The narrative from the AI labs is dazzling: build AGI, unlock astonishing productivity, and watch GDP surge. It’s a compelling story, especially if you’re the one building or investing in the new thought machines. But it skips the part that makes an economy an economy: circulation. An economy is not simply production. It is production…
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. I am writing this because one of my editors woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled on a bedside notepad: “What is a…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Sometimes AI feels like a niche topic to write about, but then the holidays happen, and I hear relatives of all ages talking about cases of chatbot-induced psychosis, blaming rising electricity prices…
What is patient privacy for? The Hippocratic Oath, thought to be one of the earliest and most widely known medical ethics texts in the world, reads: “Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I…
Some of designer C Jacob Payne’s projects present new, futuristic products — such as zero-gravity footwear for astronauts, and electronic-embedded ceramics — using technological tools and processes of digital fabrication, material innovation, and interactive interfaces. Other projects travel back in time to past centuries, considering the challenge of preserving and reconstructing Black architectural heritage. Payne…
The following article originally appeared on Block’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Lately, I’ve seen more developers online starting to side eye MCP. There was a tweet by Darren Shepherd that summed it up well: Most devs were introduced to MCP through coding agents (Cursor, VS Code) and most devs struggle to…
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. In an industry in constant flux, sticking your neck out to predict what’s coming next may seem reckless. (AI bubble? What AI bubble?) But for the…
We’re in the midst of a global mental-health crisis. More than a billion people worldwide suffer from a mental-health condition, according to the World Health Organization. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is growing in many demographics, particularly young people, and suicide is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives globally each year. Given the clear…
If the past 12 months have taught us anything, it’s that the AI hype train is showing no signs of slowing. It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of the year, DeepSeek had yet to turn the entire industry on its head, Meta was better known for trying (and failing) to make the metaverse…
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, summed it up in three words: “This is embarrassing.” Hassabis was replying on X to an overexcited post by Sébastien Bubeck, a research scientist at the rival firm OpenAI, announcing that two mathematicians had used OpenAI’s latest large language model, GPT-5, to find solutions to 10 unsolved problems in…