest decline in history. Then, almost as suddenly, the market rebounded. After months of investigation, regulators attributed much of the responsibility for this “flash crash” to high-frequency trading algorithms, which…

These new batteries are finding a niche

June 12, 2025
Lithium-ion batteries have some emerging competition: Sodium-based alternatives are starting to make inroads. Sodium is more abundant on Earth than lithium, and batteries that use the material could be cheaper in the future. Building a new battery chemistry is difficult, mostly because lithium is so entrenched. But, as I’ve noted before, this new technology has…

At WWDC, Apple says it will use AI to tag apps to improve discoverability on the App Store

June 11, 2025
Apple will begin using AI technology to power the discovery of apps on the App Store, the company announced at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 25). In a session focused on updates to App Store Connect, its app distribution platform for developers, the company announced it will introduce App Store Tags — labels that […]

The Download: Amsterdam’s welfare AI experiment, and making humanoid robots safer

June 11, 2025
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. Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI Amsterdam thought it was on the right track. City officials in the welfare department believed they could build technology that would prevent fraud while…

Why humanoid robots need their own safety rules

June 11, 2025
Last year, a humanoid warehouse robot named Digit set to work handling boxes of Spanx. Digit can lift boxes up to 16 kilograms between trolleys and conveyor belts, taking over some of the heavier work for its human colleagues. It works in a restricted, defined area, separated from human workers by physical panels or laser…

Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI

June 11, 2025
This story is a partnership between MIT Technology Review, Lighthouse Reports, and Trouw, and was supported by the Pulitzer Center.  Two futures Hans de Zwart, a gym teacher turned digital rights advocate, says that when he saw Amsterdam’s plan to have an algorithm evaluate every welfare applicant in the city for potential fraud, he nearly…

The Download: IBM’s quantum computer, and cuts to military AI testing

June 10, 2025
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. IBM aims to build the world’s first large-scale, error-corrected quantum computer by 2028 The news: IBM announced detailed plans today to build an error-corrected quantum computer with significantly more computational capability than existing…