June 16, 2025

How AI can help make cities work better for residents

In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are unable to communicate, let alone analyze or put to use, all the information they have access to. This dynamic has always bothered Sarah Williams, a professor of urban planning and…

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…