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The Download: the future of batteries, and China’s chips

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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.

What’s next for batteries

Every year the world runs more and more on batteries. Electric vehicles passed 10% of global vehicle sales in 2022, and they’re on track to reach 30% by the end of this decade.

The transition from gas-powered cars to EVs will require lots of batteries—and better and cheaper ones at that. Most EVs today are powered by lithium-ion batteries, a decades-old technology that academic labs and companies alike are seeking to make more efficient and even more affordable. 

In the midst of the soaring demand for EVs and renewable power, and an explosion in battery development, one thing is certain: batteries will play a key role in the transition to renewable energy. Here’s what to expect in 2023. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

Chinese chips will keep powering your everyday life

The global semiconductor industry is in a state of flux. The US started to take steps to freeze China out of the industry in 2022, pushing the sector to diversify from the Chinese supply chain and build factories elsewhere.

But while the US government’s punitive restrictions will start to bite over the next few months, and the high end of China’s chip industry is likely to suffer, the country may take a bigger role in manufacturing older-generation chips that are still widely used in everyday life. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

Zeyi’s story is from China Report, his weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things about China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

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

1 China is furious at other countries’ covid travel restrictions 
Beijing claims the covid testing requirements “lack scientific basis.” (The Guardian)
+ AI isn’t very good at detecting covid. (New Scientist $)

2 Sam Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to all charges
He’ll face trial in October. (CoinDesk)
+ It’s possible he’ll try to strike a plea deal with prosecutors. (Economist $)

3 Microsoft wants to integrate ChatGPT into Bing  
It hopes to chip away at Google’s search dominance. (The Information $)
+ How accurate its answers will be is still up for debate. (Bloomberg $)
+ A new app claims to detect whether essays have been written using ChatGPT. (Insider $)
+ How to spot AI-generated text. (MIT Technology Review)

4 US pharmacies can sell abortion pills for the first time
While a prescription is still required, it’ll significantly broaden access to medicated abortions. (BBC)
+ Where to get abortion pills and how to use them. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Political adverts are returning to Twitter 
The U-turn comes months after advertisers started leaving in their droves. (Politico)
+ Covid misinformation spiked on Twitter after NFL player Damar Hamlin collapsed. (WP $)

6 Ethereum is getting greener
It won’t solve crypto’s environmental footprint entirely, though. (Motherboard)
+ Taiwan isn’t worried about the crypto crash. (Rest of World)

7 Instagram is paying musicians a fortune to soundtrack its Reels
It’s low-effort, high-reward. (New Yorker $)
+ But it’s mostly getting tougher out there for online creators. (The Information $)

8 Amazon in Pakistan is overrun with scammers
The fraudsters are concocting increasingly elaborate schemes to trick victims. (Rest of World)

9 Those cheap TVs come at a price
Once a staple of the American home, they’re not the status symbol they used to be. (The Atlantic $)

10 Don’t hold a holiday party in the metaverse 🎉
Your colleagues are unlikely to want to join, unfortunately. (Wired $)

Quote of the day

“I can smell the stench of crime.”

—An unnamed customer criticizes crypto exchange FTX in a complaint filed with the FTC, Gizmodo reports.

The big story

What cities need now

April 2021

Urban technology projects have long sought to manage the city. The latest, “smart city” projects, have much in common with previous iterations. Again and again, these initiatives promise novel “solutions” to urban “problems.”

After a decade of pilot projects and flashy demonstrations, though, it’s still not clear whether smart city technologies can actually solve or even mitigate the challenges cities face. What is clear, however, is that technology companies are increasingly taking on administrative and infrastructure responsibilities that governments have long fulfilled.

If smart cities are to avoid exacerbating urban inequalities, we have to take a long, hard look at how cities have fared so far. Read the full story.

—Jennifer Clark

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.)

+ Did you hear the one about the nun and the monk who fell in love and got married? No, really!
+ The Centenarians of Oklahoma sound absolutely fabulous.
+ An English seaside town canceled its New Year fireworks—to protect a visiting walrus.
+ Loads of us will set ourselves reading goals this year, but not all of us will stick to them.
+ Aww. Rats deride pleasure from watching fellow rodents getting tickled. 🐀



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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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