Good morning! Today: read our latest magazine issue on innovation, a startup is making deep learning possible without specialized hardware, and robots are the new recruits on the pandemic's front lines. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day.
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Technology has let us down. Here’s how to make it work for us again
The technology we have mirrors the society we have, and specifically the way power in that society is distributed, writes Gideon Lichfield, editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review, in the opening letter of our latest magazine: The Innovation Issue. Those who have power, be it through money, connections, or other kinds of privilege, have much more say in deciding which technologies get built and who they benefit.
Such a system fails many people. Covid-19 and, more recently, the protests in the US sparked by the police officer who calmly murdered the unarmed, unresisting George Floyd in full view of cameras have made this clearer than ever.
The venture-capital-driven tech boom of recent decades has not given the country much of the technology and infrastructure it needs to fight a pandemic. It has worsened economic inequality, political polarization, and the spread of misinformation. It has not reduced racial injustice: even though police brutality against black people has been documented countless times on cell phones and police bodycams in the past few years, the death toll has stayed perfectly steady. Indeed, the US has used technology to make racial oppression more systematic, as Charlton McIlwain writes in this issue.
The pandemic exacerbates these inequities. Not only are people in some of the lowest-paid, most precarious jobs—delivery drivers, supermarket cashiers, warehouse staff—at highest risk of catching covid-19, but as Erika Hayasaki explains, the crisis is likely to accelerate their replacement with robots and other forms of automation.
None of this is the fault of technology, but of a society that gives markets, and therefore the rich and powerful, too much say over which technologies are built and how they are used.
Read the rest of the latest edition of MIT Technology Review here and subscribe.
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The startup making deep learning possible without specialized hardware
A discovery: Graphics cards, or GPUs, are the most common hardware choice for deep-learning models. Neural Magic, a startup led by MIT professor Nir Shavit, claims that central processing units, or CPUs, the most generic computer chip found in any average laptop, can do the job instead, if programmed correctly.
Why it’s potentially exciting: The idea is to allow any company to deploy a deep-learning model without the need for specialized hardware. It would not only lower the costs of deep learning but also make AI more widely accessible. In recent years, dozens of companies have cropped up to design AI chips that circumvent these problems. The trouble is, the more specialized the hardware, the more expensive it becomes. Neural Magic intends to buck this trend. Read the full story.
—Karen Hao
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Robots are the new recruits on the pandemic’s front lines
We give robots some pretty scary and stressful jobs: cleaning up nuclear sites, inspecting pipelines from the inside, exploring the frozen wastes of Mars. The arrival of the coronavirus has transformed more familiar settings, like grocery stores and hospitals, into potentially hazardous environments as well. Erika Hayasaki, a writer and journalism professor in California, learned that the pandemic is leading some organizations to speed up their automation plans in order to aid front-line workers.
Her feature article appears in the July issue of MIT Technology Review. In this episode of our podcast Deep Tech, she describes her reporting on companies in California and Texas that are rushing to meet the demand, and asks whether the new wave of safety-driven automation could ultimately force more human workers into retraining programs. Listen to it for yourself.
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We can still have nice things
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The top ten must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How the pandemic will reshape architecture
We’re having to redesign homes, offices, and cities. ( New Yorker)
+ Covid cases are surging in Oklahoma just days before Trump’s Tulsa rally. ( Reuters)
+ How to protect the elderly. ( Axios)
2 A hunt for dark matter has found an unexplained signal
This could be dark matter, new properties of neutrinos—or contamination. ( Quanta)
3 England’s contact tracing program is in deep trouble
This is almost a perfect description of how not to set up a contact tracing system. ( NYT $)
4 The science of reopening a restaurant during a pandemic 🍽️
There is nothing easy about this. ( Wired $)
+ Is one meter a safe enough distance? ( Wired UK)
5 China is collecting the DNA of tens of millions of boys and men
It’s to supplement a growing genetic database. And a US company is helping. ( NYT $)
6 Facebook groups are dangerous
The privacy and community they offer make them ideal conduits for misinformation. ( Wired $)
+ Civil rights groups are pushing for advertisers to boycott Facebook. ( WSJ $)
+ Cops are asking for more and more data from Facebook—and they’re getting it. ( OneZero)
7 The Justice Department is proposing to limit tech companies’ free speech protections
This could badly backfire. ( WSJ $)
+ Senate republicans introduced a new bill that would restrict Section 230 protections. (Gizmodo)
+ What is Section 230 and why does Donald Trump want to change it? ( TR)
8 How to topple a statue safely, using science
You’ll need rope, hooks, and lots of people. Or you could go wild and create a thermite reaction. ( Popular Mechanics)
9 You can now tweet your voice 🗣️
Fun, but... how do you moderate this? ( The Verge)
10 Gen Zers are mocking millennials on TikTok
Boomers, enjoy this time off. ( Buzzfeed)
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“If we lived under water in isolation or in our small groups, and we’re down there for extended periods of time, we wouldn’t have to worry about the coronavirus.”
—Adam Jewell, seasteading fan and co-host of the Colonize the Ocean podcast, has a novel solution for the pandemic, NBC reports.
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