Deep Tech: Recent Episodes
MIT Technology Review
This exclusive, subscriber-only podcast takes deep dives into the fascinating journalism captured in MIT Technology Review’s print magazine. Listeners have the chance to hear from cutting-edge researchers, the people whose lives are being changed by new technologies, and the reporters on the front lines of technological upheaval.
The road to building an artificial general intelligence begins with stopping current AI models from perpetuating racism, sexism, and other forms of pernicious bias.
Attempts to stem the spread of harmful, false material can create no-win scenarios for the companies that run the internet’s largest platforms.
The power to dictate policy in the digital world is increasingly belonging to private actors. The road to reclaiming that power for democracies will take a united effort. Also this week, an air leak onboard the International Space Station grows larger, Mars gets wetter and technology gets better at understanding voters.
A country known for protecting its citizens’ digital privacy has begun building a massive data trove to keep tabs on people.
The Indian government claims the communications blackouts are necessary for keeping the peace in areas where outbreaks of violence are common. But over time, the shutdowns have become Delhi’s go-to tactic for suppressing all manner of political unrest.
In the US, there’s a prevailing narrative that China doesn’t care about privacy. But Chinese citizens will soon have much greater consumer privacy protections than Americans.
Toronto and the corridor that stretches west to Kitchener and Waterloo is already Canada’s capital of finance and technology—and naturally, the region’s leaders want to set an example for the rest of the world. That’s part of the reason why in 2017, municipal organizations in Toronto tapped Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs to redevelop a disused waterfront industrial district as a high-tech prototype for the “smarter, greener, more inclusive cities” of tomorrow. But within three years the deal had collapsed, a victim of conflicting visions, public concerns over privacy and surveillance, and (to hear Sidewalk Labs tell it) pandemic-era economic change. Journalist Brian Barth, who trained in urban planning and spent seven years living and working and Toronto before returning to the US this summer, says the Sidewalk fiasco also symbolizes a larger difference: the contrast between Silicon Valley’s hard-charging, individualist, libertarian ethos and a Canadian business style that emphasizes collaboration, respect, and social responsibility. In this edition of Deep Tech, Barth talks about the tensions that led to Sidewalk Labs’ departure and the strategies Canadian CEOs are following to build a more open and inclusive tech sector. Episode art by David Biskup
The numbers tell the story. US venture capital firms have $444 billion under management, including $121 billion in “dry powder” waiting in reserve—all in pursuit of the next “unicorn” startup that will grow to be worth billions. But about three-quarters of the industry’s cash goes to support software innovation—a habit that’s looking particularly short-sighted at a time when the nation is facing its worst public-health crisis in a century. On top of that, most of the people who allot venture cash are white men, and they mostly fund startups led by white men. Fully 65 percent of venture capital firms have no female partners, and 81 percent have no Black investors. Only two percent of the cash distributed by venture firms in 2017-18 went to women-led startups, and over the period from 2013 to 2017, only one percent of venture money percent went to Black entrepreneurs. For the July issue of MIT Technology Review, financial journalist Elizabeth MacBride took a hard-hitting look at the venture industry and its successes, failures, and blind spots. This week on Deep Tech she talks about why the mystique of the VC cowboy with a nose for huge profits is mostly a fabrication, and why it’s hard to disentangle the industry’s bias toward funding white, male, Ivy League-educated entrepreneurs from its bias toward the software industry, where it’s easiest to obtain outsized returns. Episode graphic by Nico Ortega.
Ilan Gur always wanted to build things. But after finishing his PhD in material science at UC Berkeley, he says he “bounced around, feeling like a misfit.” He left the publish-or-perish world of academia, and burned through a few million dollars before realizing that venture capital isn’t the right way to fund applied research, either. If solving a problem like pandemic preparedness isn’t immediately profitable, the market won’t solve it, Gur, who founded the fellowship programs Cyclotron Road and Activate, now argues. That’s why he thinks the US needs a new way to allot R&D funds based on impact, not profits, and in an essay for the July issue of Technology Review, he calls for a new playbook for government funding of applied research. We sat down with him to learn more about why the current system of R&D funding is out of date, and how a new one could help the US better address its current needs as well as prepare for the future. Episode graphic by Ian Grandjean
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 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.
“The reality is that there are two ways to look at responding” to a natural disaster, says Linda Kozlowski, a city councillor in Manzanita, Oregon. “One is that I'm in it for me, and everybody else can take care of themselves. We have chosen to go the opposite direction. Our community has chosen to say, let's work together.” Small towns dot the remote, often harsh beauty of the Oregon coast. Storms regularly lash the region, and its inhabitants are sometimes left to their own devices for days. Many who call the area home could be described as “preppers”—preparing for the power going out, a tornado, or a tsunami triggered by the massive fault that looms just offshore. But when journalist Britta Lokting wrote about her cousin’s family in the tiny coastal hamlet of Cape Mears this spring, she found that preppers aren’t always the rugged, bunker-building individualists you may expect. Manzanita and Kozlowski, it turns out, have inspired towns up and down the coast to take a community-first approach to disaster preparedness. As Lokting found, it’s given them a unique perspective on what it means to be ready for anything—including a pandemic.
No sooner had the stay-at-home orders come down than mobile app developers around the world began to imagine how our smartphones could make it safer for everyone to venture back out. Dozens of countries and a handful of US states are now urging citizens to download government-blessed apps that use GPS-based location tracking, the Bluetooth wireless standard, or a combination of both to alert us when we’ve crossed paths with an infected individual—information that could tell us when we need to self-isolate for the protection of others. But who controls this data, and what kinds of privacy protections are built in? To get a handle on how different apps work, three MIT Technology Review journalists built the Covid-19 Tracing Tracker, a public database that rates tracing apps according to principles devised by the American Civil Liberties Union and similar organizations. They say they’re learning that not all tracing apps are the same, and that in the end, it may be Google and Apple, not governments, that wind up imposing key privacy protections.
When it comes to the latest technologies for testing, treating, and preventing the spread of covid-19, there’s no one on MIT Technology Review’s staff who’s better connected and better informed than Antonio Regalado, the magazine’s senior biomedicine editor. Since February, he’s been self-isolating with his family at their farm house in Maine, while continuing to report on the pandemic. We talked with Antonio about why it’s taking so long to scale up coronavirus testing, what new vaccine technologies look most promising, and why he started prepping for the worst way back in January.
We can probably stay sheltered in our homes, collectively flattening the curve of coronavirus infections, for several more weeks—maybe a few more months if we must. But for the sake of our mental health, not to mention that of the global economy, we can’t stay cooped up for the 12 to 18 months that it might take to create and validate vaccines or drugs that are effective against SARS-CoV-2. So how do we safely roll back the current social-distancing measures? The emerging consensus is that it will happen region by region as falling infection rates allow, and with protective measures that include massively scaled-up diagnostic testing, contact tracing, and antibody testing to see who’s immune. Here in the US, as Gideon Lichfield explains in this episode of Deep Tech, we’re only at the beginning of those efforts.
Every two weeks, give or take, SpaceX puts another 60 Starlink communications satellites into low-earth orbit. Its initial goal is to launch 12,000 of these small mass-produced satellites—six times the number of operating satellites currently in orbit—with another 42,000 possibly to follow. Other companies such as Amazon, Telesat, and Planet are planning their own satellite “mega-constellations.” The result could be a welter of new space-based services, from Internet connectivity to continuous mapping. But there’s also growing attention to the potential downsides, including an increased risk of collisions that could end up littering low Earth orbit with dangerous debris and rendering it unusable. In this episode of Deep Tech, we hear from OneWeb founder Greg Wyler and science writer and former astrophysicist Ramin Skibba about efforts to mitigate the hazards.
“You can’t attribute any specific weather event to climate change.” For years, that was the party line among meteorologists and climate scientists; while they were alarmed by global warming, they were also sensitive to the bafflingly complex and multicausal origins of events like hurricanes and droughts. But thanks to improved climate simulations, accumulating weather data, and more powerful computers, it’s now possible to model worlds with and without the greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere over the past 150 years. And that lets researchers conclude that specific weather events, such as the devastating bushfires in Australia, were—within certain upper and lower bounds—more likely and more damaging thanks to global temperature increases. For the March/April 2020 issue, Technology Review senior energy editor James Temple surveyed the work of a number of groups doing this work, including World Weather Attribution, co-led by University of Oxford professor Friederike Otto.
Three-year-old Ipek Kuzu has an extremely rare genetic mutation that disrupts a protein needed for DNA repair, causing the loss of brain cells. Now she’s become only the second person in the world to receive a customized “antisense oligonucleotide” drug designed to compensate for the DNA mistake by allowing her cells to splice together a functional version of the protein. The drug took Boston-based pediatrician and geneticist Tim Yu only months to create, heralding a new era of individualized genomic medicine. But it cost $2 million to manufacture and test—leading to questions about how soon “hyper-personalized” treatments for rare genetic disorders can be made accessible and affordable. Journalist Erika Check Hayden got to know the Kuzu family, and in this episode she chronicles Ipek’s journey, with help from Ipek’s father Mehmet and Technology Review biomedicine editor Antonio Regalado.
Was it a breakthrough or a snooze? In October 2019, Google scientists announced they’d achieved “quantum supremacy,” the long-sought proof that a computer built around quantum bits can, at least in certain cases, carry out calculations exponentially faster than a computer built around classical bits. Researchers at IBM, one of Google’s main rivals in the race to commercialize quantum computing, immediately shot down the claim, saying not only that Google had exaggerated its quantum computer’s advantages but downplaying the significance of quantum supremacy. MIT Technology Review editor in chief Gideon Lichfield visited both companies on a quest to understand the deeper meaning of their disagreement.