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Rethinking sustainable mobility in a new, digital landscape

Yansong Chen, senior vice president of strategy and technology at Ricardo—an environmental, engineering, and strategic consulting company—says advanced technologies are changing the way the industry looks at its value proposition, at a... Read more »

Learning to code isn’t enough

The very existence of these training endeavors reflected a mixed set of motivations on the part of the organizers, who were mostly white, well-off volunteers. These volunteers tended to conflate living in... Read more »

Snap is launching augmented-reality mirrors in stores

“Our goal is to have people use their time more efficiently in the world instead of getting immersed in a virtual one,” says Bobby Murphy, Snap’s chief technology officer.  The AR mirrors... Read more »

The Download: OpenAI’s data disaster, and screens in schools

OpenAI has just over a week to comply with European data protection laws following a temporary ban in Italy, and a slew of investigations in other EU countries. If it fails, it... Read more »

OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it

In AI development, the dominant paradigm is that the more training data, the better. OpenAI’s GPT-2 model had a data set consisting of 40 gigabytes of text. GPT-3, which ChatGPT is based... Read more »

How to teach kids who flip between book and screen

The use of digital books and textbooks exploded during the pandemic, and it may be only a matter of time before all educational publishing moves online. So it’s all the more important... Read more »

The Download: fire-resistant homes, and Big Tech’s AI chokehold

With each devastating wildfire in the US West, officials consider new methods or regulations that might save homes or lives the next time. In the parts of California where the hillsides meet... Read more »

The quest to build wildfire-resistant homes

“We have to get over this idea that it’s always the best thing to actually evacuate,” says Kolden. “We used to have community bomb shelters, right? These are functionally community fire shelters. Those... Read more »

Generative AI risks concentrating Big Tech’s power. Here’s how to stop it

Myers West says her secondment taught her that AI regulation doesn’t have to start from a blank slate. Instead of waiting for AI-specific regulations, such as the EU’s AI Act, which will take... Read more »

The Download: solar geoengineering’s high stakes, and tracking student’s moods

Picture two theoretical futures: one in which nations counteract climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space, and another where the world continues heating up. There are big differences between the two,... Read more »