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The Download: AI’s life-and-death decisions, and plant-based steak

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

The messy morality of letting AI make life-and-death decisions

In a workshop in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke is overseeing testing on his new assisted suicide machine. Sealed inside the coffin-sized pod, a person who has chosen to die must answer three questions: Who are you? Where are you? And do you know what will happen when you press that button? The machine will then fill with nitrogen gas, causing the occupant to pass out in less than a minute and die by asphyxiation in around five.

Despite a 25-year campaign to “demedicalize death” through technology, Nitschke has not been able to sidestep the medical establishment fully. Switzerland, which has legalized assisted suicide, requires that candidates for euthanasia demonstrate mental capacity, which is typically assessed by a psychiatrist.

A solution could come in the form of an algorithm that Nitschke hopes will allow people to perform a kind of psychiatric self-assessment. While his mission may seem extreme—even outrageous—to some, he is not the only one looking to involve technology, and AI in particular, in life-or-death decisions. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

This fascinating piece is from our forthcoming mortality-themed issue, available from 26 October. If you want to read it when it comes out, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for as little as $80 a year.

Impossible Foods has a big new offering in the works: filet mignon

Progress is being made on a truly impossible-seeming area of plant-based meat products: steak. And not just any steak—filet mignon.

At MIT Technology Review’s ClimateTech event on Wednesday, Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown shared that while he couldn’t give an exact date for when the company’s steak product will be ready for consumers to purchase, there is a prototype—and he tried it out himself earlier this year. Read the full story diving into the biggest challenges of replicating the crème de la crème of steaks from plants, and tune in to our live blog covering the second day of ClimateTech later this morning.

Elsewhere at Climate Tech, our climate reporter Casey Crownhart moderated a session on  “Solving the Hard-to-Solve Sectors,” digging into the industries that are crucial to combating climate change, but tend to be overlooked.

She dived into the nitty gritty of what these sectors are, what’s so hard about them, and the approaches companies are taking to clean them up in The Spark, her weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all the latest climate innovations. Read this week’s edition, and sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. 

Human brain cells transplanted into baby rats’ brains grow and form connections

Human neurons transplanted into a rat’s brain continue to grow, forming connections with the animals’ own brain cells and helping guide their behavior, new research has shown.

In a study published in the journal Nature yesterday, lab-grown clumps of human brain cells were transplanted into the brains of newborn rats. They grew and integrated with the rodents’ own neural circuits, eventually making up around one-sixth of their brains. It’s a development that could shed light on human neuropsychiatric disorders. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

The must-reads

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

1 How China’s chipmakers are preparing for US sanctions 
Stockpiling components and planning to train AI models overseas are just some of the tools in their arsenal. (Wired $)
+ Samsung has been granted a year-long exemption from the rules. (WSJ $)
+ The regulations come at a very trying time for the industry. (Bloomberg $)

2 A robotic exoskeleton adapts to wearers to help them walk faster
Traditional exoskeletons are expensive and bulky, but this one is essentially a little robotic boot. (MIT Technology Review) 

3 Amazon’s dream home is a surveillance nightmare
Its products gather swathes of data, detailing your routines and habits. (WP $)
+ Ring’s new TV show is a brilliant but ominous viral marketing ploy. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Alex Jones must pay the Sandy Hook victims’ families $1 billion
It’s a record-breaking amount for a defamation lawsuit. (Vox)

5 Ukraine’s Starlink systems are coming back online
The devices have suffered outages in the past few days, leaving soldiers without any way to communicate. (FT $)
+ Odessa’s officials have removed Elon Musk’s picture from a billboard. (Motherboard)
+ Russia’s train reliance is part of its problem during the war. (The Atlantic $)

6 The US midterms have a misinformation problem
Multilingual fact-checking groups are stepping up to try to combat the falsehoods. (NYT $)
+ Why midterm “October surprises” are rarely the revelations they seem. (Vox)

7 A long-standing malaria mystery has been solved
Experts simply couldn’t work out where mosquitoes went during hot weather. (Economist $)
+ The new malaria vaccine will save countless lives. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Fake vaccination certificates are circulating in India
It doesn’t bode well for the country’s claims of high vaccination rates. (Rest of World)

9 Even AI doesn’t like math
Some language models are failing to get to grips with tricky problems. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ A new AI tool can detect sepsis. (Undark)
+ DeepMind’s game-playing AI has beaten a 50-year-old record. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Consumer tech is going solar powered 
If this Swedish startup has their way, that is. (The Next Web)

Quote of the day

“Compare that to Lord of the Rings, when they scan your eyeballs just to get in!”

—Charlie Vickers, the actor who plays Halbrand in The Rings of Power, discusses the intense biometric lengths that showmakers went to in order to keep the Tolkien show a secret with the Guardian.

The big story

The uneasy coexistence of Yandex and the Kremlin

August 2020

While Moscow was under coronavirus lockdown between March and June 2020, the Russian capital emptied out—apart from the streams of cyclists in the trademark yellow uniform of Yandex’s food delivery service.

Often referred to in the West as Russia’s Google, Yandex is really more like Google, Amazon, Uber, and maybe a few other companies combined. It’s not really part of Russia’s Silicon Valley, as much as it’s a Russian Silicon Valley unto itself.  

But Yandex’s success has come at a price. The Kremlin has long viewed the internet as a battlefield in its escalating tensions with the West and has become increasingly concerned that a company like Yandex, with the heaps of data it has on Russian citizens, could one day fall into foreign hands. In a world increasingly concerned with protecting borders and regulating the tech industry, Yandex’s dilemma may not be just a Russian story. Read the full story.

—Evan Gershkovich

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 tweet ’em at me.)

+ Hey, geese like baseball too! (thanks Craig!)
+ Here’s all the summer movies you may have missed the first time around.
+ Guys, drop everything—it’s squirrel awareness month.
+ This clip reminds me how much I need to up my pool game.
+ John Lennon insisting all four Beatles were bald will never not be funny.



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The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush

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The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush


The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania. 

Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.

Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.

A changing way of life

The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.

Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.

One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.

Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.

The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan


Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.

Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost. 

But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation

—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures

The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI


A strategic imperative

Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.

According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.

Mapping out a generative AI pathway

One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.

The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.

Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.

All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.

The benefits of third-party experience

Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).

Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”

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