As regular readers will know, I tend to start each edition of this newsletter by telling you all about a topic that’s been on my mind—whether it’s a big news story, a fascinating trend, or just something cool I happened to hear about in my reporting.

This week is a bit different. It’s my last Checkup for a while. In a matter of weeks, I’ll be starting a Knight Science Journalism fellowship at MIT (which is completely unrelated to my position at Tech Review). The Checkup will live on—I’ll be passing the baton to my brilliant colleagues while I’m away! But this is a farewell from me, for now.

The Checkup is not yet a year old, but we’ve covered some extremely exciting developments in medicine and biotechnology since we launched last September. We’ve come a long way since then—today, there are over 77,000 of you getting this newsletter in your inboxes every week! We’ve covered everything from teeny-tiny viruses to life-changing brain implants. There’s been a real mix of stories that have made me laugh, cry, and—always—think. So let’s take the opportunity to look at some story highlights from the last 10 months.

The first edition of the Checkup looked at what minimally conscious brains can do. There’s some really fascinating research on the minds of people who are in what’s known as an unresponsive wakefulness state and only show unreliable flickers of awareness. Some studies suggest that people in this state can still learn.

I spoke to neuroscientist John Whyte, who told me about attempts to pull minimally conscious people back into full consciousness. Some of these have involved sticking electrodes into a part of the brain that’s thought to control awareness. Others have involved drugs.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget Whyte’s story about a young man he’d treated with one of these drugs. The man, who had sustained a head injury on his way home from his summer vacation, had been unconscious for three years. Within an hour of being given a drug called zolpidem, he seemed revived—he was even able to hug his parents. But the effects lasted only a few hours, Whyte told me through tears. His parents opted to save the drug for special occasions.

As a reporter covering health and biotech, I am hugely privileged to hear the personal stories of people who have been through incredible experiences. Another story that will stick with me is that of Ian Burkhart, who I spoke to for a more recent edition of the Checkup.

Burkhart also experienced a life-changing injury in his young adulthood—a diving accident that left him with a broken neck. He was no longer able to move his limbs.

A few years later, he volunteered to have an experimental device implanted in his brain. The device, which was essentially a set of 100 electrodes, was designed to record activity in a part of his brain responsible for controlling arm movement. Researchers were able to send recorded brain signals to a sleeve of electrodes on Burkhart’s arm via a computer. He was soon able to use the device to move his hand and fingers by thought alone.

I first spoke to Burkhart in 2016, a couple of years after he’d had the device implanted. By that point, he was able to control his fingers well enough to play Guitar Hero. At the time, he said of the device: “It’s grown to be a part of me.”

But looming funding cuts soon threatened the project, and after an infection, he had to have the implant removed. He found this difficult, he told me. “When I first had my spinal cord injury, everyone said: ‘You’re never going to be able to move anything from your shoulders down again,’” he said. “I was able to restore that function, and then lose it again. That was really tough.” (You can read more about the ethical implications of removing brain implants—particularly when recipients feel it has become part of them—in this piece).

More generally, brain implants can both record brain activity and electrically stimulate parts of the brain. It’s an approach that appears to help treat some disorders, but it’s worth bearing in mind that these devices can collect intimate biological data. And while this data should be used to improve a person’s health, there’s a chance it could be used in a legal setting.

Recordings from a brain device have already been used to clear someone from assault charges. In that case, recordings suggest the person was having a seizure at the time of the alleged assault. But such recordings could just as easily be used against someone, as we explored in a February edition of the Checkup. In another edition, I had an eye-opening chat with futurist and legal ethicist Nita Farahany about the need to protect our brain data and establish our “neurorights.”

Since its inception, the Checkup has also covered some of the most exciting aspects of microbiome research. Anyone who knows me understands my fascination with the tiny bugs that live in and on us. (Former colleagues referred to me as their “poo correspondent” for my reporting on fecal transplants.)

So perhaps it’s no surprise that a recent edition of this newsletter looked at what fecal analysis can tell you about your diet and your microbiome. Scientists are developing new tools that they hope will eventually allow them to create personalized, microbiome-based diet plans. Others are working on engineering “designer microbes” for healthier microbiomes.

It’s a worthwhile endeavor given just how important these microbes seem to be for our health. They even change as we age, which has led some scientists to wonder if establishing a “younger” microbiome in the gut might somehow improve older people’s health.

We’ve also explored some really tricky ethical questions that surround reproduction and parenthood as a result of new scientific advances. Scientists can now use stem cells to make what look like early-stage embryos, for example. How far should we allow them to develop?

We can also use cells from dead people to make babies. Who should get to decide how and when that technology is used, if ever? And then there’s the race to make functional human egg and sperm cells in the lab. This technology could allow us to create babies with more than two parents, or none at all. Will it change our understanding of what it means to be a parent?

There often aren’t definitive answers to questions like these, but exploring them has been a blast. I’d like to say a great big thank you for doing that with me.

Read more from Tech Review’s archive

I’ve really enjoyed writing to you from reporting trips I’ve taken over the last year, especially from an exclusive conference in Switzerland for uber-wealthy people looking to add years to their lives.

And from a seaside resort in Montenegro where life-extension enthusiasts explored a way to turn Rhode Island into a longevity state.

While I’m away, the Checkup will live on! It will take a short break and then return to your inboxes in early August. In the meantime, I’d also like to flag the other amazing weekly newsletters written by my fabulous colleagues.

Every Monday morning, Melissa Heikkilä shares her insights on the wild world of AI with subscribers of the Algorithm. And there’s more throughout the week. If you’re interested in batteries, concrete, lab-grown meat, and all things climate-related, Casey Crownhart’s newsletter, the Spark, is for you.

Tate Ryan-Mosley has all you need to know about power, politics, and Silicon Valley in the Technocrat. And you can probably guess what Zeyi Yang’s informative and entertaining China Report is all about.

From around the web

There’s evidence that weight-loss drugs like Wegovy work well in children—and trials in children as young as six are about to start. But taking these drugs could be a lifelong commitment, and they could be harmful for those with eating disorders. So should we ever give weight-loss drugs to kids? (New Scientist)

Humans transmitted the coronavirus to white-tailed deer more than 100 times in late 2021 and early 2022, according to new research. The virus probably spread among the deer, mutated, and then passed back to us. (The New York Times)

Activists are suing the Idaho government over a state law that prohibits adults from helping minors access abortions. The law was hastily cobbled together and is unconstitutional, according to the plaintiffs. (The Guardian)

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a daily contraceptive pill for over-the-counter use. The move should allow people to buy birth control pills without a prescription. (Reuters)

There are somewhere between 50 and 800 longevity clinics in the US, where clients pay as much as $100,000 for sometimes unproven treatments. (The Wall Street Journal)

Two virologists have testified in support of their findings that the coronavirus had a “natural” origin and was not engineered in a lab. At a hearing titled “Investigating the proximal origin of a cover-up,” the scientists also said that Anthony Fauci did not exert influence over their research paper. (The New York Times)

Now we have the first indication of its effect in the workplace. A new study by two MIT economics graduate students, published today in Science, suggests it could help reduce gaps in writing ability between employees. They found that it could enable less experienced workers who lack writing skills to produce work similar in quality to that of more skilled colleagues.

Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang recruited 453 marketers, data analysts, and college-educated professionals and got each of them to complete two kinds of tasks they’d normally undertake as part of their jobs, such as writing press releases, short reports, or analysis plans. Half were given the option of using ChatGPT to help them complete the second of the two tasks.

A group of other professionals then quality-checked the results, grading the writing on a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 the best. Each piece of work was evaluated by three people working in the same professions, hired through the research platform Prolific. 

The writers who chose to use ChatGPT took 40% less time to complete their tasks, and produced work that the assessors scored 18% higher in quality than that of the participants who didn’t use it. The writers who were already skilled at writing were able to reduce the amount of time they spent on their work, while those who were assessed as being weaker writers produced higher-quality work once they gained access to the chatbot.

“ChatGPT is just very good at producing this kind of written content, and so using it to automate parts of the writing process seems likely to save a lot of time,” says Noy, lead author of the research.

“One thing that’s clear is that this is very useful for white-collar work—a lot of people will be using it, and it’s going to have a pretty big effect on how white-collar work is structured,” he adds.

However, the output of ChatGPT and other generative AI models is far from reliable. ChatGPT is very good at presenting false information as factually correct, meaning that although workers may be able to leverage it to help them produce more work, they also run the risk of introducing errors. 

Depending on the nature of a person’s job, those kinds of inaccuracies could have serious implications. Lawyer Steven Schwartz was fined $5,000 by a judge last month for using ChatGPT to produce a legal brief that contained false judicial opinions and legal citations.

“Technological advances are commonplace and there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” the judge, Kevin Castel, wrote. “But existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”

The research hints at how AI could be helpful in the workplace by acting as a sort of virtual assistant, says Riku Arakawa, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who studies workers’ use of large language models, and was not involved with the research. 

“I think this is a really interesting result that demonstrates how human-AI cooperation works really well in this kind of task. When a human leverages AI to refine their output, they can produce better content,” he adds.

How common chemicals could help clean up global shipping

Global shipping is a big deal for the climate, accounting for 3% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Last week saw a big news announcement from the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency in charge of regulating the vessels that carry the goods we buy all over the world. 

On July 7, the IMO agreed to new climate goals, setting a target date of “by or around 2050” to clean up the industry’s act and reach net-zero emissions. There are checkpoints too: emissions should be at least 20% below 2008 levels by 2030.

The shipping industry hasn’t had targets like this before. So how does it reach them? It’s more doable than you might think, as our climate reporter Casey Crownhart explains. Read the full story.

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

If you’re interested in the shipping industry’s carbon footprint, why not check out:

+ How ammonia could help clean up global shipping. The fuel could provide an efficient way to store the energy needed to power large ships on long journeys. Read the full story.

+ Why slower ships and new fuels could be a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to reaching those net-zero goals.

The must-reads

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

1 Elon Musk has unveiled his new startup, xAI
But his chances of overtaking OpenAI any time soon are slim. (Wired $)
+ The new company will rely on Tesla for a lot of its resources. (WP $)
+ Anthropic’s new chatbot is here. (The Guardian)

2 What the James Webb Space Telescope has taught us
Its first year of operation has opened our eyes to the wonders of the universe. (The Atlantic $)
+ There’s granite on the moon, apparently. (Economist $)
+ How the James Webb Space Telescope broke the universe. (MIT Technology Review)

3 What hasn’t Sam Altman invested in?
Many of his 400 or so investments are benefiting from the AI boom, too. (The Information $)
+ Has GPT-4 been secretly overhauled? It seems like it. (Insider $)
+ Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death. (MIT Technology Review)

4 America’s aggressive subsidies policy is paying off
The US wants future technologies to be developed at home, and the rest of the world is scrabbling to keep up. (FT $)
+ The $100 billion bet that a postindustrial US city can reinvent itself as a high-tech hub. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Facebook and Google are tracking your tax preparations
Now, a group of lawmakers want to do something about it. (Vox)

6 Junky AI content is taking over the internet
It’s a new form of spam, and it’s everywhere. (WSJ $)
+ Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads. (MIT Technology Review)
+ AI is fueling a drug addiction crisis. (Insider $)

7 Climate change is changing the color of the ocean
Its new greener hue indicates serious disruptions in the marine food web. (Motherboard)

8 IT workers in Bangladesh are struggling in the heat
The country’s intense heatwave makes it virtually impossible to work in offices. (Rest of World)
+ Heat exposure is a deadly killer. (Slate $)
+ The villagers fighting to survive India’s deadly heatwaves. (MIT Technology Review)

9  Farming robots are getting better—and cheaper
Human laborers are no longer always the best at what they do. (FT $)
+ How technology might finally start telling farmers things they didn’t already know. (MIT Technology Review)

10  Airbnb’s party ban isn’t working
It seems like background checks aren’t doing much to curb wild guests. (Wired $)

Quote of the day

“I look a little bit askance at signing a six month pause while you’re trying to accelerate your own effort.”

—Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, criticizes Elon Musk’s recent call for a pause on AI development given that the billionaire has just unveiled his own AI startup, xAI, he tells Bloomberg.

The big story

Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.

July 2020

Inequality and the misuses of police power don’t just play out on the streets or during school riots. For digital rights activists, the focus is now on where there is most potential for long-lasting damage: predictive policing tools and the abuse of data by police forces.

A number of studies have shown that these tools perpetuate systemic racism, and yet we still know very little about how they work, who is using them, and for what purpose. All of this needs to change before a proper reckoning can take place, but a clear principle is emerging: if we can’t fix them, we should ditch them. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

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.)

+ This baby flamingo learning to stand on one leg is just too cute.
+ Live Aid was 38 years ago today! Let’s revisit just one of its iconic performances.
+ Brutalist architecture is an acquired taste, but you can’t deny its buildings are striking.
+ Mads Mikkelsen is just unapologetically himself.
+ What are these daring shrimp up to at the bottom of the sea, exactly?

I’ve been thinking a lot about boats lately, and not just because it’s been hot in New York for days and hopping into any body of water sounds incredibly refreshing right now. 

I’ve actually got boats on the mind because there was just big news in global shipping from the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency in charge of regulating the vessels that carry everything from tennis skirts to EV batteries around the world. On July 7, the IMO agreed to new climate goals, setting a target date of “by or around 2050” to clean up the industry’s act and reach net-zero emissions. 

This is a big deal for the shipping industry, which didn’t have any broadly accepted target before. But as we all know, a goal is more of a starting point than an end. So let’s take a look at the technology that companies might turn to as they chase net-zero shipping. 

Starting small

Aside from the net-zero target, a crucial piece of the IMO agreement is a set of checkpoints along the way to 2050. These aren’t binding, but the IMO did set a target to cut emissions 20% by 2030, and 70% by 2040. 

Those checkpoints could be critical in spurring industry to take action, said Madeline Rose, who was present for the IMO proceedings and is a senior director of climate at Pacific Environment, an environmental group. 

I was especially intrigued by that first checkpoint, because 2030 is coming up fast. (Fun fact: The first day of 2030 is actually closer to today than the last day of 2016 is.) And a 20% emissions cut for an industry that’s often called hard to decarbonize sounds like a lot. But digging into it, I was surprised to learn that there are actually several fairly straightforward avenues the industry could take to reach this target, and likely with time to spare. 

In fact, just slowing down ships could be enough to achieve that 20% cut in greenhouse-gas emissions. Faster ships require more fuel than slower ships, even when traveling the same distance. And other technology options are on the table too, like new fuels and devices like sails or special rotors that can harness the wind to boost ships. That trifecta could actually add up to a nearly 50% decrease in emissions by the end of the decade, according to one study from environmental consultancy CE Delft. 

I wrote all about these near-term measures that shipping could take, so check out my story for more on that. In the meantime, let’s set our sights further toward the horizon and consider what shipping might look like in 2050. 

Ocean-going

Slowing ships down, adding wind assistance, or even adding coatings to make boats more slippery in the water will all cut down on the amount of fuel used. But that isn’t how we’re going to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to zero. That’s because even as you get more efficient, you’ll still be using fossil fuels that produce the climate-warming emissions.

So in the longer term, shipping will have to find more fundamental ways to clean up its act, like finding new power sources. 

Batteries will find their way into some ships, but they’ll probably be limited to shorter voyages, because most batteries today would be too bulky and heavy to carry enough energy for the longest trips.

One study, published last year in Nature Energy, estimated that journeys of up to 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) could be economically serviced by battery-powered ships today. If batteries continue to get cheaper and pack more energy into a smaller package, that could soon stretch to 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) (or even longer, if environmental costs are taken into account and ships can be designed to carry more weight). 

But for the longest routes, we’ll likely still need to rely on fuels. 

One option is ammonia, which I’ve written about before. This chemical, today used as a fertilizer ingredient, could power ships in two different ways. It could be used in combustion engines, since as a non-carbon-based fuel it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide when burned. Ammonia can also be used as a way to store and transport hydrogen, which could then be used in fuel cells to power electric ships. Check out my story from last year for all the details. 

Other companies are looking to methanol as a potential green fuel. There’s still carbon in it, so it does produce carbon emissions when burned, but the fuel can be produced using renewable electricity and carbon dioxide pulled from the atmosphere or from biological sources, so the balance of emissions could be low, or even zero. 

Shipping giant Maersk recently announced that it gathered enough bio-methanol for a maiden voyage from South Korea to Denmark. Availability of bio-methanol and other low-emissions fuels is still a bottleneck in the industry, but the company has ordered over a dozen methanol-powered ships. 

I’ll be following work on these alternative power sources, so stay tuned for more from me. And for the record, we’re closer to 2050 than we are to 1996. 

Related reading

Check out my story about how the shipping industry can start making emissions cuts right now. 

Ammonia is a popular candidate for global shipping, but the fuel has some potential roadblocks to overcome first. I wrote last year about these two sides of the ammonia coin. 

Ships might not be the only thing powered by methanol: in China, some companies want to use it to power vehicles. My colleague Zeyi Yang reported on that trend in the fall. 

Another thing

Syracuse, New York, could soon go through a time of immense change. The city is marked by poverty—and it will soon be home to four massive chip factories, which will cost a total $100 billion to build. My colleague David Rotman took a deep dive into what this could mean for the area, and what an influx of funding from the US federal government will mean for other cities across the country. Give it a read here.

Keeping up with climate

Over 60,000 people died because of Europe’s summer heat waves last year. Italy, Spain, and Portugal saw the highest mortality rates. (New York Times)

→ I wrote last year about how changing summer heat patterns will likely bring more air conditioning to the continent, and why that might be a problem. (MIT Technology Review) 

A decades-old coal-fired power plant in North Dakota is getting retrofitted with a carbon capture system. The project will cost over $1 billion, and it could be a major test for the technology. (Inside Climate News) 

Toyota announced ambitions to get solid-state batteries into cars in 2027. But this is far from the first time the automaker has made promises about the technology. (Financial Times) 

→ If they make it into EVs, solid-state batteries could speed charging times and boost vehicle range. (MIT Technology Review)

A test of an enhanced geothermal system in Utah hit a big milestone, connecting deep tunnels drilled underground. Enhanced geothermal projects could help bring renewable energy to places where traditional geothermal isn’t accessible. (Deseret)

There’s a pot of money at the Department of Energy with hundreds of millions of dollars in it, and the office wants to use some of it for public transit. (Bloomberg)

The Biden administration just approved a massive offshore wind farm. It’s off the coast of New Jersey and could power as many as 380,000 homes. (Grist)

Bill Gates isn’t too scared about AI

Bill Gates just joined the chorus of big names in tech who have weighed in on the question of risks around artificial intelligence. TL;DR? He’s not too worried, we’ve been here before.

The billionaire business magnate and philanthropist made his case in a post on his personal blog GatesNotes, in which he called AI the most transformative technology any of us will see in our lifetimes—ahead of the internet, smartphones, and personal computers.

His optimism is refreshing after weeks of doomsaying. Gates urges fast but cautious action to address some of the harms AI already poses to society, from elections to education to employment. The problem is that he doesn’t offer anything new. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

The UN just set a net-zero goal for shipping. Here’s how that could work. 

Ships crisscrossing the world’s oceans are vital to our global economy—everything from the bananas in your kitchen to the car in your driveway may have journeyed on one at some point. 

But all that travel causes pollution: the global shipping industry is responsible for over a billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions each year, about 3% of the world’s total. 

A UN group called the International Maritime Organization agreed earlier this month to set a goal of net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions for global shipping by or around 2050. But experts say that there are more than enough tools available for the industry to reach, or even surpass, those new goals. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

The US-China chip war is still escalating

The temperature of the US-China tech conflict just keeps rising. Last week, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced a new export license system for gallium and germanium, two elements that are used to make computer chips and other tech devices.

By putting a chokehold on these two raw materials, China is signaling that it, in turn, can cause pain for the Western tech system and push other countries to rethink the curbs they put on China.

But despite the country’s intentions, the new export controls may not have much long-term impact on other countries. And technological tensions are only getting worse. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

Zeyi’s story is from China Report, his weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things happening with China and tech. 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-linked hackers infiltrated US government emails
Experts worry it’s part of an extensive espionage campaign against US officials. (WSJ $)
+ The attack appears to have been targeted rather than broad-brush. (NYT $)

2 Silk Road’s second-in-command has been jailed for 20 years
Almost a decade after the infamous online black market went offline. (Wired $)

3 Microsoft and Activision could merge as soon as this month
It’s good news for Microsoft, bad news for those worried by tech monopolies. (WP $)

4 Generative AI will tip Google Search into chaos
While SEO clickbait suffers, what comes next could be even weirder. (The Atlantic $)
+ AI chatbots could end up making us work harder. (New Yorker $)
+ AI’s overlooked workforce is toiling away, day after day. (Rest of World)
+ Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines. (MIT Technology Review)

5 This ‘biological camera’ stores images in DNA
Treating DNA as hardware is a useful storage solution. (Motherboard)

6 What this Canadian lake tells us about climate change
It’s a remarkable record of geological change. (Vox)
+ Global warming’s crisis can be felt everywhere. (New Yorker $)
+ Restoring an ancient lake from the rubble of an unfinished airport in Mexico City. (MIT Technology Review)

7 VCs are going all in on AI
Crypto? What crypto? (Bloomberg $)
+ Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone? (MIT Technology Review)

8 China has successfully launched a methane-fueled rocket
And it’s leapfrogged the US’s efforts in the process. (SCMP $)
+ Elsewhere, one of Blue Origin’s rocket engines caught fire last month. (Bloomberg $)

9 A photography competition rejected a suspected AI image
Even though the flattered creator swears she took it on her iPhone. (The Guardian)

10 Russia’s top Wikipedia editor is launching a Kremlin-compliant rival
This could be a precursor to the website being banned there. (Bloomberg $)

Quote of the day

“Twitter doesn’t have an intolerant policy like Meta. Other platforms cannot replace it.”

—Anas Haqqani, a Taliban thought-leader, officially endorses Twitter over Meta’s new Threads platform.

The big story

The code must go on: An Afghan coding bootcamp becomes a lifeline under Taliban rule

December 2021

Four months after the Afghan government fell to the Taliban, 22-year-old Asad Asadullah had settled into a new routine. In his hometown in Afghanistan’s northern Samangan province, the former computer science student started and ended each day glued to his laptop screen.

Since late October, Asadullah had been participating in a virtual coding bootcamp organized by CodeWeekend, a volunteer-run community of Afghan tech enthusiasts, with content donated by Scrimba, a Norwegian company that offers online programming workshops. 

Asadullah is one of the millions of young Afghans whose lives, and plans for the future, were turned upside down when the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan in August 2020. In such dire circumstances, a coding bootcamp may seem out of place. But for its participants, it offers hope of a better future. Read the full story.

—Eileen Guo

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.)

+ Thanks to new data from the JWST, we can now fly through the Universe, which is seriously cool.
+ These real-life wedding crashers know how to have a good time.
+ Are expensive sandwiches worth it? Well, it depends what you put in them.
+ These hiking trails are some of the most spectacular in the world.
+ There may not be much evidence for mother trees, but it’s a nice idea nonetheless.

The temperature of the US-China tech conflict just keeps rising.

Last week, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced a new export license system for gallium and germanium, two elements that are used to make computer chips, fiber optics, solar cells, and other tech devices.

Most experts see the move as China’s most significant retaliation against the West’s semiconductor tech blockade, which expanded dramatically last October when the US limited the export to China of the most cutting-edge chips and the equipment capable of making them. 

Earlier this year, China responded by putting Raytheon and Lockheed Martin on a list of unreliable entities and banned domestic companies from buying chips from the American company Micron. Yet none of these moves could rival the global impact of the gallium/germanium export control. By putting a chokehold on these two raw materials, China is signaling that it, in turn, can cause pain for the Western tech system and push other countries to rethink the curbs they put on China.

But as I reported yesterday, China’s new export controls may not have much long-term impact. “Export control is not as effective if the technologies are available in other markets,” Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an associate professor of international studies at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Since the technology to produce gallium and germanium is very mature, it won’t be too hard for mines in other countries to ramp up their production, although it will take time, investment, policy incentives, and maybe technological improvement to make the process more environmentally friendly.

So what happens now? Half of 2023 is now behind us, and even though there have been a few diplomatic events showing the US-China relationship warming up, like trips to China made by US officials Antony Blinken and Janet Yellen, the tensions on the technological front are only getting worse.

When the US instituted its chip-related export restrictions in October, it wasn’t clear how much of an impact they would have, because the US doesn’t control the entirety of the semiconductor supply chain. Analysts said one of the biggest outstanding questions was the extent to which the US could persuade its allies to join the blockade. 

Now the US has managed to get the key players on board. In May, Japan announced that it is limiting the export of 23 types of equipment used in a variety of chipmaking processes. It even went further than the original US rules. The US limited the export of tools for making the most cutting-edge chips—those of the 14-nanometer generation and under. Japan’s restrictions extend to older, less-advanced chip generations (all the way to the 45-nanometer level), which has the Chinese semiconductor industry worried that production of basic chips used in everyday products, like cars, will also be affected.

At the end of June, the Netherlands followed suit and announced that it will limit the export to China of deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines used to pattern chips. That’s also an escalation of the previous rules, which since 2019 had only limited export of the most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines.

These expanding restrictions likely prompted China to take a page from its enemies’ playbook by instituting the controls on gallium and germanium. 

Yellen’s visit last week shows that this back-and-forth retaliation between China and the US-led bloc is not ending anytime soon. Both Yellen and the Chinese leaders expressed their concern at the meeting about the other side’s export controls, yet neither said anything about backing down. 

If more aggressive actions are taken soon, we may see the tech war expand out of the semiconductor field to involve things like battery technologies. As I explained in my piece on Monday, that’s where China would have a larger advantage.

Do you believe the technological tensions between the US and China will worsen from here? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. Tesla is laying off some battery manufacturing workers in China as a result of the cutthroat electric-vehicle price competition in the country. (Bloomberg $)

2. China’s top EV maker, BYD, is building three new factories in Brazil to make batteries, EVs, and hybrid cars. They will be built at the location of an old Ford plant. (Quartz)

3. Shenzhen, the city often seen as the Silicon Valley of China, is facing population decline for the first time in decades. (Nikkei Asia $)

4. Five people were arrested by the Hong Kong police for involvement in creating an online shopping app to map out local businesses that support the pro-democracy movement. (Hong Kong Free Press)

5. There’s now an official app for learning how to do journalism in China—with online courses taught about the Marxist view of journalism, why the party needs to control the press, and how to be an “influencer-style journalist.” (China Media Project)

6. During her visit, Yellen sat down for dinner with six female Chinese economists. Then they were called traitors online. (Bloomberg $)

7. A new study says a rapidly growing number of scientists of Chinese descent have left the US since 2018, the year the US Department of Justice launched its “China Initiative.” (Inside Higher Ed). An investigation of the initiative by MIT Technology Review published in late 2021 showed it had shifted its focus from economic espionage to “research integrity.” The initiative was officially shut down in 2022.

8. Threads, the new Twitter competitor released by Meta, hit the top five on Apple’s China app store even though Chinese users have to access the platform with a VPN. (TechCrunch)

Lost in translation

On July 5, the famous Hong Kong singer CoCo Lee died by suicide after having battled depression for several years. The tragic incident again highlighted the importance of depression treatment, which is often inaccessible in China. As the Chinese publication Xin Kuai Bao reported, fewer than 10% of patients diagnosed with depression in China have received any kind of medical treatment. 

But in recent years, as several patents for popular Western brand-name depression drugs have expired, Chinese pharmaceutical companies have ramped up their production of local generic alternatives. There’s also a fierce race to invent home-grown treatments. Last November, the first domestically designed depression drug was approved for sale in China, marking a new era for the industry. There are 17 more domestic treatments in trials right now.

One more thing

Every time high-profile US visitors come to China, Chinese social media always fixates on one thing: what they ate. Apparently, Janet Yellen is a fan of the wild mushrooms from China’s southwest border, which her group ordered four times in one dinner. The specific mushroom, called Jian Shou Qing in China, is also known for having psychedelic effects if not cooked properly. Now the restaurant is cashing in by offering Yellen’s dinner choices as a set, branded the “God of Money” menu, according to Quartz.

The optimism is refreshing after weeks of doomsaying—but it comes with few fresh ideas. 

The billionaire business magnate and philanthropist made his case in a post on his personal blog GatesNotes today. “I want to acknowledge the concerns I hear and read most often, many of which I share, and explain how I think about them,” he writes.

According to Gates, AI is “the most transformative technology any of us will see in our lifetimes.” That puts it above the internet, smartphones, and personal computers, the technology he did more than most to bring into the world. (It also suggests that nothing else to rival it will be invented in the next few decades.)

Gates was one of dozens of high-profile figures to sign a statement put out by the San Francisco–based Center for AI Safety a few weeks ago, which reads, in full: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

But there’s no fearmongering in today’s blog post. In fact, existential risk doesn’t get a look in. Instead, Gates frames the debate as one pitting “longer-term” against “immediate” risk, and chooses to focus on “the risks that are already present, or soon will be.”

“Gates has been plucking on the same string for quite a while,” says David Leslie, director of ethics and responsible innovation research at the Alan Turing Institute in the UK. Gates was one of several public figures who talked about the existential risk of AI a decade ago, when deep learning first took off, says Leslie: “He used to be more concerned about superintelligence way back when. It seems like that might have been watered down a bit.”

Gates doesn’t dismiss existential risk entirely. He wonders what may happen “when”—not if —“we develop an AI that can learn any subject or task,” often referred to as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

He writes: “Whether we reach that point in a decade or a century, society will need to reckon with profound questions. What if a super AI establishes its own goals? What if they conflict with humanity’s? Should we even make a super AI at all? But thinking about these longer-term risks should not come at the expense of the more immediate ones.”

Gates has staked out a kind of middle ground between deep-learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Google and went public with his fears about AI in May, and others like Yann LeCun and Joelle Pineau at Meta AI (who think talk of existential risk is “preposterously ridiculous” and “unhinged”) or Meredith Whittaker at Signal (who thinks the fears shared by Hinton and others are “ghost stories”).

It’s interesting to ask what contribution Gates makes by weighing in now, says Leslie: “With everybody talking about it, we’re kind of saturated.”

Like Gates, Leslie doesn’t dismiss doomer scenarios outright. “Bad actors can take advantage of these technologies and cause catastrophic harms,” he says. “You don’t need to buy into superintelligence, apocalyptic robots, or AGI speculation to understand that.”

“But I agree that our immediate concerns should be in addressing the existing risks that derive from the rapid commercialization of generative AI,” says Leslie. “It serves a positive purpose to sort of zoom our lens in and say, ‘Okay, well, what are the immediate concerns?’”

In his post, Gates notes that AI is already a threat in many fundamental areas of society, from elections to education to employment. Of course, such concerns aren’t news. What Gates wants to tell us is that although these threats are serious, we’ve got this: “The best reason to believe that we can manage the risks is that we have done it before.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, calculators changed how students learned math, allowing them to focus on what Gates calls the “thinking skills behind arithmetic” rather than the basic arithmetic itself. He now sees apps like ChatGPT doing the same with other subjects.

In the 1980s and ’90s, word processing and spreadsheet applications changed office work—changes that were driven by Gates’s own company, Microsoft.

Again, Gates looks back at how people adapted and claims that we can do it again. “Word processing applications didn’t do away with office work, but they changed it forever,” he writes. “The shift caused by AI will be a bumpy transition, but there is every reason to think we can reduce the disruption to people’s lives and livelihoods.”

Similarly with misinformation: we learned how to deal with spam, so we can do the same for deepfakes. “Eventually, most people learned to look twice at those emails,” Gates writes. “As the scams got more sophisticated, so did many of their targets. We’ll need to build the same muscle for deepfakes.”

Gates urges fast but cautious action to address all the harms on his list. The problem is that he doesn’t offer anything new. Many of his suggestions are tired; some are facile.

Like others in the last few weeks, Gates calls for a global body to regulate AI, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency. He thinks this would be a good way to control the development of AI cyberweapons. But he does not say what those regulations should curtail or how they should be enforced.

He says that governments and businesses need to offer support such as retraining programs to make sure people do not get left behind in the job market. Teachers, he says, should also be supported in the transition to a world in which apps like ChatGPT are the norm. But Gates does not specify what this support would look like.

And he says that we need to get better at spotting deepfakes, or at least use tools that detect them for us. But the latest crop of tools cannot detect AI-generated images or text well enough to be useful. As generative AI improves, will the detectors keep up?

Gates is right that “a healthy public debate will depend on everyone being knowledgeable about the technology, its benefits, and its risks.” But he often falls back on a conviction that AI will solve AI’s problems—a conviction that not everyone will share.

Yes, immediate risks should be prioritized. Yes, we have steered through (or bulldozed over) technological upheavals before and we could do it again. But how?

“One thing that’s clear from everything that has been written so far about the risks of AI—and a lot has been written—is that no one has all the answers,” Gates writes.

That’s still the case.

But all that travel causes pollution: the global shipping industry is responsible for over a billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions each year, about 3% of the world’s total. 

A UN group called the International Maritime Organization (IMO) agreed on July 7 to set a goal of net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions for global shipping “by or around 2050.” (Net-zero emissions means either cutting off all sources of these emissions or finding ways to balance them out, such as using carbon removal.) Setting a target date for emissions to balance out to zero is a major step for an industry that’s often called tough to decarbonize. But experts say that there are more than enough tools available for the industry to reach, or even surpass, the new goals set by the IMO. 

The new agreement establishes checkpoints along the way to the 2050 target: emissions should be at least 20% below 2008 levels by 2030, and at least 70% lower by 2040. The deal also says that low-emission energy sources should make up at least 5% of energy used in shipping by 2030.

While 2030 is fast approaching, it’s possible for the industry to make those emissions cuts in time, says Bryan Comer, head of the maritime program at the International Council on Clean Transportation. “I don’t think it’s necessarily technically difficult to clean up or decarbonize the sector—just more politically challenging,” he says.

In fact, the industry could meet the new 2030 checkpoint mostly by slowing down ships, Comer says. That’s because a ship moving slower generally requires less fuel, which reduces emissions. (The same is true for cars, so if you’re looking to save money on gas, consider slowing down.)

There are other options on the table to cut emissions further, says Faïg Abbasov, director of shipping at the European Federation for Transport and Environment. 

One potential route is to use wind to help push ships along. Startups and major companies alike are working to add sails, kites, and special rotors to help give ships a boost. Harnessing wind assistance is possible only on certain types of ships that have the deck space open for added equipment, but the technique can help reduce fuel demand, cutting down on the greenhouse gases emitted on a journey. 

New fuels could also play a role. While most will still release greenhouse gases when they’re burned, producing biofuels and synthetic fuels can draw carbon out of the atmosphere. (In the case of biofuels, plants suck up carbon dioxide as they grow. Synthetic fuels can be made using carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere via direct air capture.) The result in either case is to reduce, or even eliminate, the total amount of emissions making it into the atmosphere. And many of these fuels could work with existing engines. 

By combining slower speeds, wind assistance, and low-emissions fuels, the shipping industry could cut emissions nearly 50% by the end of the decade, according to a study published in June by the environmental consultancy CE Delft. The study was commissioned by several environmental groups, including the European Federation for Transport and Environment. 

The changes would increase shipping costs by 6% to 14% over current levels. But those costs pale in comparison with the expected damages of climate change, Abbasov says.

The next two milestones, at 2040 and 2050, could be harder to hit. Efficiency improvements and operational measures won’t be enough to get global shipping to net-zero emissions by 2050. Decarbonizing shipping is a multitrillion-dollar endeavor and will require technological advancements, including wide use of low- and zero-emissions fuels like green hydrogen, methanol, and ammonia, which are largely yet to be demonstrated or adopted in commercial operations.

The stakes for decarbonizing the global economy, including shipping, were on display during negotiations, says Madeline Rose, who was present for the proceedings and is a senior director of climate at Pacific Environment, an environmental group: “We had the hottest Fourth of July ever on record. We had floods and heat waves in China, heat waves and floods in Spain. We’re sitting through this and seeing the climate science we’ve been warned about.”

Rose and other experts criticized the IMO for not going far enough in its goal-setting. The Paris agreement, a UN deal passed in 2015, set a target of limiting total global warming to well below 2 °C over preindustrial levels, and ideally below 1.5 °C. The targets are somewhat arbitrary, as any additional warming will have consequences for the planet. But they’ve also been central to climate policy since they were established. 

Reaching either warming target requires ramping down emissions across all sectors, from transportation to power generation to heavy industry. The IMO’s 2050 net-zero target, along with the near-term checkpoints, should be enough for the industry to do its part in keeping warming below 2 °C, according to an analysis from the International Council on Clean Transportation. However the net-zero date would need to be bumped up to about 2040 for the sector to keep up with a plan that would limit warming below 1.5 °C, according to another ICCT analysis. 

“We are fundamentally just disheartened and disappointed that nations couldn’t agree to firm 1.5-degree-aligned targets,” Rose says. 

Next, the IMO aims to impose new measures that will help the industry hit its self-imposed targets, including a gradual reduction of allowable emissions from fuels, and some type of economic measures that could put a price on greenhouse-gas emissions.

Those negotiations might not be straightforward either: some countries, including China, Argentina, and Brazil, lobbied against a 2040 net-zero target in the IMO negotiations, and China has strongly opposed economic measures under consideration, including an emissions levy.

The shipping industry’s first broad net-zero target isn’t the end of talks, Comer says, but it “sets the end target really clearly.”

Weather forecasting is having an AI moment

Last week was the hottest week on record. Punishing heat waves and extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods are going to become more common as the climate crisis worsens, making it more important than ever before to produce accurate weather forecasts.  

AI is proving increasingly helpful with that. In the past year, weather forecasting has been having an AI moment. 

Using AI to predict weather has a big advantage: it’s fast. Traditional forecasting models are big, complex computer algorithms based on atmospheric physics and take hours to run. AI models can create forecasts in just seconds. 

But they’re unlikely to replace conventional weather prediction models anytime soon—and we don’t know if they’ll be reliable enough to predict rare and extreme weather events. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

Melissa’s story is from The Algorithm, her weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

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

1 Threads is hurting Twitter
Twitter’s traffic is tumbling, while Threads already has more than 100 million new users. (WSJ $)
+ Threads could make Meta a cool $8 billion in the next two years. (Bloomberg $)
+ Elon Musk is resorting to dirty tactics. (The Guardian)

2 US officials asked for a delay on their social media company contact ban
But the judge has already denied one previous request to halt proceedings. (WP $)
+ Senators are being briefed on AI today. (Reuters)

3 The EU and the US have agreed a data sharing deal
It’s taken years to thrash out, and a lot of European lawmakers still don’t like it. (NYT $)
+ Social media companies will be relieved. (The Verge)

4 China is drawing up its rules to govern AI
It’s being forced to offset rapid innovation against state control. (FT $)
+ China isn’t waiting to set down rules on generative AI. (MIT Technology Review)

5 AI detection tools discriminate against non-native English speakers
It highlights how many AI detection systems aren’t fit for purpose. (The Guardian)
+ AI-text detection tools are really easy to fool. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Real-time crime centers are on the rise
They collect extensive surveillance data that privacy advocates claim crosses a line. (Wired $)
+ Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state. (MIT Technology Review)

7 How to cope with climate anxiety 
Climate therapy is a growing field to help people cope with their fears. (New Yorker $)
+ Heatwaves claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in Europe last year. (New Scientist $)

8 Facebook is a breeding ground for illegal wildlife trafficking
Rare animals are exchanging hands for vast amounts. (Rest of World)
+ Governments are using counterterrorism measures to counter poaching. (Slate $)

9 The Earth is lumpy
It’s far less smooth than photos taken from space would have us believe. (The Atlantic $)
+ Earth’s low orbit is becoming increasingly crowded. (TechCrunch)

10 Would you pay to smash up a printer?
Plenty of people do, it turns out. (WP $)

Quote of the day

“It’s just not easy to kill everybody.”

—Kjirste Morrell, a professional superforecaster, explains why fears over the threat AI poses to humanity are overblown to the Economist.

The big story

China’s path to modernization has, for centuries, gone through my hometown

 June 2021

For generations, politicians and intellectuals have sought ways to build a strong China. Some imported tools and ideas from the West. Others left for a better education, but the homeland still beckoned.

Yangyang Cheng, a particle physicist at Yale Law School, is a product of their complex legacy. She grew up in Hefei, then a humble, medium-sized city in central-eastern China, which is now a budding metropolis with new research centers, manufacturing plants, and technology startups.

For two of the city’s proudest sons, born a century apart, a strong homeland armed with science and technology was the aspiration of a lifetime. Cheng grew up with their stories. They teach her about the forces that propelled China’s rise, and the way lives can be squeezed by the pressures of geopolitics. Read the full story.

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.)

+ Learning something new every day isn’t only possible—it can even be fun.
+ I wish I was this pigeon.
+ If you’re a book lover, book yourself on the next available trip to Washington DC.
+ Think beyond Coachella—there are plenty of niche music festivals out there to suit everyone’s tastes.
+ Is video art better than TikTok clips? You be the judge.

Is it hot where you are? It sure is here in London. I’m writing this newsletter with a fan blasting at full power in my direction and still feel like my brain is melting. Last week was the hottest week on record. It’s yet another sign that climate change is “out of control,” the UN secretary general said. 

Punishing heat waves and extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods are going to become more common as the climate crisis worsens, making it more important than ever before to produce accurate weather forecasts.  

AI is proving increasingly helpful with that. In the past year, weather forecasting has been having an AI moment. 

Three recent papers from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, and Huawei have introduced machine-learning methods that are able to predict weather at least as accurately as conventional methods, and much more quickly. Last week I wrote about Pangu-Weather, an AI model developed by Huawei. Pangu-Weather is able to forecast not only weather but also the path of tropical cyclones. Read more here. 

Huawei’s Pangu-Weather, Nvidia’s FourcastNet, and Google DeepMind’s GraphCast, are making meteorologists “reconsider how we use machine learning and weather forecasts,” Peter Dueben, head of Earth system modeling at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), told me for the story. 

ECMWF’s weather forecasting model is considered the gold standard for medium-term weather forecasting (up to 15 days ahead). Pangu-Weather managed to get comparable accuracy to the ECMWF model, while Google DeepMind claims in an non-peer-reviewed paper to have beat it 90% of the time in the combinations they tested.

Using AI to predict weather has a big advantage: it’s fast. Traditional forecasting models are big, complex computer algorithms based on atmospheric physics and take hours to run. AI models can create forecasts in just seconds. 

But they are unlikely to replace conventional weather prediction models anytime soon. AI-powered forecasting models are trained on historical weather data that goes back decades, which means they are great at predicting events that are similar to the weather of the past. That’s a problem in an era of increasingly unpredictable conditions.

We don’t know if AI models will be able to predict rare and extreme weather events, says Dueben. He thinks the way forward might be for AI tools to be adopted alongside traditional weather forecasting models to get the most accurate predictions. 

Big Tech’s arrival on the weather forecasting scene is not purely based on scientific curiosity, reckons Oliver Fuhrer, the head of the numerical prediction department at MeteoSwiss, the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology. 

Our economies are becoming increasingly dependent on weather, especially with the rise of renewable energy, says Fuhrer. Tech companies’ businesses are also linked to weather, he adds, pointing to anything from logistics to the number of search queries for ice cream.  

The field of weather forecasting could gain a lot from the addition of AI. Countries track and record weather data, which means there is plenty of publicly available data out there to use in training AI models. When combined with human expertise, AI could help speed up a painstaking process. What’s next isn’t clear, but the prospects are exciting. “Part of it is also just exploring the space and figuring out what potential services or business models might be,” Fuhrer says. 

Deeper Learning

AI-text detection tools are really easy to fool

Within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch, there were fears that students would be using the chatbot to spin up passable essays in seconds. In response to those fears, startups started making products that promise to spot whether text is written by a human or a machine. Turns out it’s relatively simple to trick these tools and avoid detection. 

Snake-oil alert: I’ve written about how difficult—if not impossible—it is to detect AI-generated text. As my colleague Rhiannon Williams reports, new research found that most of the tools that claim to be able to spot such text perform poorly. Researchers tested 14 detection tools and found that while they were good at spotting human-written text (with 96% accuracy on average), that fell to 74% for AI-generated text, and even lower, to 42%, when that text had been slightly tweaked. Read more. 

Bits and Bytes

AI companies are facing a flood of lawsuits over privacy and copyright
What America lacks in AI regulation, it makes up for in multimillion-dollar lawsuits. In late June, a California law firm launched a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company violated the privacy of millions of people when it scraped data from the internet to train its model. Now, actor and comedian Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for scraping her copyrighted work into their AI models. These cases, along with existing copyright lawsuits by artists, could set an important precedent for how AI is developed in the US. 

OpenAI has introduced a new concept: “superalignment” 
It’s a bird … It’s a plane … It’s superalignment! OpenAI is assembling a team of researchers to work on “superintelligence alignment.” That means they’ll focus on solving the technical challenges that would be involved in controlling AI systems that are smarter than humans. 

On one hand, I think it’s great that OpenAI is working to mitigate the harm that could be done by the superintelligent AI it is trying to build. But on the other hand, such AI systems remain wildly hypothetical, and existing systems cause plenty of harm today. At the very least, I hope OpenAI comes up with more effective ways to control this generation of AI models. (OpenAI)

Big Tech says it wants AI regulation, so long as users bear the brunt
This story gives a nice overview of the lobbying happening behind the scenes around the AI Act. While tech companies say they support regulation, they are pushing back against EU efforts to impose stricter rules around their AI products. (Bloomberg)

How elite schools like Stanford became fixated on the AI apocalypse
Fears about existential AI risk didn’t come from nowhere. In fact, as this piece explains, it’s a billionaire-backed movement that’s recruited an army of elite college students to its cause. And they’re keen to capitalize on the current moment. (The Washington Post)