Enterprises are shifting operations from on-premises to the cloud, and industry momentum for digital transformation continues to push forward. Gartner that 80% of CEOs are increasing investment in digital technologies in 2023 to achieve greater efficiency and productivity. Cloud and digitization are becoming a necessity across industries to ensure competitiveness. But as companies make these shifts, employees feel the change in atmosphere. And according to the American Psychological Association, , especially when they don’t understand the reasons for the change. Transformation is not just about onboarding technology: it means changes in people’s responsibilities, daily routines, and workstyles. The key to taking full advantage of these powerful digital tools is understanding how they affect employees at all levels. It can be hard for leaders to avoid rushing ahead, because digital transformation is a chance to look at the whole operation, says Jennifer Chilton, principal of advisory and enterprise solutions at KPMG. It’s exciting to ponder an all-encompassing view of efficiency that can automate manual processes, she says, not only for a smoother workflow, but for faster information flow around the business: “Improve the controls, improve the speed.” A successful transition requires an equally expansive view of the one component on which it all hinges: people. Michelle Kent, principal at KPMG’s people and change practice, has a blunt message for executives who give their staff little notice before major changes, scant information about the future state of the company, and negligible involvement in the planning: “That’s not how people work.” . This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Decoding the data of the Chinese mpox outbreak Almost exactly a year after the World Health Organization declared mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) a public health emergency, the hot spot for the outbreak has quietly moved from the US and Europe to Asia. China in particular is experiencing a concerning increase in mpox cases right now. While Beijing did recently issue a guidance on mpox prevention, the country hasn’t taken a very proactive approach to containing the outbreak. It hasn’t talked at all about using , for example. And the way Beijing has so far reported disease data, combined with the way the WHO publishes it, makes it really difficult to understand the exact scale of mpox in the country. . —Zeyi Yang This story is from China Report, Zeyi’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things happening in China. to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Check out Zeyi’s digging into China’s public mpox health crisis published earlier this week. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Meta has started blocking news in CanadaPublishers have branded the decision an abuse of power. ()+ And the US could be next. ()+ The news business is in a state of flux right now. ( $)2 The US is set to give South Korea billions in chip subsidiesAnd China’s not happy about it. ( $)+ Relations between South and North Korea are at a new low. ( $) 3 Kenya has suspended Worldcoin from operating thereIts authorities are probing whether it’s safe—or legal. ()+ How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users. () 4 Ukraine is hitting Russians with 3D-printed bombsThey’re lightweight, cheap, and deadly. ( $)+ Mass-market military drones have changed the way wars are fought. () 5 China is still trading billions of dollars’ worth of cryptoDespite it being illegal there since 2021. ( $)+ The country is cracking down on young people spending time online again. ( $)+ Why China kicked out the crypto miners. () 6 Amazon’s grocery business is strugglingTurns out bricks and mortar stores aren’t so easy to run after all. ( $)+ So the company’s growing its health services instead. ( $) 7 The FDA could approve the first pill for postpartum depressionIt’s much faster-acting than current antidepressants. ( $)+ Reproductive health misinformation has flourished on Meta’s platforms. ( $) 8 NASA has regained contact with Voyager 2After a week in the dark, the 46-year old spacecraft is back in business. ( $) 9 A YouTube sleuth became caught up in their own true crime investigationBut our appetite for grisly drama remains unabated. ( $)+ YouTube is benefiting off the back of the Hollywood labor strikes. ( $) 10 We need new antibioticsAncient drug molecules could hold the key to helping us discover new treatments. ()+ AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we’ve got to see if they work. () Quote of the day “Some people think I look too human when I stand up. I am a Malayan sun bear!” —A statement from Hangzhou Zoo in China reassures visitors that, contrary to internet conspiracy theories, its Malayan sun bear is not a man in a suit, reports. The big story Zimbabwe’s climate migration is a sign of what’s to come December 2021Julius Mutero has spent his entire adult life farming a three-hectare plot in Zimbabwe, but has harvested virtually nothing in the past six years. He is just one of the 86 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who the World Bank estimates will migrate domestically by 2050 because of climate change—the largest number predicted in any of six major regions the organization studied.In Zimbabwe, farmers who have tried to stay put and adapt have found their efforts woefully inadequate in the face of new weather extremes. Droughts have already forced tens of thousands from the country’s lowlands to the Eastern Highlands. But their desperate moves are creating new competition for water in the region, and tensions may soon boil over. . —Andrew Mambondiyani We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + Any should swing by the Final Fantasy Eorzea cafe.+ It turns out that have been bobbing about for over 500 million years

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Almost exactly a year after the World Health Organization mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) a public health emergency, the hot spot for the outbreak has quietly moved from the US and Europe to Asia. China in particular is experiencing a concerning increase in mpox cases right now. This morning, I on the developing mpox situation there and the government’s response so far. While Beijing did recently issue a guidance on mpox prevention, the country hasn’t taken a very proactive approach to containing the outbreak—a stark contrast from its strict covid policies (which I extensively last year). It’s particularly worrying that the government hasn’t talked at all about using mpox vaccines, though and they have proved to be effective at containing the mpox spread in countries including. Beijing’s omission may be a result of “technology nationalism,” says Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. But delaying the approval of effective foreign vaccines could stymie prevention and result in more dangerous outcomes, Huang warns—the same thing that happened with covid. You can read more about the difficulties in containing the mpox spread in China in the today.But in this newsletter, I want to highlight a different challenge: because of the way Beijing has so far reported mpox data and the way the WHO publishes it, it’s quite difficult to understand the exact scale of mpox in the country. When I started reporting this story, I found that the only available mpox case count China has published is a one-time report tallying cases from June 2 to June 30. No information on weekly developments or cases from before or after June has been made public, even though other Asian countries, including Japan, started to see cases rise back in March. But when I looked up , with data starting in January 2022, I was surprised to find a consistent stream of new cases being reported by China several times a week, as recently as July 20. For some time I thought this meant Chinese health authorities or researchers had been quietly reporting more timely data to the WHO while keeping the information inaccessible to the public. After all, something similar . Honestly, I found this data surprising and alarming. News about mpox in China has been mostly under the radar, but as the WHO overview explains: “In the most recent week of full reporting, 7 countries reported an increase in the weekly number of cases, with the highest increase reported in China.” The WHO data shows that from May to July, China reported 315 mpox cases, the most around the world in this time frame. Sounds quite bad, right? It turns out the reality is a tad more complicated. On the WHO website, the recent mpox data listed under China is the sum of cases reported in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The lack of data separation is significant here for a few reasons. First, while case counts have indeed risen in China, we don’t know by how much and over what time frame. China reported 106 cases in June alone, and it’s safe to assume there were additional cases in May and July. But there’s no information there to help us understand the exact urgency and severity of the outbreak, which can lead to panic and uninformed interventions. What’s more, as its handling of covid shows, the Chinese government may be holding onto data to serve its own interests. Beyond that, this combined data reporting obscures the fact that Taiwan and China, with their different governing bodies, have responded to public health emergencies in very different ways. While China has not signaled any interest in using mpox vaccines, Taiwan, which has its own CDC, has already administered over 72,000 shots so far. While China has only issued a one-month report of case counts, Taiwan has a public database showing how many new cases are reported each week, making it easy to see that the outbreak is on the decline there, six months after local transmission started. So aggregating very different sources of data creates a confusing landscape and makes it hard to follow the impact of public health measures. This means that when the WHO data shows a 550% increase in weekly new cases in China between July 10 and July 17, the jump means little. It doesn’t reveal the direction of the mpox outbreak; it only emphasizes the broken, irregular pattern of case reporting from China. This is not to say the outbreak in China is insignificant, but that the data on the WHO website can easily mislead observers. It’s important to realize that despite how authoritative they may sound, international organizations like the WHO don’t have a magic source of data that overcomes the limited public health information coming out of China. It can only rely on individual countries to voluntarily report such data. (The WHO didn’t immediately respond to questions about its data aggregation practices; today is a public holiday in Switzerland, where it’s headquartered.) Unfortunately, as the status of Taiwan remains one of the most sensitive security topics to Beijing, even the act of singling out the island’s public health data can be seen as a political move. That is larger than any technical obstacle. At a crucial time like this, transparent and timely case counting is one of the most important public health tools against infectious diseases. It’s too bad that politics is getting in the way of that. Do you think WHO should disaggregate the mpox data of China and Taiwan? What are your reasons? Tell me at zeyi@technologyreview.com. Catch up with China 1. Chinese feminists are rushing out to support the Barbie movie. (But you can’t do a “Barbenheimer” double feature yet, since Oppenheimer isn’t arriving in China until August 30.) () 2. The US government believes Chinese hackers have inserted malware into the communications, logistics, and supply networks of US military bases. () 3. A former party official in the city of Hangzhou, who oversaw the rise of tech giant Alibaba, was imprisoned for life for taking $25 million in bribes. () 4. Volkswagen bought a 5% stake in the Chinese electric vehicle company Xpeng, and the companies will jointly develop two EV models under the Volkswagen brand. () 5. TikTok’s newly launched ad library in Europe shows that Chinese major state media have run over 1,000 ads on the platform, even though TikTok’s policy forbids political ads. () 6. Shein spent $600,000 on lobbying activities between April 1 and June 30, nearly three times its lobbying spending in the first quarter. () 7. China will restrict the export of long-range civilian drones, citing concerns that they might be converted to military use. () 8. A Taiwanese businessman accused of espionage and stealing state secrets was freed after two years in a Chinese jail. () Lost in translation A new AI photo generator app called 妙鸭相机 (Miaoya Camera), developed with support from a Alibaba-owned company, is all the rage in China right now. Users can upload 21 photos with their faces to create personalized portraits that look as if they were created by a professional. It’s priced at just 9.9 RMB ($1.38), a tiny fraction of what chain photography studios often charge. (These studios have become a popular business in recent years.) Experts told Chinese publication that the technology Miaoya Camera uses—mostly the open-source model Stable Diffusion and a technique called “low-rank adaptation of large language models” to improve the result—is nothing groundbreaking but just well packaged for the user experience. Expectedly, a controversy then arose about the broad data use permissions in the app’s user agreement; the app apologized and promised it will use personal data only to generate profile photos. One more thing This is from Dongbei — RADII (@RADII_Media) These Barbies and Kens are from Dongbei, the northeastern region of China, where food portions are gigantic and people are often stereotyped as being straightforward and tough. (Sort of like the Texas of China, you know.) But really, these are created by an AI artist, Kim Wang, through Midjourney. about using Midjourney to reimagine Chinese history.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. China is suddenly dealing with another public health crisis: mpox The Chinese government is battling a new public health concern: mpox. The World Health Organization reports that China is currently experiencing the world’s fastest increase in cases of mpox (formerly known as monkeypox)—and it needs to act fast to contain the spread. The countries that have successfully contained mpox outbreaks have mostly done so thanks to proactive measures like vaccination campaigns. The problem is, the Chinese government has barely started to take action. . —Zeyi Yang These new tools could help protect our pictures from AI Generative AI is making it ridiculously easy to manipulate people’s images. While nonconsensual deepfake porn has been used to torment women for years, the latest generation of AI makes it an even bigger problem. These systems are much easier to use than previous deepfake tech, and they can generate images that look completely convincing. The good news is that new tools are starting to emerge which can protect people’s photos and artworks from being tinkered with using AI systems. These tools are neither perfect nor enough on their own—but they’re a start. . —Melissa Heikkilä This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly AI newsletter. to receive it in your inbox every Monday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Worldcoin’s data-capturing plan is working Despite glaring privacy concerns, plenty of people like cash rewards. ()+ How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users. () 2 Twitter is suing a nonprofit that says it hosts hate speechThe Center for Countering Digital Hate claims Elon Musk is trying to silence it. ( $)+ The company’s advertising income is still in freefall. ( $)+ Its new slogan is the rather lame ‘Blaze your glory!’ () 3 Meta is creating chatbots with personas for its platformsWhich seems like a particularly creepy way to boost engagement. ( $)+ Just as it looks like Threads is losing its initial attraction. ( $)+ Google wants to make its Assistant more personable, too. ()4 Post-Roe, pregnancy-related deaths are probably risingThe problem is, there’s no way of knowing exactly how much. ()+ The cognitive dissonance of watching the end of Roe unfold online. () 5 Amazon wants to deliver your packages even fasterThink hours, rather than days. ( $)+ Spare a thought for your delivery driver in the heat. ( $)6 TikTok is pushing a dietary supplement as a weight loss solutionIt’s not exactly new, but it’s attracting new attention in the age of Ozempic. ( $)+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? () 7 UV and blue light could help us to kill deadly E.coliBut the two forms of light are only effective when used together. ()+ Why tiny viruses could be our best bet against antimicrobial resistance. () 8 Start-ups are harnessing AI to treat erectile dysfunctionIn a bid to truly personalize treatment to the individual. () 9 When did food videos get so… racy? Thirst trap chefs know exactly what they’re doing with that pasta. ( $) 10 Apple’s bid to save classical music hasn’t gone to plan Smaller, nimbler rivals do a better job across the board. ( $) Quote of the day “SHUT IT OFF! It is creating a massive nighttime nuisance and making it hard to sleep.” —San Francisco residents complain about the bright, flashing X sign that Elon Musk installed on the roof of Twitter’s headquarters without permission, reports. The big story Geoffrey Hinton has a hunch about what’s next for AI April 2021 In November 2020, psychologist Geoffrey Hinton had a hunch. After a half-century’s worth of attempts—some wildly successful—he’d arrived at another promising insight into how the brain works and how to replicate its circuitry in a computer. If his bet pays off, it might spark the next generation of artificial neural networks—mathematical computing systems, loosely inspired by the brain’s neurons and synapses, that are at the core of today’s artificial intelligence. His “honest motivation,” as he puts it, is curiosity. But ideally, the consequence is more reliable and trustworthy AI. . —Siobhan Roberts We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + What does a week living like look like? Pretty hard work, actually.+ Not everyone can pull off a like Sinéad O’Connor.+ Would you cut it as ?+ Chicken is great, caprese is great, so it makes sense that looks amazing.+ Congratulations to these , which defied the odds to flourish in Antarctica.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, . Earlier this year, when I realized how ridiculously easy generative AI has made it to manipulate people’s images, I maxed out the privacy settings on my social media accounts and swapped my Facebook and Twitter profile pictures for illustrations of myself.The revelation came after playing around with Stable Diffusion–based image editing software and various deepfake apps. With a headshot plucked from Twitter and a few clicks and text prompts, I was able to generate deepfake porn videos of myself and edit the clothes out of my photo. As a female journalist, I’ve experienced more than my fair share of online abuse. I was trying to see how much worse it could get with new AI tools at people’s disposal. While has been used to torment women for years, the latest generation of AI makes it an even bigger problem. These systems are much easier to use than previous deepfake tech, and they can generate images that look completely convincing. Image-to-image AI systems, which allow people to edit existing images using generative AI, “can be very high quality … because it’s basically based off of an existing single high-res image,” Ben Zhao, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago, tells me. “The result that comes out of it is the same quality, has the same resolution, has the same level of details, because oftentimes [the AI system] is just moving things around.” You can imagine my relief when I learned about a new tool that could help people protect their images from AI manipulation. was created by researchers at MIT and works like a protective shield for photos. It alters them in ways that are imperceptible to us but stop AI systems from tinkering with them. If someone tries to edit an image that has been “immunized” by PhotoGuard using an app based on a generative AI model such as Stable Diffusion, the result will look unrealistic or warped. Another tool that works in a similar way is called . But rather than protecting people’s photos, it helps artists prevent their copyrighted works and artistic styles from being . Some artists have been up in arms ever since image-generating AI models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 entered the scene, arguing that tech companies scrape their intellectual property and use it to train such models without compensation or credit. Glaze, which was developed by Zhao and a team of researchers at the University of Chicago, helps them address that problem. Glaze “cloaks” images, applying subtle changes that are barely noticeable to humans but prevent AI models from learning the features that define a particular artist’s style. Zhao says Glaze corrupts AI models’ image generation processes, preventing them from spitting out an infinite number of images that look like work by particular artists. PhotoGuard has a demo online that works with Stable Diffusion, and artists will soon have access to Glaze. Zhao and his team are currently beta testing the system and will allow a limited number of artists to to use it later this week. But these tools are neither perfect nor enough on their own. You could still take a screenshot of an image protected with PhotoGuard and use an AI system to edit it, for example. And while they prove that there are neat technical fixes to the problem of AI image editing, they’re worthless on their own unless tech companies start adopting tools like them more widely. Right now, our images online are fair game to anyone who wants to abuse or manipulate them using AI. The most effective way to prevent our images from being manipulated by bad actors would be for social media platforms and AI companies to provide ways for people to immunize their images that work with every updated AI model. In a , leading AI companies have pinky-promised to “develop” ways to detect AI-generated content. However, they did not promise to adopt them. If they are serious about protecting users from the harms of generative AI, that is perhaps the most crucial first step. Deeper Learning Cryptography may offer a solution to the massive AI-labeling problem is generating a lot of buzz as a neat policy solution to mitigating the potential harm of generative AI. But there’s a problem: the currently available for identifying material that was created by artificial intelligence are . (In fact, just this week OpenAI shuttered its own AI-detecting tool because of high error rates.) Meet C2PA: Launched two years ago, it’s an open-source internet protocol that relies on cryptography to encode details about the origins of a piece of content, or what technologists refer to as “provenance” information. The developers of C2PA often compare the protocol to a nutrition label, but one that says where content came from and who—or what—created it. . Bits and Bytes The AI-powered, totally autonomous future of war is hereA nice look at how a US Navy task force is using robotics and AI to prepare for the next age of conflict, and how defense startups are building tech for warfare. The , even though many thorny ethical questions remain. () Extreme heat and droughts are driving opposition to AI data centers The data centers that power AI models use up millions of gallons of water a year. Tech companies are facing increasing opposition to these facilities all over the world, and as natural resources are growing scarcer, governments are also starting to demand more information from them. () This Indian startup is sharing AI’s rewards with data annotators Cleaning up data sets that are used to train AI language models can be a with little respect. Karya, a nonprofit, calls itself “the world’s first ethical data company” and is funneling its profits to poor rural areas in India. It offers workers compensation many times above the Indian average. () Google is using AI language models to train robotsThe tech company is using a model trained on data from the web to help robots execute tasks and recognize objects they have not been trained on. Google hopes this method will make robots better at adjusting to the messy real world. ()

Hazmat suits, PCR tests, quarantines, and contact tracing—it was hard not to feel déjà vu last week when China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention published new guidance on how to contain a disease outbreak. But what was happening was not another covid wave. Rather, the Chinese government was addressing a potentially significant new public health concern: mpox. The World Health Organization reports China is currently experiencing the world’s fastest increase in cases of mpox (formerly known as monkeypox), and the country needs to act fast to contain the spread. While the Americas and Europe have mostly contained the mpox outbreak that started in mid-2022, Asia has emerged as the disease’s new hot spot. Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, which all saw sporadic imported cases last year, have reported weekly new case numbers in the double digits in 2023, meaning the virus has been spreading in the domestic population. But according to the latest data reported to the WHO, China has surpassed all other countries in the world, with 315 confirmed cases in just the past three months—though irregular case reporting from Beijing means it’s impossible to know the true scale of the disease at this point. Mpox is less contagious than covid, but since 2022, more than 88,000 people have contracted the disease, which can be painful and even debilitating for some. More than 150 people have died. Some countries have been more successful than others at containing domestic mpox outbreaks—and much of their success is arguably a result of proactive measures like vaccination campaigns. But the Chinese government has barely started to take action. “Compared with the response to covid-19 … the [Chinese] response is certainly dramatically different,” says Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Even though [mpox] is less likely to develop into a large outbreak in the country, the Pollyanna attitude may encourage the spread of the disease among the at-risk population—unless they take a more active campaign against the disease.” How it’s spreading now In May, the WHO declared that mpox was no longer a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) because cases had gone down significantly in countries that had seen large outbreaks last year, mostly in the Americas and Europe. (Mpox has been endemic in West and Central Africa for decades and remains so.) “Overall, compared to where we were last year, we’re definitely in a different place,” says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-disease physician and chair of the Infectious Disease Society of America’s Global Health Committee. “We have much fewer cases, but we are seeing sporadic outbreaks in different parts of the world.” Indeed, by the time the WHO rescinded the PHEIC declaration, many Asian countries were already starting to see an uptick. Japan was the first Asian country to report a significant increase in mpox cases, in March. In May, a report by researchers in the country that the disease could surge across Asia, owing to the connectedness between Japan and other Asian countries and the low mpox vaccination rate in the region. If the outbreak grows to the level that it did in the West, the researchers noted, over 10,000 cases might be expected in Japan alone before mpox is successfully contained. It’s less clear what exactly is happening in China. According to data collected by the WHO, China reported 315 new mpox cases from May to July. A case count this high suggests that not all cases were travel related. But—in another situation reminiscent of its covid response—China isn’t as forthcoming as other countries with its disease data; it doesn’t publish weekly reports of new cases. Rather, it has released a one-time report of the number of mpox cases recorded in June: 106. The Chinese government didn’t release data from May, and hasn’t released any data about July cases yet. The WHO, though, lumps together the case counts from Taiwan, which has its own government and CDC, and Hong Kong under the name of China. And there’s no way for the public to separate the data. So the 315 number includes the 106 cases Beijing says it identified in July, plus the number of infections in Taiwan and Hong Kong over May, June, and July. This all further obscures the true toll of mpox in China—even though it’s critical during an infectious-disease outbreak to be on top of things as soon as possible. The Chinese name for mpox—猴痘, or houdou—has also been thrown around casually as a slur against gay men. “We also need to understand more about the people that have been infected,” Kuppalli says, “such as … the demographics, the clinical presentation, their immune status, and about how they’ve been presenting to care. I think that type of information is important.” A muddled response that makes LGBTQ communities a target The lack of clarity on how the disease has spread has caused some Chinese people to panic. The news that mpox cases have started to appear in the country has been circulating for weeks. But not until July 26 did China’s CDC and health ministry co-publish a new guidance on how to prevent its spread, and even that left unanswered questions. The directive asked that all confirmed mpox patients transfer to a medical facility for quarantine unless they have only mild symptoms. It said contact tracing going back three weeks would be conducted for every patient, and their close contacts would be asked to self-quarantine for three weeks. It also recommended that local authorities monitor the mpox virus level in wastewater around certain areas. What makes monitoring the outbreak more difficult in China is that, as in the West, the current mpox spread has been seen mostly among communities of men who have sex with men (MSM). And , that association is consistently misinterpreted in China to suggest that mpox is only an STD spread by gay men through sexual activities—a particularly dangerous connection, as the LGBTQ community is in the country. Many Chinese social media users who have spotted men withskin lesions in public have been posting their photos to ask whether it’s an mpox symptom. And the Chinese name for mpox—猴痘, or houdou—has also been thrown around casually as a slur against gay men. To efficiently stop the spread of mpox, public health officials need to strike a delicate balance between destigmatizing the disease by dispelling the idea that it affects only gay men and prioritizing the MSM communities that are most vulnerable to it. “Working with the people that are affected, helping to have non-stigmatizing language and communication, has been hugely effective in helping to curb the outbreak” in the West, Kuppalli says. So far, some local LGBTQ communities in China feel they’re on their own. M, who works for a queer rights organization in Guangzhou and asked to be identified only by his first initial given the sensitivity of his work, points out that the CDC recommended wastewater monitoring specifically near venues that MSM communities frequent, including bars, clubs, and saunas. He says this has become controversial within the Chinese LGBTQ community, and that some organizers feel this puts a target on their backs. “It will take a long time. I have some friends who have already traveled to Hong Kong or Macau to get vaccinated for mpox.” Another LGBTQ organizer, Suihou, who works in the central province of Hubei and asked to be identified by a pseudonym, tells MIT Technology Review that even though contact tracing information is supposed to be strictly confidential, he has seen one example in which an mpox patient’s private information, including phone number, national ID, address, and HIV status, was leaked and passed around on social media. Organizers like M and Suihou are doing their own work to mobilize a disease response. To spread information about mpox prevention, M has recently sent text messages to 700 people and hosted in-person lectures that reached over 900 people. And Suihou has worked with one mpox patient closely, helping him get testing and treatment. Not all the medical workers they’ve encountered have been trained on how to handle the sensitivity of these cases, he says; during the contact tracing process, the doctor told the patient that this disease is a problem for “your kind of people.” Suihou warns that some people may avoid seeking medical help altogether, particularly given the lack of state support for mandatory quarantine and contact tracing. “From the individual cases that I have heard of, everyone who has a confirmed case is being asked to go to a quarantine facility,” Suihou says. But, he explains, since the government has not provided a budget to help cover the quarantine, as it did with covid, patients have no choice but to pay for the hospital stay and all medical tests out of their own pockets. Many marginalized individuals, who are also more vulnerable in an infectious-disease outbreak, may not be able to afford that. “With the slowdown of the [Chinese] economy, local governments don’t have the physical capacity or even the willingness to invest more in public health,” Huang explains. Even the WHO doesn’t have funding specifically earmarked for mpox prevention; it has been using its emergency fund to cover mpox-related work. A lot of the financial burden will again fall on local organizers. M tells me that his organization is using funds intended for HIV prevention to conduct mpox outreach work. All of this could further disincentivize people who get infected from seeking medical tests and treatment. This in turn would make the community spread of mpox even harder to track—and could undermine prevention efforts taken so far. A lack of available vaccines Much as with covid, vaccination is one of the best ways to get mpox under control. Worldwide, three vaccines are currently being used for mpox prevention: ACAM2000, MVA-BN (also known as JYNNEOS in the US), and Lc16m8. All these vaccines were originally designed for protection against smallpox but have been found effective against mpox. The US has administered more than 1.2 million JYNNEOS and ACAM2000 shots. And in Asia, imported 10,000 JYNNEOS shots last year and is planning to procure another 20,000 this year, while , despite its small size, has procured and administered over 72,000 JYNNEOS shots so far. Japan, meanwhile, has relied on to produce its own Lc16m8, while also donating doses of the vaccine to countries including Colombia. But none of these vaccines have been approved for use in China. The situation recalls how China refused to import any mRNA covid vaccines, instead relying on a few homegrown vaccines that were shown to be less effective. In this case, though, the country doesn’t currently produce any of its own smallpox vaccines; production was terminated after smallpox was eradicated globally in 1980. Bavarian Nordic, the Danish company that produces the JYNNEOS vaccine, tells MIT Technology Review that it can’t disclose client information unless requested by the government and can’t confirm whether China has procured any JYNNEOS shots. But it says the company is not in the process of applying to register the vaccine in China. The WHO also has a sharing mechanism in place that allows member states to receive vaccines if needed. But it’s unclear whether China has applied for mpox vaccines. The organization did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether there are plans to send vaccines to China. The new Chinese CDC guidance on mpox made no mention of any vaccine as part of its outbreak response. “It’s quite unlikely that China will focus on procuring vaccines at this moment, since there’s no precedent and [no] emergency approval of the vaccines. Rather, there seems to be a focus on surveillance, monitoring, quarantine, contact tracing, etc.,” says Zoe Leung, a senior associate at Bridge Consulting, a Beijing-based communication consultancy specializing in public health. It may not be this way forever: Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical company, announced last November that it had developed the world’s first mRNA vaccine against mpox, and it has been found effective in preclinical studies. On July 13, Sinopharm officially applied for clinical trial approval for a “replication-defective mpox vaccine,” though it’s unclear whether these are the same products. Sinopharm did not immediately reply to questions about its mpox vaccine development. “There is domestic research [on a mpox vaccine], but we don’t know when it can be commercially available. It will take a long time,” says M, the organizer in Guangzhou. “I have some friends who have already traveled to Hong Kong or Macau to get vaccinated for mpox.” But for Chinese people to get vaccinations outside mainland China, there is often a high cost, a long wait time, and layers of bureaucracy to wade through. It’s again similar to trends seen earlier in the pandemic, when Chinese people with means traveled to Hong Kong to get mRNA covid vaccines. “It doesn’t necessarily mean [Beijing is] not interested in vaccines,” says Huang, “but there’s this technology nationalism that discouraged them from rapid approval of the use of foreign vaccines.” And that, he warns, “certainly contributed to the rapid increase in covid-related mortalities.”

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Cryptography may offer a solution to the massive AI-labeling problem The White House wants big AI companies to disclose when content has been created using artificial intelligence, and very soon the EU will require some tech platforms to label AI-generated content. There’s a big problem, though: identifying material that was created by AI is a massive technical challenge. The best options currently available—detection tools powered by AI, and watermarking—are inconsistent, impermanent, and sometimes inaccurate. But another approach has been attracting attention lately: C2PA. It’s an open-source internet protocol that relies on cryptography to encode details about the origins of a piece of content. The problem is, it’s far from a fix-all solution.. —Tate Ryan-Mosley If you’re interested in reading more about the search for a better way to label AI, check out the of The Technocrat, Tate’s weekly newsletter covering policy and power in Silicon Valley. to receive it in your inbox every Friday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Twitter as we knew it is deadWhat comes next, in its new guise of X, is anyone’s guess. ( $)+ The company has reinstated Kanye West’s account after an eight-month ban. ( $)+ We’re not tweeting anymore—we’re just posting. ()+ Why doesn’t Elon Musk understand that he’s not above needing permits? ( $)+ We’re witnessing the brain death of Twitter. ()2 It looks like another covid wave is brewingCases are slowly creeping up, but we still don’t know if covid exhibits a seasonal pattern. ( $)+ Cases are on the rise in the UK, too. () 3 Starlink controls nearly all satellite internet servicesThat disproportionate power doesn’t bode well for international relations. ( $)+ Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS. () 4 Amazon is asking some of its remote workers to resignIf they can’t join office hubs, they’re being asked to vacate their positions. ( $)+ Things aren’t great for UPS drivers either. ( $) 5 Evangelical Christians are spying on sex workers onlineTheir surveillance tactics are helping police to obtain search warrants. ()+ Evangelicals are looking for answers online. They’re finding QAnon instead. () 6 Why EV bikes keep catching fireThough lithium-ion batteries are generally safe. ( $)+ The speed limit on certain e-bikes can be circumvented. ( $) 7 Military start-ups are boomingAI is supercharging weapons and systems, with potentially deadly consequences. ( $)+ Silicon Valley has been capitalizing on the war in Ukraine. () 8 Creating prosthetic arms has always been challengingThe Boston Arm was among the first to harness electrical signals from its wearer’s muscles. ()+ These prosthetics break the mold with third thumbs, spikes, and superhero skins. () 9 3D-printing is helping to protect rare speciesBy providing convincing replicas of animal body parts used to decorate traditional headdresses. () 10 Please don’t drink laundry detergentDespite what you might see on TikTok. () Quote of the day “To them, we are like robots rather than people. The little things that make us human, you can feel them being ground out of you.” —An anonymous Amazon worker in the UK describes the punishing reality of life inside the company’s warehouses to . The big story Eight ways scientists are unwrapping the mysteries of the human brain August 2021There is no greater scientific mystery than the brain. It’s made mostly of water; much of the rest is largely fat. Yet this roughly three-pound blob of material produces our thoughts, memories, and emotions. It governs how we interact with the world, and it runs our body. Increasingly, scientists are beginning to unravel the complexities of how it works and understand how the 86 billion neurons in the human brain form the connections that produce ideas and feelings, as well as the ability to communicate and react. Here’s our whistle-stop tour of some of the most cutting-edge research—and why it’s important. . We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + The cast of the US version of The Office were avid readers of an (but if you haven’t seen the British original, you really should.)+ Timelapses of is my latest obsession. + Bring back the !+ A is true public service journalism.+ Clear your mind and your schedule—it’s time to take the perfect weekend .

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, . I recently wrote about a project backed by some major tech and media companies trying to help identify content made or altered by AI. With the boom of AI-generated text, images, and videos, both lawmakers and average internet users . Though it might seem like a very reasonable ask to simply add a label (which it is), it is not actually an easy one, and the existing solutions, like AI-powered detection and watermarking, have some serious pitfalls. As my colleague Melissa Heikkilä has , most of the current technical solutions “don’t stand a chance against the latest generation of AI language models.” Nevertheless, the race to label and detect AI-generated content is on. That’s where this protocol comes in. Started in 2021, (named for the group that created it, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) is a set of new technical standards and freely available code that securely labels content with information clarifying where it came from. This means that an image, for example, is marked with information by the device it originated from (like a phone camera), by any editing tools (such as Photoshop), and ultimately by the social media platform that it gets uploaded to. Over time, this information creates a sort of history, all of which is logged. The tech itself—and the ways in which C2PA is more secure than other AI-labeling alternatives—is pretty cool, though a bit complicated. I get more into it in my piece, but it’s perhaps easiest to think about it like a nutrition label (which is the preferred analogy of most people I spoke with). You can see an example of a with the label created by Truepic, a founding C2PA member, with Revel AI. “The idea of provenance is marking the content in an interoperable and tamper-evident way so it can travel through the internet with that transparency, with that nutrition label,” says Mounir Ibrahim, the vice president of public affairs at Truepic. When it first launched, C2PA was backed by a handful of prominent companies, including Adobe and Microsoft, but over the past six months, its membership has increased 56%. Just this week, the major media platform Shutterstock announced that it would use . It’s based on an opt-in approach, so groups that want to verify and disclose where content came from, like a newspaper or an advertiser, will choose to add the credentials to a piece of media. One of the project’s leads, Andy Parsons, who works for Adobe, attributes the new interest in and urgency around C2PA to the proliferation of generative AI and the expectation of legislation, both in the US and the EU, that will mandate new levels of transparency. The vision is grand—people involved admitted to me that real success here depends on widespread, if not universal, adoption. They said they hope all major content companies adopt the standard. For that, Ibrahim says, usability is key: “You wanna make sure no matter where it goes on the internet, it’ll be read and ingested in the same way, much like SSL encryption. That’s how you scale a more transparent ecosystem online.” This could be a critical development as we enter the US election season, when all eyes will be watching for AI-generated misinformation. Researchers on the project say they are racing to release new functionality and court more social media platforms before the expected onslaught. Currently, C2PA works primarily on images and video, though members say that they are working on ways to handle text-based content. I get into some of the other shortcomings of the protocol in the piece, but what’s really important to understand is that even when the use of AI is disclosed, it might not stem the harm of machine-generated misinformation. Social media platforms will still need to decide whether to keep that information on their sites, and users will have to decide for themselves whether to trust and share the content. It’s a bit reminiscent of initiatives by tech platforms over the past several years to label misinformation. Facebook as misinformation ahead of the 2020 election, and clearly there were still considerable issues. And though C2PA does not intend to assign indicators of accuracy to the posts, it’s clear that just providing more information about content can’t necessarily save us from ourselves. What I am reading this week We published that outlines how AI might impact domestic politics, and what milestones to watch for. It’s fascinating to think about AI submitting or contributing to a public testimony, for example. Vittoria Elliott , which is also meant to bring transparency to AI-generated content, is not sufficient in managing the threat of disinformation. She explains that experts say the White House needs to do more than just push voluntary agreements on AI. And here’s another story I thought was interesting on the race to develop better . Speaking of AI … our AI reporter Melissa also developed by MIT researchers that can help prevent photos from being manipulated by AI. It might help prevent problems like AI-generated porn that uses real photos from unconsenting women. TikTok is dipping its . New features on the app allow users to purchase products directly from influencers, leading some to complain about a feed that feels like a flood of sponsored content. It’s a mildly alarming development in the influencer economy and highlights the selling power of social media platforms. What I learned this week Researchers are still trying to sort out just how social media platforms, and their algorithms, affect our political beliefs and civic discourse. This week, about the impact of Facebook and Instagram on users’ politics during the 2020 election showed that the effects are quite complicated. The studies, published by University of Texas, New York University, Princeton, and other institutions, found that while the news people read on the platforms showed a high degree of segregation by political views, removing reshared content from feeds on Facebook did not change political beliefs. The size of the studies is making them sort of a big deal in the academic world this week, but the for its close collaboration with Meta.

The White House big AI companies to disclose when content has been created using artificial intelligence, and very soon the EU will require some tech platforms their AI-generated images, audio, and video with “prominent markings” disclosing their synthetic origins. There’s a big problem, though: that was created by artificial intelligence is a . The best options currently available—detection tools powered by AI, and watermarking—are inconsistent, impermanent, and sometimes inaccurate. (In fact, just this week OpenAI its own AI-detecting tool because of high error rates.) But another approach has been attracting attention lately: C2PA. Launched two years ago, it’s an open-source internet protocol that relies on cryptography to encode details about the origins of a piece of content, or what technologists refer to as “provenance” information. The developers of C2PA often compare the protocol to a nutrition label, but one that says where content came from and who—or what—created it. The project, part of the nonprofit , was started by Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic, which formed the (from which C2PA gets its name). The coalition now has over 1,500 members, including companies as varied and prominent as Nikon, the BBC, and Sony. Recently, as interest in AI detection and regulation has intensified, the project has been gaining steam; Andrew Jenks, the chair of C2PA, says that membership has increased 56% in the past six months. The major media platform Shutterstock has joined as a member and to use the protocol to label all its AI-generated content, including its DALL-E-powered AI image generator. Sejal Amin, chief technology officer at Shutterstock, told MIT Technology Review in an email that the company is protecting artists and users by “supporting the development of systems and infrastructure that create greater transparency to easily identify what is an artist’s creation versus AI-generated or modified art.” What is C2PA and how is it being used? Microsoft, Intel, Adobe, and other major tech companies started working on C2PA in February 2021, hoping to create a universal internet protocol that would allow content creators to opt in to labeling their visual and audio content with information about where it came from. (At least for the moment, this does not apply to text-based posts.) Crucially, the project is designed to be adaptable and functional across the internet, and the base computer code is accessible and free to anyone. Truepic, which sells content verification products, has demonstrated how the protocol works with with Revel.ai. When a viewer hovers over a little icon at the top right corner of the screen, a box of information about the video appears that includes the disclosure that it “contains AI-generated content.” Adobe has also already integrated C2PA, which it calls content credentials, into several of its products, including Photoshop and Adobe Firefly. “We think it’s a value-add that may attract more customers to Adobe tools,” Parsons says. C2PA is secured through cryptography, which relies on a series of codes and keys to protect information from being tampered with and to record where information came from. More specifically, it works by encoding provenance information through a set of hashes that cryptographically bind to each pixel, says Jenks, who also leads Microsoft’s work on C2PA. C2PA offers some critical benefits over AI detection systems, which use AI to spot AI-generated content and can in turn learn to get better at evading detection. It’s also a more standardized and, in some instances, more easily viewable system than watermarking, the other prominent technique used to identify AI-generated content. The protocol can work alongside watermarking and AI detection tools as well, says Jenks. The value of provenance information Adding provenance information to media to combat misinformation is not a new idea, and early research seems to show that it could be promising: one from a master’s student at the University of Oxford, for example, found evidence that users were less susceptible to misinformation when they had access to provenance information about content. Indeed, in OpenAI’s about its AI detection tool, the company said it was focusing on other “provenance techniques” to meet disclosure requirements. That said, provenance information is far from a fix-all solution. C2PA is not legally binding, and without required internet-wide adoption of the standard, unlabeled AI-generated content will exist, says Siwei Lyu, a director of the Center for Information Integrity and professor at the University at Buffalo in New York. “The lack of over-board binding power makes intrinsic loopholes in this effort,” he says, though he emphasizes that the project is nevertheless important. What’s more, since C2PA relies on creators to opt in, the protocol doesn’t really address the problem of bad actors using AI-generated content. And it’s not yet clear just how helpful the provision of metadata will be when it comes to media fluency of the public. Provenance labels do not necessarily mention whether the content is true or accurate. Ultimately, the coalition’s most significant challenge may be encouraging widespread adoption across the internet ecosystem, especially by social media platforms. The protocol is designed so that a photo, for example, would have provenance information encoded from the time a camera captured it to when it found its way onto social media. But if the social media platform doesn’t use the protocol, it won’t display the photo’s provenance data. The major social media platforms have not yet adopted C2PA. Twitter had to the project but dropped out after Elon Musk took over. (Twitter also stopped participating in other focused on curbing misinformation.) C2PA “[is] not a panacea, it doesn’t solve all of our misinformation problems, but it does put a foundation in place for a shared objective reality,” says Parsons. “Just like the nutrition label metaphor, you don’t have to look at the nutrition label before you buy the sugary cereal. “And you don’t have to know where something came from before you share it on Meta, but you can. We think the ability to do that is critical given the astonishing abilities of generative media.”

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Six ways that AI could change politics —Bruce Schneier & Nathan E. Sanders When it comes to how AI may threaten our democracy, much of the public conversation lacks imagination. People talk about the danger of campaigns that attack opponents with fake images, audio or video because we already have decades of experience dealing with doctored images and misinformation spread by foreign governments. Threats of this sort seem urgent and disturbing because we know what to look for, and we can easily imagine their effects. But the truth is, the future will be much more interesting. Here are six milestones that will herald a new era of democratic politics driven by AI. . Interested in AI and politics? Why not check out: + How AI could write our laws. ChatGPT and other AIs could supercharge the influence of lobbyists—but only if we let them. .+ Read our to policymaking on generative AI.+ How judges, not politicians, could dictate America’s AI rules. With politicians struggling to curb AI harms, it’s boom time for tech lawyers. . The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 It’s tricky to know what to make of new studies into Facebook Meta disagrees with how independent researchers interpreted its data. ( $)+ The company collaborated with them on a multi-year project. ( $)+ The findings make it even more complicated to discern social media’s effects. ( $)+ It also means there are no simple answers. ( $) 2 Generative AI companies are desperate for your data And it’s incredibly difficult to stop them from scraping it. ()+ YouTube is dubbing videos with AI-generated voices. ()+ Meta’s Llama 2 might not be as open-source as it claims. ()+ It looks like LinkedIn is developing an AI job application coach. ()+ OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it. () 3 The quest for EV metals comes with a human costMiners are dying in Indonesia attempting to extract nickel. () 4 Won’t somebody please think of the kidfluencers?Regulators are circling, and it’s harder to make money than it used to be. ( $)+ Meet the wannabe kidfluencers struggling for stardom. () 5 US intelligence services are trying to preserve a spying loopholeThey’re trying to convince lawmakers to keep phone surveillance measures in place. ( $) 6 Infusing older mice with young blood helps them live longerHowever, it doesn’t prove it’d work for humans. ( $)+ Aging clocks aim to predict how long you’ll live. () 7 The Cook Islands don’t know what to do about deep-sea miningResidents are reluctant to publicly oppose their government’s pro-mining stance. ()+ These deep-sea “potatoes” could be the future of mining for renewable energy. () 8 Gene-edited food is on the riseCRISPR works like natural breeding, just much faster. ()+ How CRISPR could help save crops from devastation caused by pests. () 9 Maybe aliens really are out there That’s what a respected US intelligence official told a committee earlier this week. ( $)+ The internet didn’t seem too bothered by the revelation, though. ()+ Some UFO whistleblowers are more reliable than others. () 10 TikTok is a shopping app now|It’s basically QVC for Gen Z. ( $) Quote of the day “When it comes to polarization, or people’s political beliefs, there’s a lot more that goes into this than social media.” —Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of public policy, tells why it’s so hard to tease out the effect social media has on people’s opinions. The big story Inside Australia’s plan to survive bigger, badder bushfires April 2019Australia’s colonial history is dotted with fires so enormous they have their own names. The worst, Black Saturday, struck the state of Victoria on February 7, 2009. Fifteen separate fires scorched the state over just two days, killing 173 people. While Australia is notorious for spectacular blazes, it actually ranks below the United States, Indonesia, Canada, Portugal, and Spain when it comes to the economic damage caused by wildfires over the past century. That’s because while other nations argue about the best way to tackle the issue, the horrors of Black Saturday led Australia to drastically change its response—one of the biggest of which was also one of the most basic: taking another look at the way fire risk is rated. . —Bianca Nogrady We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + The friendship between a is the most heartwarming thing you’ll see today.+ Looking to buy your friend the weirdest gift possible? got your back.+ These discovered in the Czech Republic are really beautiful.+ It’s time to embrace , in all its glory.+ These never-before-seen photos of are quite something.

ChatGPT was released just nine months ago, and we are still learning how it will affect our daily lives, our careers, and even our systems of self-governance. But when it comes to how AI may threaten our democracy, much of the public conversation lacks imagination. People talk about the danger of campaigns that attack opponents with fake images (or fake audio or video) because we already have decades of experience dealing with doctored images. We’re on the lookout for foreign governments that spread misinformation because we were traumatized by the 2016 US presidential election. And we worry that AI-generated opinions will swamp the political preferences of real people because we’ve seen political “astroturfing”—the use of fake online accounts to give the illusion of support for a policy— grow for decades. Threats of this sort seem urgent and disturbing because they’re salient. We know what to look for, and we can easily imagine their effects. The truth is, the future will be much more interesting. And even some of the most stupendous potential impacts of AI on politics won’t be all bad. We can draw some fairly straight lines between the current capabilities of AI tools and real-world outcomes that, by the standards of current public understanding, seem truly startling. With this in mind, we propose six milestones that will herald a new era of democratic politics driven by AI. All feel achievable—perhaps not with today’s technology and levels of AI adoption, but very possibly in the near future. What makes for a political AI milestone? Good benchmarks should be meaningful, representing significant outcomes that come with real-world consequences. They should be plausible; they must be realistically achievable in the foreseeable future. And they should be observable—we should be able to recognize when they’ve been achieved. Worries about AI swaying an election will very likely fail the observability test. While the risks of election manipulation through the robotic promotion of a candidate’s or party’s interests is a legitimate threat, elections are massively complex. Just as the debate continues to rage over why and how Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, we’re unlikely to be able to attribute a surprising electoral outcome to any particular AI intervention. Thinking further into the future: Could an AI candidate ever be to office? In the world of speculative fiction, from to Black Mirror, there is growing interest in the possibility of an AI or technologically assisted, otherwise-not-traditionally-eligible candidate winning an election. In an era where videos can misrepresent the views and actions of human candidates and human politicians can choose to be represented by or even , it is certainly possible for an AI candidate to mimic the media presence of a politician. Virtual politicians have received votes in national elections, for example in in 2017. But this doesn’t pass the plausibility test. The voting public and legal establishment are likely to accept more and more automation and assistance supported by AI, but the age of non-human elected officials is far off. The next political milestones for AI Let’s start with some milestones that are already on the cusp of reality. These are achievements that seem well within the technical scope of existing AI technologies and for which the groundwork has already been laid. Milestone #1: The acceptance by a legislature or agency of a testimony or comment generated by, and submitted under the name of, an AI. Arguably, we’ve already seen legislation drafted by AI, albeit under the direction of human users and introduced by human legislators. After some early examples of bills written by AIs were introduced in and the , many major legislative bodies have had their “first bill written by AI,” “used ChatGPT to generate committee ,” or “first written by AI” events. Many of these bills and speeches are more stunt than serious, and they have received more than consideration. They are short, have trivial levels of policy substance, or were heavily edited or guided by human legislators (through highly specific prompts to large language model–based AI tools like ChatGPT). The interesting milestone along these lines will be the acceptance of testimony on legislation, or a comment submitted to an agency, drafted entirely by AI. To be sure, a large fraction of all writing going forward will be assisted by—and will truly benefit from—AI assistive technologies. So to avoid making this milestone trivial, we have to add the second clause: “submitted under the name of the AI.” What would make this benchmark significant is the submission under the AI’s own name; that is, the acceptance by a governing body of the AI as proffering a legitimate perspective in public debate. Regardless of the public fervor over AI, this one won’t take long. The New York Times has published a under the name of ChatGPT (responding to an opinion piece we wrote), and legislators are already turning to AI to write high-profile opening at committee hearings. Milestone #2: The adoption of the first novel legislative amendment to a bill written by AI. Moving beyond testimony, there is an immediate pathway for AI-generated policies to become law: . This involves making tweaks to existing laws or bills that are tuned to serve some particular interest. It is a natural starting point for AI because it’s tightly scoped, involving small changes guided by a clear directive associated with a well-defined purpose. By design, microlegislation is often implemented surreptitiously. It may even be filed anonymously within a deluge of other amendments to obscure its intended beneficiary. For that reason, microlegislation can often be bad for society, and it is ripe for exploitation by generative AI that would otherwise be subject to heavy scrutiny from a polity on guard for risks posed by AI. Milestone #3: AI-generated political messaging outscores campaign consultant recommendations in poll testing. Some of the most important near-term implications of AI for politics will happen largely behind closed doors. Like everyone else, political campaigners and pollsters will turn to AI to . We’re already seeing turn to AI-generated images to manufacture social content and simulate results using AI-generated respondents. The next step in this evolution is political messaging developed by AI. A mainstay of the campaigner’s toolbox today is the message testing survey, where a few alternate formulations of a position are written down and tested with audiences to see which will generate more attention and a more positive response. Just as an experienced political pollster can anticipate effective messaging strategies pretty well based on observations from past campaigns and their impression of the state of the public debate, so can an AI trained on reams of public discourse, campaign rhetoric, and political reporting. More futuristic achievements of AI as democratic actors With these near-term milestones firmly in sight, let’s look further to some truly revolutionary possibilities. While these concepts may have seemed absurd just a year ago, they are increasingly conceivable with either current or near-future technologies. Milestone #4: AI creates a political party with its own platform, attracting human candidates who win elections. While an AI is unlikely to be allowed to run for and hold office, it is plausible that one may be able to found a political party. An AI could generate a political platform calculated to attract the interest of some cross-section of the public and, acting independently or through a human intermediary (hired help, like a political consultant or legal firm), could register formally as a political party. It could collect signatures to win a place on ballots and attract human candidates to run for office under its banner. A big step in this direction has already been taken, via the campaign of the Danish in 2022. An artist collective in Denmark an AI chatbot to interact with human members of its community on Discord, exploring political ideology in conversation with them and on the basis of an analysis of historical party platforms in the country. All this happened with earlier generations of general purpose AI, not current systems like ChatGPT. However, the party to receive enough signatures to earn a spot on the ballot, and therefore did not win parliamentary representation. Future AI-led efforts may succeed. One could imagine a generative AI with skills at the level of or beyond today’s leading technologies could formulate a set of policy positions targeted to build support among people of a specific demographic, or even an effective consensus platform capable of attracting broad-based support. Particularly in a European-style multiparty system, we can imagine a new party with a strong news hook—an AI at its core—winning attention and votes. Milestone #5: AI autonomously generates profit and makes political campaign contributions. Let’s turn next to the essential capability of modern politics: fundraising. “An entity capable of directing contributions to a campaign fund” might be a realpolitik definition of a political actor, and AI is potentially capable of this. Like a human, an AI could conceivably generate contributions to a political campaign in a variety of ways. It could take a seed investment from a human controlling the AI and invest it to yield a return. It could start a business that generates revenue. There is growing interest and experimentation in : AI agents that set about growing businesses or otherwise generating profit. While ChatGPT-generated businesses may not yet have taken the world by storm, this possibility is in the same spirit as the algorithmic agents powering modern and so-called capabilities that are already helping to automate business and financial decisions. Or, like most political entrepreneurs, AI could generate political messaging to convince humans to spend their own money on a defined campaign or cause. The AI would likely need to have some humans in the loop, and register its activities to the government (in the US context, as officers of a 501(c)(4) or political action committee). Milestone #6: AI achieves a coordinated policy outcome across multiple jurisdictions. Lastly, we come to the most meaningful of impacts: achieving outcomes in public policy. Even if AI cannot—now or in the future—be said to have its own desires or preferences, it could be programmed by humans to have a goal, such as lowering taxes or relieving a market regulation. An AI has many of the same tools humans use to achieve these ends. It may advocate, formulating messaging and promoting ideas through digital channels like social media posts and videos. It may lobby, directing ideas and influence to key policymakers, even legislation. It may spend; see milestone #5. The “multiple jurisdictions” piece is key to this milestone. A single law passed may be reasonably attributed to myriad factors: a charismatic champion, a political movement, a change in circumstances. The influence of any one actor, such as an AI, will be more demonstrable if it is successful simultaneously in many different places. And the digital scalability of AI gives it a special advantage in achieving these kinds of coordinated outcomes. Will we know when the future is here? The greatest challenge to most of these milestones is their observability: will we know it when we see it? The first campaign consultant whose ideas lose out to an AI may not be eager to report that fact. Neither will the campaign. Regarding fundraising, it’s hard enough for us to track down the human actors who are responsible for the “dark money” contributions controlling much of modern political finance; will we know if a future dominant force in fundraising for political action committees is an AI? We’re likely to observe some of these milestones indirectly. At some point, perhaps politicians’ dollars will start migrating en masse to AI-based campaign consultancies and, eventually, we may realize that political movements sweeping across states or countries have been AI-assisted. While the progression of technology is often unsettling, we need not fear these milestones. A new political platform that wins public support is itself a neutral proposition; it may lead to good or bad policy outcomes. Likewise, a successful policy program may or may not be beneficial to one group of constituents or another. We think the six milestones outlined here are among the most viable and meaningful upcoming interactions between AI and democracy, but they are hardly the only scenarios to consider. The point is that our AI-driven political future will involve far more than deepfaked campaign ads and manufactured letter-writing campaigns. We should all be thinking more creatively about what comes next and be vigilant in steering our politics toward the best possible ends, no matter their means.

The pharmaceutical industry operates under one of the highest failure rates of any business sector. The success rate for drug candidates entering capital Phase 1 trials—the earliest type of clinical testing, which can take —is anywhere between 9% and 12%, depending on the year, with costs to bring a drug from discovery to market ranging from , according to Science. This skewed balance sheet drives the pharmaceutical industry’s search for machine learning (ML) and AI solutions. The industry lags behind many other sectors in digitization and adopting AI, but the cost of failure—estimated at , according to Drug Discovery Today—is an important driver for companies looking to use technology to get drugs to market, says Vipin Gopal, former chief data and analytics officer at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, currently serving a similar role at another Fortune 20 company. “All of these drugs fail due to certain reasons—they do not meet the criteria that we expected them to meet along some points in that clinical trial cycle,” he says. “What if we could identify them earlier, without having to go through multiple phases of clinical trials and then discover, ‘Hey, that doesn’t work.’” The speed and accuracy of AI can give researchers the ability to quickly identify what will work and what will not, Gopal says. “That’s where the large AI computational models could help predict properties of molecules to a high level of accuracy—to discover molecules that might not otherwise be considered, and to weed out those molecules that, we’ve seen, eventually do not succeed,” he says. . This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This new tool could protect your pictures from AI manipulation What’s happening? There’s currently nothing stopping someone taking the selfie you posted online last week and editing it using powerful generative AI systems. Even worse, it might be impossible to prove that the resulting image is fake. The good news is that a new tool, created by researchers at MIT, could prevent this. How does it work? The tool, called PhotoGuard, works like a protective shield by altering photos in tiny ways that are invisible to the human eye but prevent them from being manipulated. If someone tries to use an editing app based on a generative AI model to manipulate an image that has been “immunized” by PhotoGuard, the result will look unrealistic or warped. Why it matters: The need to find ways to detect and stop AI-powered manipulation has never been more urgent, because generative AI tools have made it quicker and easier than ever before. . —Melissa Heikkilä Why air-conditioning is a climate antihero Temperatures are rising around the globe, shattering extreme heat records on basically every continent. It’s making air-conditioning less of a “nice to have” and more of an absolute necessity in some parts of the world. But air-conditioning is becoming a monster when it comes to energy demand. We might have to add a whole US electrical grid’s worth of new energy generation just to power all the air conditioners that will come online in the next few decades. On the upside, plenty of people are working towards improving existing systems to make them more climate-friendly. . —Casey Crownhart This story is from The Spark, Casey’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things climate and energy. to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Scientists are questioning the discovery of a room-temperature superconductorSome are wondering if the reported breakthrough is too good to be true. ( $)+ A major journal has retracted a paper written by one of the same authors. ( $)+ Physicist Ranga Dias is facing accusations that he fabricated data. ( $)2 Temperatures are breaking records across the worldBut not all records are equal, exactly. ()+ All these climate disasters are costing us billions of dollars. ( $)+ Scientists are arguing over whether the Atlantic’s currents are really collapsing. ( $)+ More accurate weather forecasting is on the horizon. ( $)+ Weather forecasting is having an AI moment. () 3 AI’s biggest companies are forming a safety bodyBut it relies on them all openly sharing data with each other which seems… unlikely. ( $)+ It’s looking an awful lot like a desire to self-regulate. ( $) 4 NASA wants to build a nuclear-powered rocket In theory, it could speed astronauts to Mars in half the time it currently takes. ( $)+ Quicker journeys would be much better for cooped-up crew members. ( $) 5 The US is finally getting new EV chargersBut even the 30,000-strong network is falling short of what’s needed. ( $)+ In the clash of the EV chargers, it’s Tesla vs. everyone else. () 6 AI’s human workers are rising upData annotators say they’re overworked, underpaid and mistreated. ( $)+ We are all AI’s free data workers. () 7 Texas police purchased Israeli phone-tracking techAuthorities are cracking down on migrants attempting to cross the border from Mexico. ()+ The new US border wall is an app. () 8 Fears are growing around China’s self-driving car techExperts fear it could build autonomous military vehicles. ( $)+ Meanwhile in San Francisco, a group is waging war against robotaxis. ()+ Robotaxis are here. It’s time to decide what to do about them. () 9 Robots are becoming more human-likeWhen combined with sophisticated chatbots, the results are even more uncanny. ( $)+ This four-legged robot is equally comfortable on two legs. () 10 It’s virtually impossible to compete with Google SearchBut a group of former Googlers are having a go. () Quote of the day “At this time of day you only see tourists in the square. Everyone else is indoors.” —Panagiotis Vahaviolos, a restaurant owner in Mystras, Greece, despairs at the intense heat wave savaging the country, he tells . The big story The gig workers fighting back against the algorithms April 2022In the Bendungan Hilir neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from Jakarta’s glitzy business district, motorcycle drivers gather in an informal “base camp.” They are drivers with Gojek, Indonesia’s largest ride-hailing firm. They’re also part of the backbone of a growing movement of resistance against the dispatch algorithms that dominate their lives. Base camps grew out of a tradition that existed before algorithmic ride-hailing services came to Indonesia. They’re the network through which drivers around the city stay in tight communication. This sense of community is now at the heart of what distinguishes Jakarta’s drivers from other gig workers around the world, and could reveal a new playbook for resistance: a way for workers to build collective power, achieve a measure of security, and take care of one another when seemingly no one else will. . —Karen Hao & Nadine Freischlad We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + sure loves squishing into boxes.+ Why are we so gripped by ?+ If you’re ever passing through Kings Cross St Pancras station in London, you might be lucky enough to stumble across this kind of .+ The internet can be cruel, especially if you’re called .+ This is cool: was fond of using male models to depict his female subjects.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, The unending heat this summer has kept the air conditioners in my apartment windows wildly busy. When I’m not taking guesses about what my electric bill might look like this month, I’ve been thinking a lot about how air-conditioning is the double-edged sword of climate technologies. On one hand, temperatures are rising around the globe, shattering extreme heat records on basically every continent. That’s making air-conditioning less of a “nice to have” and more of an absolute necessity in some parts of the world. On the other hand, air-conditioning is becoming a monster when it comes to energy demand. We might have to add a whole US electrical grid’s worth of new energy generation just to power all the air conditioners that will come online in the next few decades. This dynamic is heating up along with the planet, so for the newsletter this week, let’s talk about the climate problem/solution that is air-conditioning. Cold take Air-conditioning seems ubiquitous where I live in the US, to the point that I carry around a sweater in the summer in anticipation of over-cooled offices and restaurants. But in many parts of the world, including some of the countries at highest risk for extreme heat, most people go without it. Roughly 5% of households in India have air-conditioning. Of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, roughly one in 10 has access to AC, according to the . That’s expected to change in the coming decades, as the . By 2050, over two-thirds of the world could have an air conditioner, and half those units will likely be in three countries, : China, Indonesia, and India. Wider access to cooling is absolutely essential: it will save lives as heat waves become more common and more extreme because of climate change. But adding more air conditioners presents a challenge, because they’ll increase energy demand—by a lot. Space cooling makes up nearly 40% of all expected growth in energy demand between now and 2050. In 2018, cooling consumed about 2,000 terawatt-hours of energy globally. In 2050, that could grow to 6,200 TWh. The difference, 4,200 TWh, isroughly the same amount of energy the entire US electrical grid supplied in 2022. So if things don’t change, we’ll need to build enough renewable energy not only to replace all the fossil fuels still on the grid, but also to power a metric boatload of air conditioners. Hot off the press The good news is that there’s a ton of room for improvement in air-conditioning technology. I spoke about this with , who recently helped run a massive competition called the Global Cooling Prize. He’s also a manager in the program on carbon-free buildings at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy think tank. The Global Cooling Prize wrapped up in 2021 and awarded prize money to teams from academia and industry that came up with better ways to cool buildings. The target was a cooling system that produced one-fifth the climate impact of conventional air conditioners while meeting a host of other criteria. There were with a range of approaches, some improving on existing technology and some looking for entirely new ways to do cooling. The two winning teams built better versions of existing air conditioners, which are called vapor-compression systems. By swapping out certain parts for better ones (more effective heat exchangers, variable-speed compressors, and so on), the teams were able to come up with a much more efficient version of the air conditioners that we know and love today. But several of the other finalists were looking to mix up how we cool buildings. While these didn’t reach the climate target or one of the other criteria, all of them had “very interesting, innovative approaches,” Kalanki says. A few of the finalists belong to a category of startups looking to materials called desiccants, which can suck up moisture from the air like a sponge. By using these materials to deal with humidity, cooling devices could greatly reduce electricity use while keeping us comfortable on hot days. I just took a close look at these desiccant cooling systems for . Basically, there’s a long way to go before these materials find their way into homes and commercial buildings, but the physics behind how they might work is fascinating. If you’re interested in hearing more, check out for all the details. And for more on both the impending problem of air conditioners and some potential solutions, check out some other stories from the Tech Review vault. Related reading I wrote last summer about the summer heat waves in Europe, and My colleague James Temple reported in 2020 about . James also took a look at how , which can release heat when they’re subjected to pressure or an electric field, could chart a new method of cooling buildings. Keeping up with climate Texas and California have historically faced a stressed grid in the summer. This year, however, things have so far been quiet for the two states. California’s had a lot of hydropower capacity because of an excessively wet winter, and Texas has installed a ton of solar recently. () Some experts say that paying people to use less energy during high-stress times on the grid could help keep blackouts at bay, but Texas hasn’t put any residential demand-response programs in place. () Geothermal startup Fervo reached a new milestone, completing a 30-day demonstration of its 3.5-megawatt commercial pilot plant. () → Fervo showed earlier this year that it can use its wells as a massive underground battery. () The hottest new corporate climate trend is “greenhushing,” or keeping quiet about climate pledges. Nobody can ask questions about your goals if you never talk about them. () While agriculture has struggled in some parts of the world, crop yields are still on the rise in the US. Experts aren’t sure how long that trend will last. () The US federal government has been pumping money into clean energy since the Inflation Reduction Act passed nearly a year ago. More than a third of the manufacturing funding has gone to South Korean companies, which have positioned themselves as key partners, especially in batteries. () Intense storms are causing severe flooding around the world. Climate change is playing a role in these storms, and we’re only going to see more of them. ()

Remember that selfie you posted last week? There’s currently nothing stopping someone taking it and editing it using powerful generative AI systems. Even worse, thanks to the sophistication of these systems, it might be impossible to prove that the resulting image is fake. The good news is that a new tool, created by researchers at MIT, could prevent this The tool, called , works like a protective shield by altering photos in tiny ways that are invisible to the human eye but prevent them from being manipulated. If someone tries to use an editing app based on a generative AI model such as Stable Diffusion to manipulate an image that has been “immunized” by PhotoGuard, the result will look unrealistic or warped. Right now, “anyone can take our image, modify it however they want, put us in very bad-looking situations, and blackmail us,” says Hadi Salman, a PhD researcher at MIT who contributed to the research. It was at the International Conference on Machine Learning this week. PhotoGuard is “an attempt to solve the problem of our images being manipulated maliciously by these models,” says Salman. The tool could, for example, help prevent women’s selfies from being made into . The need to find ways to detect and stop AI-powered manipulation has never been more urgent, because generative AI tools have made it quicker and easier to do than ever before. In a , leading AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta committed to developing such methods in an effort to prevent fraud and deception. PhotoGuard is a complementary technique to another one of these techniques, watermarking: it aims to stop people from using AI tools to tamper with images to begin with, whereas watermarking uses similar invisible signals to allow people to detect AI-generated content once it has been created. The MIT team used two different techniques to stop images from being edited using the open-source image generation model Stable Diffusion. The first technique is called an encoder attack. PhotoGuard adds imperceptible signals to the image so that the AI model interprets it as something else. For example, these signals could cause the AI to categorize an image of, say, Trevor Noah as a block of pure gray. As a result, any attempt to use Stable Diffusion to edit Noah into other situations would look unconvincing. The second, more effective technique is called a diffusion attack. It disrupts the way the AI models generate images, essentially by encoding them with secret signals that alter how they’re processed by the model. By adding these signals to an image of Trevor Noah, the team managed to manipulate the diffusion model to ignore its prompt and generate the image the researchers wanted. As a result, any AI-edited images of Noah would just look gray. The work is “a good combination of a tangible need for something with what can be done right now,” says Ben Zhao, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago, who developed a similar protective method called Glaze that artists can use to . Tools like PhotoGuard change the economics and incentives for attackers by making it more difficult to use AI in malicious ways, says Emily Wenger, a research scientist at Meta, who also worked on Glaze and has developed methods to prevent facial recognition. “The higher the bar is, the fewer the people willing or able to overcome it,” Wenger says. A challenge will be to see how this technique transfers to other models out there, Zhao says. The researchers have published a that allows people to immunize their own photos, but for now it works reliably only on Stable Diffusion. And while PhotoGuard may make it harder to tamper with new pictures, it does not provide complete protection against deepfakes, because users’ old images may still be available for misuse, and there are other ways to produce deepfakes, says Valeriia Cherepanova, a PhD researcher at the University of Maryland who has . In theory, people could apply this protective shield to their images before they upload them online, says Aleksander Madry, a professor at MIT who contributed to the research. But a more effective approach would be for tech companies to add it to images that people upload into their platforms automatically, he adds. It’s an arms race, however. While they’ve pledged to improve protective methods, tech companies are still also developing new, better AI models at breakneck speed, and new models might be able to override any new protections. The best scenario would be if the companies developing AI models would also provide a way for people to immunize their images that works with every updated AI model, Salman says. Trying to protect images from AI manipulation at the source is a much more viable option than trying to use to detect AI tampering, says Henry Ajder, an expert on generative AI and deepfakes. Any social media platform or AI company “needs to be thinking about protecting users from being targeted by or their faces being cloned to create defamatory content,” he says.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These moisture-sucking materials could transform air conditioning A surprising set of materials could soon help make more efficient air conditioners that don’t overtax the electrical grid on hot days. As extreme heat continues to shatter records around the globe, demand for air conditioning is expected to triple in the next few decades. That’s why the race to build more efficient air conditioners has become increasingly urgent. Although some companies focused on improving existing designs, others are looking to entirely new systems that use materials called desiccants. The hope is these systems could cool more efficiently, even in extreme heat and humidity—and, crucially, reduce stress on the grid. . —Casey Crownhart Shein sued Temu. Temu sued Shein. The war over fast fashion is heating up. Things are currently escalating between Temu and Shein, two Chinese e-commerce platforms. Last week Temu, the young shopping platform currently bombarding US users with social ads, filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court against Shein, the older, massively popular e-commerce website. The accusations in the suit are pretty revelatory if you want to learn more about the state of the “ultra-fast fashion” business. The two platforms are engaged in an escalating legal battle over what each claims is unfair competition. However, airing their dirty laundry so publicly could open them up to even more criticism from eagle-eyed US politicians. . —Zeyi Yang Zeyi’s story is from China Report, his weekly newsletter delving into tech and power in China. to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. If you’d like to read more about the key Chinese shopping players, why not check out: + This obscure shopping app is now America’s most downloaded. Temu shot up to the top spot in app store charts, but it has a long way to go before it can replicate the e-commerce success it’s seen in China. . + Shein’s charm offensive is off to a rocky start. The fast-fashion company invited six influencers to examine its factory conditions in China, but the social media campaign ended in a major backlash. . + Why Zeyi’s had to end. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 AI could be used to create bioweaponsThat’s what a trio of experts warned in testimony to the US Senate yesterday. ( $)+ AI is already changing warfare. ( $)+ But many of the existential AI warnings are vague at best. ( $)+ It’s no surprise Big Tech is volunteering its thoughts on regulation. ( $)+ How existential risk became the biggest meme in AI. () 2 The Atlantic Ocean’s currents are in danger of collapsingThe currents govern weather patterns, and their demise could be catastrophic. ( $)+ Scientists are racing to work out what the consequences could be, exactly. () 3 OpenAI has shut down its AI text-detection toolTL;DR: it didn’t work. ()+ AI-text detection tools are really easy to fool. () 4 It’s boom time for mixed-reality startupsApple’s Reality Pro headset has given the industry a much-needed shot in the arm. ( $) 5 Propaganda is hiding in plain sight on ThreadsAccounts from Russia and China are right there, with no labels identifying them as state-run. ( $)+ Threads is becoming yet another vehicle for AI. ( $) 6 Data centers use a vast amount of waterWhich is a major problem when countries are battling extreme heat waves. ( $)+ The US’s TVA has been accused of failing to embrace clean energy. ( $) 7 Researchers are trying to extract the benefits of psychedelicsWithout forcing the subject to trip, which some argue is the entire point. ()+ Mind-altering substances are being overhyped as wonder drugs. () 8 You can’t really learn a language from a free app But that isn’t stopping millions of Duolingo’s users from trying. ( $) 9 How covid changed gaming for the betterAlienated users forged communities they still love to this day. ( 10 Internet cafes are still going Where else are you planning on printing that document? () Quote of the day “They’re looking to his story to say ‘OK, what are the responsibilities for scientists developing new technologies that may have unintended consequences?’” —Director Christopher Nolan muses over the parallels between his new movie exploring how J. Robert Oppenheimer made the first atomic bomb and today’s AI researchers, reports. The big story The Atlantic’s vital currents could collapse. Scientists are racing to understand the dangers. December 2021 Scientists are searching for clues about one of the most important forces in the planet’s climate system: a network of ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). They want to better understand how global warming is changing it, and how much more it could shift in the coming decades—even whether it could collapse. The problem is the Atlantic circulation seems to be weakening, transporting less water and heat. Because of climate change, melting ice sheets are pouring fresh water into the ocean at the higher latitudes, and the surface waters are retaining more of their heat. Warmer and fresher waters are less dense and thus not as prone to sink, which may be undermining one of the currents’ core driving forces. . —James Temple We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + What’s your ? (A tatty Metallica ‘Ride the Lightning’ shirt from 1984, thanks for asking)+ A love letter to (but don’t shake them!)+ Aww, this made it all the way to the top of a mountain! + Somebody write a horror film about this immediately.+ All hail the very best .

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Even though I know that Temu and Shein, two Chinese e-commerce platforms, occupy the same off-price shopping space, I have to admit I didn’t expect the tensions between them to escalate so quickly. Last week Temu, the young shopping platform currently bombarding US users with social ads, filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court against Shein, the older shopping website that has been massively popular among Gen-Z consumers in recent years. The accusations in the suit are quite revelatory if you want to learn more about the state of the “ultra-fast fashion” business. As regular readers know, I have covered both platforms repeatedly, writing about , , and . These reads should be helpful if you want to understand the two platforms, which are rare examples of Chinese tech companies still trying to become mass consumer brands in the US and finding at least some success despite changeable policies at home and political hostility in the US. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t seem to bond over their shared difficulties. Instead, the competition between Shein and Temu is starting to look like a race to the bottom. The two platforms are engaged in an escalating legal battle over what each claims is unfair competition. It started in December, when Shein sued Temu over intellectual-property infringement. Specifically, of misleading consumers into thinking they were the same brand, allegedly selling products copyrighted by Shein and displaying the word “Shein” in search ads that led to Temu’s website. It also claimed that Temu is behind three imposter Twitter accounts using names like “Shein_USA” and asking fans to support “the new Twitter of Shein” while posting links to Temu’s app and website. The two companies are still fighting over this case in court. Now Temu is striking back and accusing Shein of violating US antitrust law by forbidding suppliers from working with the newer platform. According to the , Temu says Shein has asked all of its more than 8,000 manufacturers to sign exclusive agreements and “loyalty oaths” that specifically prevent them from selling on Temu. It also claims Shein is using false copyright infringement claims to try to get Temu to take down certain products that Temu sells at cheaper prices than Shein does. “For a long time, we have exercised significant restraint and refrained from pursuing legal actions. However, Shein’s escalating attacks leave us no choice but to take legal measures to defend our rights and the rights of those merchants doing business on Temu, as well as the consumers’ rights to a wide variety of affordable products,” Temu told MIT Technology Review. Meanwhile, a Shein spokesperson told MIT Technology Review, “We believe this lawsuit is without merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves.” While the validity of Temu’s claims is up for the court to decide, reading the filing offers quite an education—it paints a detailed picture of the ultra-fast-fashion industry that Shein and Temu are competing in, and more specifically the supply-chain model that has been essential to Shein’s success over the past several years. To take a step back: Shein doesn’t operate like traditional consumer brands. Instead of owning factories that make products for it exclusively, the company works with a vast network of independent Chinese factories. Most times, these factories create the designs, manufacture the products, and sell them to Shein, entrusting the platform to deal with other processes, like listing, customer service, and shipping. Shein offers these suppliers a steady stream of overseas orders. In exchange, it buys the products at very low prices and requests that the suppliers remain loyal to the brand. “As the dominant ultra-fast-fashion retailer, Shein knows that manufacturers need Shein’s volume and its access to the US market and it is, therefore, able to coerce manufacturers into arrangements that force manufacturers not to do business with Temu,” says Temu’s filing. This has apparently created a big headache for Temu. The new player’s business model seeks to replicate the success of Shein’s in many ways. Both have capitalized on cheap international shipping, China’s strong manufacturing capacity, and, crucially, the supply chain that Shein pioneered. For a while, the companies differentiated themselves by the kind of products they sold: Shein is more about apparel, while Temu is more about household products. But each platform is now looking at the other’s primary product lines too, making the companies more direct competitors—meaning that they are going after the same suppliers. Since both of them rely heavily on maintaining an expansive network of low-cost suppliers, it would be devastating if one platform—especially the more established one—forced producers to choose between the two. This is essentially what Temu is accusing Shein of doing. (To be fair, Temu itself is no stranger to accusations of coercion against suppliers. Many Chinese sellers that the platform forces them to accept extremely low prices or arbitrarily ends their business when it finds a cheaper supplier.) Historically, exclusivity agreements have not been uncommon in Chinese tech fights. For more than a decade, companies like Meituan and Alibaba’s Taobao forbade vendors from working with competitor platforms, until the Chinese government explicitly banned such deals in an antitrust push in 2021. But publicly exposing this practice today in the US doesn’t seem like a wise thing to do, at least in my opinion. The popularity of Shein and Temu has already , who see them as the next privacy or intellectual-property threat from China. And what they are accusing each other of doing will almost certainly become ammunition for future criticism. In that case, maybe neither of them will be able to survive in the US market. What do you think of the business model of ultra-fast fashion? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com. Catch up with China 1. Two US congressional committees have announced investigations into Ford’s battery plant in Michigan, which sources technologies from a Chinese company. They’re concerned the batteries could exploit a loophole in the Inflation Reduction Act. () 2. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are divided over whether the US should restrict outward investment in China. () 3. A Chinese economist estimates the youth unemployment rate in the country at 46.5%, two times the official figure. () 4. In another example of conflicting numerical narratives, official data showed that the number of cremations in an eastern province in China increased 70% in the first quarter of 2023 compared with last year, which suggests a much larger covid death toll than Beijing admits. Then the numbers were scrubbed from the web. () 5. Beijing officials met with global venture capitalists and private equity investors to quell their anxieties about investing in China. () 6. When Chinese companies have gone public overseas, their filings have usually included a section that warns investors of the policy risks in China. Now Chinese regulators are asking them to sugarcoat it. () 7. Pandemic travel restrictions have made Chinese postpartum nannies, who take care of new mothers, highly in demand in the Bay Area. Prospective clients need to make reservations seven months in advance. () Lost in translation Now that China has terminated all its covid prevention programs, mRNA companies in the country are struggling to stay relevant, the . Since China never approved any foreign-made mRNA covid vaccines for use in the country, a few domestic companies had high hopes that they could offer homegrown alternatives. At their peak, these mRNA companies secured billions of dollars of venture capital and even acquired emergency-use approvals for vaccines in countries like Laos and Indonesia. However, none of the Chinese mRNA products cleared final clinical trials or won approval for commercial use at home. One of the leading companies, Stermina, suspended its Shanghai factory operation earlier this month because of inadequate demand. As market interest in covid vaccines wanes, these companies are announcing pivots in their research to mRNA vaccines against cancers or rabies. One more thing Just how popular are bubble teas? Right now, there are six Chinese bubble tea makers that plan to file to go public—but in the US or Hong Kong, , and not at home. It turns out they can’t list on domestic stock markets; the Chinese stock regulator apparently thinks their businesses are too risky. I, a loyal customer, beg to differ.

A surprising set of materials could soon help make more efficient air conditioners that don’t overtax the electrical grid on hot days. As extreme heat continues to shatter records around the globe, electricity demand for air conditioning is expected to triple in the next few decades—an increase of about 4,000 terawatt-hours between 2016 and 2050, according to the , or roughly the same electricity demand as the . That’s why the race to build more efficient air conditioners has become increasingly urgent. While some companies are focused on improving existing designs, others are looking to entirely new systems that use materials called desiccants. These systems could cool more efficiently, even in extreme heat and humidity, reducing stress on the grid. A typical air conditioner cools indoor spaces by pumping a refrigerant around in a cycle and through heat exchangers, soaking up heat from the inside air and releasing it outside. (, either running the opposite direction, or in reversible systems that can both heat and cool.) That approach, called vapor compression, is over 100 years old, and the basic design hasn’t changed much since its invention, says, a manager in the carbon-free buildings program at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy think tank. Pumping refrigerant around and compressing it enough to shuttle heat outside requires a lot of energy, especially when temperatures are very high. Vapor compression systems also deal with humidity and heat together, which is another drawback. Keeping a building comfortable has a lot to do with maintaining a low humidity environment, Kalanki says, but air conditioners must cool down air to pull moisture out of it. Without a designated system to tackle humidity, he says, buildings are often “over-cooled,” which can add a huge energy burden. Systems that tackle dehumidification and cooling separately could keep building temperatures comfortable with less energy and allow for more flexibility in different environments. And a growing number of startups are looking to desiccants to accomplish just that. Hot take Desiccants are materials that suck up moisture. The silica beads in those little packets that accompany new purses and shoes are a type of desiccant, designed to keep products dry as they’re shipped around the world. Other types of desiccants could be added to existing designs for air conditioners, absorbing water from the air and cutting down on the energy required to keep rooms comfortable. , an MIT spinout founded in 2018, is developing that uses a type of material called metal organic frameworks. Adding the materials to vapor compression-based air conditioners could allow the company’s system to use 35% less energy than average models, according to Transaera CEO Sorin Grama. But other companies are looking to use desiccants in cooling systems that would replace traditional air conditioners altogether. Florida-based startup , for example, is using liquid desiccants to build cooling systems. The key ingredient is different from the silica beads in shoe packaging, but the comparison is a common one—“We get that a lot,” says Matt Tilghman, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. Rather than small silica beads, Blue Frontier’s cooling technology relies on a salt solution that’s so concentrated, it can pull moisture from the air. Here’s how Blue Frontier’s cooling system works: first, a stream of air passes through a channel and over a thin layer of desiccant, which pulls moisture out of the air. Next, the now-dry air goes through an evaporative cooling step, which lowers the temperature of the air (basically the same way sweat cools your skin). In the evaporative cooling step, the air is split into two streams. One runs past a thin layer of water, which absorbs energy and drops the air’s temperature. That cooler, humid air is used to cool a metal surface, which in turn sucks heat out of the other stream of still-dry air. The humid air gets funneled outside, and the cool, dry air is blown into the building. Evaporation is an efficient cooling method, one that’s employed in low-cost devices called air coolers (also referred to as swamp coolers or evaporative coolers), which can use 80% less electricity than standard air conditioners. These devices usually add moisture to the air to cool it, which only works when starting with dry air, so their use is typically limited to dry environments, like the southwestern US. By pairing evaporative cooling with desiccants, Blue Frontier’s system can work in virtually any climate, Tilghman says. Its operations can be tweaked to handle changes in the weather or in the thermostat set point, altering the balance between cooling and dehumidifying, which could help unlock further efficiency gains. The company’s approach should be able to cut annual electricity use by a total of between 50% and 80% compared with a conventional air conditioning system, depending on the environment, Tilghman says. On thin ice Liquid desiccants are sometimes used today to dehumidify warehouses or factories that need to keep strict controls on moisture in the air, such as in pharmaceutical or electronics manufacturing. But they haven’t been widely used in cooling partly because they’re expensive. One industry standard, lithium chloride, has been subject to price hikes and supply limitations because of demand for it in lithium-ion batteries. The materials can also be corrosive. (Blue Frontier is using a new desiccant that should address those concerns, Tilghman says.) One of the biggest roadblocks to widespread desiccant cooling has been the need for a method to recharge the materials efficiently. Desiccants are like sponges—they can suck up a limited amount of water before they need to be wrung out, or regenerated. So in addition to the parts that dry and cool air, a desiccant cooling system needs a section that can regenerate the desiccant, releasing the water into another stream of air that in turn is released outside. Most desiccants can be regenerated through heating, which releases water from the material, but that step can be energy-intensive and often involves fossil fuel-powered boiler systems. Blue Frontier instead uses a heat pump to regenerate its desiccant. The heat pump adds energy demand, but while the cooling system can run continuously during a hot summer day, the regeneration system can run in the evening or overnight, when there’s less stress on the grid and electricity prices are lower, Tilghman says. Offsetting the regeneration will mean that Blue Frontier’s system could help reduce peak power demand by between 80% and 90%. Other startups are looking to get rid of the need for heat altogether. Boston-based is hoping to use membranes to filter water out of liquid desiccants to regenerate them, similar to the process used to pull salt out of water in desalination facilities. Zephyr demonstrated parts of its system in July and plans to assemble a full lab-scale prototype of a cooling system later this year. Its desiccant cooling device could use about 45% less electricity than the best vapor-compression air conditioners on the market today, says Jacob Miller, Zephyr’s co-founder and chief technology officer. Blue Frontier has two demonstration cooling systems running, one in Florida and one in Canada, and the company has plans to install several dozen more in late 2023 and 2024, Tilghman says. Both startups are focusing first on systems for larger commercial buildings, but down the line the systems could be adapted for houses and even individual apartments, Tilghman says. Blue Frontier’s first systems will be more expensive than existing air conditioners at the outset, he adds, though they should be able to make up for it in energy savings within three to five years. Access to efficient cooling technology could be crucial to helping more people live and work in safe environments without overloading grids. “If you look at the warming world, the way temperatures are rising, you need people to have access to cooling,” Kalanki says. “It’s not just an issue of thermal comfort or feeling productive, it’s also an issue of equity now.”

Many people think of generative AI as a tool that allows them to use their own words to ask questions or generate copy and images—both of which it does remarkably well. However, it also has incredible potential to transform our personal and professional work—helping us that floods our inboxes and languishes in archives. Adobe recently conducted research on digital workers’ perceptions of AI technologies, as well as their value in the workplace. We surveyed 6,049 digital workers across five countries—the U.S., UK, Australia, India, and Japan—including both rank-and-file employees and senior leaders who are using digital technologies (including ) in their workplaces. The findings reveal their perceptions and aspirations around how AI can change the way we work. Following are the top three insights from the research: #1: AI is empowering the digital workforce For companies embracing the technology, employees view AI as a constructive force. An overwhelming majority of respondents (92%) say AI is having a positive impact on their work and more than one-quarter (26%) call AI a “miracle.” Two-thirds say AI is already saving them time, and 61% say it helps them work faster. Nearly half of the workers we surveyed (45%) say AI reduces or eliminates boring or tedious tasks, while 41% say AI has changed how they work for the better. More than one-third of respondents (36%) who use AI at work say the technology enables them to do things they could never do in the past. #2: Generative AI is viewed as a productivity multiplier Generative AI has special potential to become a force multiplier by putting the power of AI at employees’ fingertips. Ninety percent of employees believe generative AI will help them work faster; integrate information from different sources in less time; and reduce time spent on difficult, boring, or tedious work. Nearly as many say generative AI will help them do more work (89%) and create better quality work (88%)—and 9 out of 10 business leaders surveyed say the same. #3: Business leaders view adoption and use of generative AI as inevitable Nearly four out of five (79%) business leaders expect their employees will use generative AI often in their work, with 39% anticipating employees will use generative AI every day. Most global business leaders (76%) say their companies are ready to adopt generative AI in their workflows. Of the roughly 25% of leaders who say they’re not prepared to adopt the new technology, nearly one-third (35%) say they either don’t have the right security, privacy, and trust guardrails in place, or they don’t understand how to use or deploy the technology effectively (34%). Enhancing human potential and productivity As generative AI becomes more common, we’re hearing renewed concerns that AI will replace human workers. While there’s no doubt that generative AI is already significantly changing how we work, when applied thoughtfully it does not replace humans, but rather . Unlocking intelligence While the shift from analog to digital has made information more available and accessible than ever, it has also brought a crush of information that is too much for most of us to absorb, let alone use. For companies, the challenge is multiplied across massive stores of archived documents from which they get little to no value. At one pharmaceutical company, which stores thousands of PDF documents containing critical research and other information, a leader commented that “it’s highly likely the cure for cancer is in that data, but we don’t have an efficient way to find it.” Generative AI will finally empower every employee and every company to put the intelligence in their documents to work. Personalizing work experiences One of the most exciting applications of generative AI in the workplace will be enabling more personalized work experiences. Today, virtually every solution delivers one-size-fits-all responses based on text prompts. Going forward, a generative AI agent will have a history of working with each individual employee—and will continually be trained by each one from a preferred pool of information. These agents will act as powerful personal assistants and become better at meeting employees’ needs, both in speed and in results that are truly tailored to their needs and work. An exciting (and responsible) future For all business and technology leaders, there are we must consider as we bring generative AI into the workplace. And while those issues may feel daunting, finding a responsible and proactive path forward is both our opportunity and responsibility. Start small, using generative AI on projects that solve real challenges. Partner with trusted vendors who are proven and invested in your success. And, most importantly, resist focusing on cost cutting alone and instead prioritize projects that empower your workforce. It is my deep belief that amplifying human potential is the most exciting and profound application for generative AI—and every technology. This content was produced by Adobe. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

This is today’s edition of , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. It’s high time for more AI transparency In less than a week since Meta launched its open source AI model, , startups and researchers have already used it to develop a chatbot and an AI assistant. It will be only a matter of time until companies start launching products built with it. LLaMA 2 makes a lot of sense. A nimble, transparent, and customizable model that is free to use could help companies create AI products and services faster than they could with a big, sophisticated proprietary model like OpenAI’s GPT-4. By allowing the wider AI community to download the model and tweak it, Meta could help to make it safer and more efficient. And crucially, it could demonstrate the benefits of transparency over secrecy when it comes to the inner workings of AI models—at a point when that could not be more timely, or more important. . —Melissa Heikkilä This story is from The Algorithm, her weekly AI newsletter. to receive it in your inbox every Monday. If you’re interested in learning more about AI, check out some of our excellent recent reporting: + A quick guide to all the most (and least) promising efforts to .+ How existential risk became in AI.+ Generative AI risks concentrating Big Tech’s power. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Twitter’s name change will cost its brand billions‘Tweeting’ is part of our cultural lexicon—but Elon Musk doesn’t seem to care. ( $)+ He’s trying to destroy Twitter’s legacy and chart a risky new course. ( $) + Musk is also projecting ‘s3xy’ on the company’s HQ walls. ( $)+ If you’re a little bit sad over Twitter’s demise, you’re not alone. ()+ The letter X does have an enduring kind of appeal, though. () 2 The world isn’t prepared for what OpenAI’s been working onSam Altman says his staff have created a dangerous AI they’ll never release. ( $)+ His ambitions are increasingly at odds with regulators. ( $)+ It’s time to talk about the real AI risks. ()3 Mastodon is rife with child abuse imagesIt’s a grim reminder of how much harder it is to moderate decentralized platforms. ( $) 4 China is fed up of Western sanctionsAnd it has no qualms about retaliating. ( $)+ China is fighting back in the semiconductor exports war. () 5 It’s harder for governments to flag people’s social media posts nowWhile the US has already been restricted, the same kinds of checks are also coming to Europe. ( $) 6 America’s farmland is being turned into AI data centersSprawling centers are springing up in rural expanses. ( $) 7 The FBI ran a secret encrypted phones business for yearsNow, a team of lawyers want a judge to name the country that aided them. ()+ Erik Prince wants to sell you a “secure” smartphone that’s too good to be true. () 8 Ozempic doesn’t have to cost this muchBut drug companies exist to make money, after all. ( $)+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? () 9 Influencers are emerging as a powerful tool for Indian politiciansPrime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a third term next year, and doesn’t want to take any chances. () 10 We’re getting closer to learning more about asteroids A mission over a decade in the making is heading back to Earth—complete with some precious rock and dust cargo. () Quote of the day “Is this what we want?” —A senior designer at Adobe questions the extent to which the company should integrate AI into its products if it risks humans losing their jobs, reports. The big story This company is about to grow new organs in a person for the first time August 2022 In the coming weeks, a volunteer in Boston, Massachusetts, will be the first to trial a new treatment that could end up creating a second liver in their body. And that’s just the beginning—in the months that follow, other volunteers will test doses that could leave them with up to six livers in their bodies. The company behind the treatment, LyGenesis, hopes to save people with devastating liver diseases who are not eligible for transplants. Their approach is to inject liver cells from a donor into the lymph nodes of sick recipients, which can give rise to entirely new miniature organs. These mini livers should help compensate for an existing diseased one. The approach appears to work in mice, pigs, and dogs. Now we’ll find out if it works in people. . —Jessica Hamzelou We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or .) + I’m not sure I like the sound of this .+ If you’ve never listened to the late, great Jane Birkin’s music, these are a good place to start.+ This story about a man winning an is absolutely adorable.+ It’s true—video games’ always had the best soundtracks.+ Turning these digital codes into has created true works of art.