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The Download: recycling batteries, and augmented reality hits stores

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The Download: recycling batteries, and augmented reality hits stores


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.

Why your iPhone 17 might come with a recycled battery

Lithium-ion batteries power most of our personal electronics today. Mining the metals that make up those batteries can mean a lot of pollution, as well as harmful conditions for workers. 

The good news is, a growing number of groups are working to make sure batteries get recycled—and some of those efforts are becoming mainstream, including Apple’s recent announcement its batteries would use 100% recycled cobalt beginning in 2025. 

It says a lot about where the battery recycling industry is and where it’s going. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

Casey’s story is from The Spark, her weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Snap is launching augmented-reality mirrors in stores

What’s happening: Snap is planning to launch augmented-reality mirrors that allow shoppers in stores to instantly see how clothes look on them without physically trying them on. The mirrors are going to appear in some US Nike stores later this year, and in the Men’s Wearhouse in Paramus, New Jersey.

Why? The mirrors are part of Snap’s new effort to start offering AR products in the physical world. AR has powered Snapchat filters and Lenses (the company’s term for its in-app AR experiences) for years, but these additional uses of the technology create a potential revenue stream for Snap outside the social media platform’s app. Read the full story.

—Tanya Basu

Learning to code isn’t enough

A decade ago, tech powerhouses like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon helped boost the nonprofit Code.org, a learn-to-code program. It sparked a wave of nonprofits and for-profits alike dedicated to coding and learning computer science, and a number of US states that have made coding a high school graduation requirement. 

But just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds, nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system. Read the full story.

—Joy Lisi Rankin

This story is from our forthcoming Education print issue, due to launch next Wednesday. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up from just $69 a year—a special low price to mark Earth Week.

The must-reads

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

1 It’s better to be safe than sorry with AI
And yet, the biggest labs aren’t investing in proper safeguarding. (Economist $)
+ Google’s using generative AI for its new ad campaigns. (FT $)
+ Discussions around AI risk are long overdue. (New Scientist $)
+ Do AI systems need to come with safety warnings? (MIT Technology Review)

2 People with long covid are still suffering  
And they’re feeling increasingly isolated due to the lack of restrictions. (The Atlantic $)
+ But new clinical trials are looking promising. (Wired $)
+ We’ve only just begun to examine the racial disparities of long covid. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Matt Walsh’s Twitter hacker did it to stir up drama
They say they compromised Walsh’s phone with the help of an “insider.” (Wired $)
+ Twitter’s getting rid of legacy blue checks—for real this time. (WP $)

4 All US Facebook users are owed money
But it’s not a lot, and isn’t coming anytime soon. (WSJ $)

5 North Korea says it’s built its first spy satellite
The satellite could play a key role in the country’s weapons programs. (FT $)
+ Soon, satellites will be able to watch you everywhere all the time. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The US Supreme Court has delayed its abortion pill decision
It’ll make a decision about the accessibility of mifepristone on Friday. (BBC)
+ Texas is trying out new tactics to restrict access to abortion pills online. (MIT Technology Review)

7 TikTok’s algorithm keeps pushing suicide content to minors
Depression, hopelessness and death are common themes. (Bloomberg $)

8  Erotic hypnosis is ruining women’s lives
Predatory men are using recordings to groom vulnerable people online. (BuzzFeed)

9 WeChat’s ultrashort soap operas are pushing China’s decency laws
The dramas are more provocative than traditional TV fare. (Rest of World)

10 How video games help people work through their grief

It gives them the chance to process their feelings in digital realms. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch.”

—An internal Google note to workers spells out the problems with the company’s AI chatbot, which it launched last month, Bloomberg reports.

The big story

How robotic honeybees and hives could help the species fight back

October 2022

Something was wrong, but Thomas Schmickl couldn’t put his finger on it. It was 2007, and the Austrian biologist was spending part of the year at East Tennessee State University. During his daily walks, he realized that insects seemed conspicuously absent.

Schmickl, who now leads the Artificial Life Lab at the University of Graz in Austria, wasn’t wrong. Insect populations are indeed declining or changing around the world.

Robotic bees, he believes, could help both the real thing and their surrounding nature, a concept he calls ecosystem hacking. Read the full story.

—Elizabeth Preston

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.)

+ There’s nothing quite like a teenage bedroom
+ If you’ve been looking to mix up your podcast library, this list offers some handy pointers.
+ Shh, don’t tell anyone about America’s hottest, and most secret, restaurants.
+ Stealing close to $200,000 in dimes seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
+ Kenny Loggins is still going—writing Winnie the Pooh songs



Tech

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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