Even if Colossal can make what it terms “a functional proxy for the dodo,” there won’t be a clear answer about where to put it. The big agricultural industry in Mauritius is sugar cane farming, and there are plenty of rats and other non-native predators around. “It would not really be a dodo, it would be a new species. But it still needs an environment,” says Jennifer Li Pook Than, a gene sequencing specialist at Stanford University whose parents were born on the island. “What would that mean ethically, if one is not available?”
Lamm isn’t offering a firm time frame for producing a dodo. He predicted the mammoth could arrive before 2029, and that the dodo could come sooner or later than that, depending on scientific factors.
Another organization, the non-profit Revive & Restore, has worked for a decade towards bringing back the passenger pigeon, a bird that once dominated American skies. But it has confronted a major technical difficulty that will also affect the dodo project.
The problem is that while it is easy to gene-edit bird cells in the lab, it’s hard to turn carefully edited cells back into a bird. For mammals, such as cattle or elephants, the answer is easy: cloning. But cloning into a bird egg doesn’t work—it’s a huge cell and its nucleus is opaque yolk. “You would have to take it out and implant another nucleus, and it’s impossible to do,” says McGrew.
McGrew believes the likely solution is to inject genetically-edited cells into the gonads of a developing pigeon chick. That way, some of those cells will end up forming the new bird’s egg or sperm. If that bird then reproduces, its offspring will be related to the donor cells (and will include any DNA changes). This technology already works, McGrew says, but so far only in chickens.
“They have to be able to transfer this technology to a pigeon,” says McGrew. “We thought that what worked for chickens would apply to other species, but it turns out to be difficult.”
These types of obstacles are why some scientists doubt de-extinction will work, and Shapiro herself has been among the skeptics, expressing doubts about the idea in interviews last year.
However, the geneticist says she’s changed her mind and now views de-extinction as a useful form of scientific public relations. “At first, I was really like, ‘I don’t know about this technology,’” Shapiro says. “But gradually I’ve come to think this is the future. We need to develop these tools and additional approaches to be able to protect species today from becoming extinct. And if we’re going to excite people enough to do that, we’re going to have to throw something big out there, and everybody’s heard of the dodo.”
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.
We have enough materials to power the world with renewable energy
The news: Powering the world with renewable energy will take a lot of raw materials. The good news is, when it comes to aluminum, steel, and rare-earth metals, there’s plenty to go around, according to a new analysis.
Greater pay off: Although emissions are an unavoidable side effect of extracting the materials, over the next 30 years they add up to less than a year’s worth of global emissions from fossil fuels. Experts are confident the up-front emissions cost will be more than offset by savings from clean energy technologies replacing fossil fuels.
But there’s a catch: While we technically have enough of the materials we need to build renewable energy infrastructure, actually mining and processing them can be a challenge. If we don’t do it responsibly, getting those materials into usable form could lead to environmental harm or human rights violations. Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
Could ChatGPT do my job?
—Melissa Heikkilä, senior AI reporter
There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether journalists or copywriters could or should be replaced by AI. So far, newsrooms have pursued very different approaches to integrating the buzziest new tool, ChatGPT, into their work: tech news site CNET secretly used it to write articles, while BuzzFeed (more transparently) announced plans to use it to generate quiz answers.
But here’s the dirty secret of journalism: a surprisingly large amount of it could be automated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if we can outsource some of the boring and repetitive parts of the job to AI. The real problems arise when you give AI too much control. Read the full story.
Melissa’s story is from The Checkup, her weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. 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 Elon Musk wants to turn Twitter into a fintech platform It’s all part of his plan to look beyond advertising to make money. (FT $)+ Ex-Twitter staff don’t know what to do with their old laptops. (Wired $) + The company has made its first interest payment on its massive debt. (Bloomberg $)
2 Inside FTX’s shadowy PR influence campaigns A new filing reveals an undisclosed network of powerful political figures. (The Intercept) + Things are getting even messier for the collapsed crypto exchange. (NY Mag $) + FTX’s victims are still furious. (The Atlantic $)
3 The US has stopped allowing companies to export to Huawei It’s just the latest in a series of China-related sanctions. (BBC)
4 The race for AI supremacy is heating up But whether American or Chinese labs will come out on top is anyone’s guess. (Economist $) + Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone? (MIT Technology Review)
5 You don’t necessarily need a headset to enter the metaverse Our everyday reality is edging closer to dystopia each day. (The Atlantic $) + Kpop could help to improve the metaverse’s image. (NYT $)
6 Celebrity voice deepfakes have been co opted to spew racist hate This sadly felt inevitable. (Motherboard) + AI voice actors sound more human than ever. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Boeing has made its last ever 747 Once a symbol of accessible travel, it’s likely to end up carrying cargo. (NYT $) + Hydrogen-powered planes take off with a startup’s test flight. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Social media has a dark obsession with being #kind Is it really a good deed if you’re filming it for clickbait? (The Guardian)
9 Spanish-speaking livestreamers are seriously hot right now Twitch is booming across Latin America, creating new opportunities for gamers. (Bloomberg $)
10 Dogs love gobbling AirTags Tracking your furry friend isn’t without its hazards. (WSJ $)
Quote of the day
“I could press the red button, close my laptop and get under my blankets for a couple hours.”
—Phoebe Gavin, a former executive director of talent and development at news site Vox, reflects on the upsides of being laid off over video call rather than in person to the Wall Street Journal.
The big story
A private security group regularly sent Minnesota police misinformation about protestors
July 2022
When US marshals shot and killed a 32-year-old Black man named Winston Boogie Smith Jr. in a parking garage in Minneapolis on June 3, 2021, the city was already in a full-blown policing crisis. George Floyd had been murdered by a member of the police force the previous May. As protests reignited all over the city, the cops couldn’t keep up.
Into the void stepped private security groups, hired primarily to prevent damage to properties. But the organizations often ended up managing protest activity—a task usually reserved for police, and one for which most private security guards are not trained.
One company, Conflict Resolution Group (CRG), regularly provided Minneapolis police with information about activists that was at times untrue and deeply politicized. Read the full story.
+ This one-page calendar is seriously blowing my mind. + I love that actors are rehearsing Shakespeare inside dystopian video game Fallout (thanks Will!) + Quick—I need an emergency photo of a bear, stat! + Can you believe these impressive plants are carved from wood? + Ambient tunes are massive right now, and I can see why.
This study only focused on technologies that generate electricity. It didn’t include all the materials that would be needed to store and use that electricity, like the batteries in electric vehicles or grid storage.
Demand for battery materials is expected to explode between now and 2050. Annual production of graphite, lithium, and cobalt will all need to be ramped up by more than 450% from 2018 levels to meet expected demand for electric cars and grid storage, according to a 2020 study from the World Bank.
Even considering battery materials, the basic takeaway is the same, Wang says: the world’s reserves of the materials needed for clean energy infrastructure are sufficient for even the highest-demand scenarios.
Getting them out of the ground will be the tricky part. Increasing production of some materials, especially those needed for batteries, will present social and environmental challenges.
Silicon is used in semiconductor chips as well as solar panels.
“There is an underappreciation about what needs to happen in mining,” says Demetrios Papathanasiou, global director for energy and extractives at the World Bank.
Take copper, for example: the world has mined about 700 million tons of copper since we started mining thousands of years ago. We’ll need to mine another 700 million tons just in the next three decades, Papathanasiou says, in order to meet climate targets. It’s not an issue of reserves: the minerals are there.
The problem is that mining, whether for fossil fuels or for renewable energy, can cause significant environmental harm. In the western US, for example, proposed mines for materials like copper and lithium could force Indigenous people from their lands and cause pollution.
Figuring out how to get the materials we need to build a cleaner future without destroying people or environments in the process should be a major focus of the renewable energy transition moving forward, Papathanasiou says. “We really need to come up with solutions that get us the material that we need sustainably, and time is very short.”
Powering the world with renewable energy will take a lot of raw materials. The good news is, when it comes to aluminum, steel, and rare-earth metals, there’s plenty to go around, according to a new analysis.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement, world leaders set a goal to keep global warming under 1.5 °C, and reaching that target will require building a lot of new infrastructure. Even in the most ambitious scenarios, the world has enough materials to power the grid globally with renewables, the researchers found. And mining and processing those materials won’t produce enough emissions to warm the world past international targets.
There is a catch to all this good news. While we technically have enough of the materials we need to build renewable energy infrastructure, actually mining and processing them can be a challenge. If we don’t do it responsibly, getting those materials into usable form could lead to environmental harm or even human rights violations.
To better understand the material demands of reaching climate targets, the researchers looked at 17 of the key materials needed to generate low-emissions electricity. They estimated how much of each of those substances would be needed to build cleaner infrastructure, and compared them to estimates of how much of those resources (or the raw materials needed to make them) are available in geologic reserves. Geologic reserves include the total material on the planet that can be recovered economically.
Most renewable technologies require some bulk materials like aluminum, cement, and steel. But others also need specialty ingredients. Solar panels run on polysilicon, while wind turbines need fiberglass for their blades and rare-earth metals for their motors.
Material requirements vary depending on what kind of new infrastructure we build—and how quickly we build it. For the most ambitious climate action scenarios, nearly 2 billion tons of steel and 1.3 billion tons of cement could be needed for energy infrastructure between now and 2050.
Production of dysprosium and neodymium, rare-earth metals used in the magnets in wind turbines, will need to quadruple over the next several decades. Solar-grade polysilicon will be another hot commodity, with the global market predicted to grow by 150% between now and 2050.
But for every scenario the team examined, the materials needed to keep the world under 1.5 °C of warming account for “only a fraction” of the world’s geologic reserves, says Seaver Wang, co-director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the journal Joule this week.
There will be consequences for digging into those reserves. The researchers found that emissions impacts from mining and processing these crucial materials could reach a total of up to 29 gigatons of carbon dioxide between now and 2050. Most of those emissions are attributed to polysilicon, steel, and cement.
The total emissions from mining and processing those materials are significant, but over the next 30 years they add up to less than a year’s worth of global emissions from fossil fuels. That up-front emissions cost will be more than offset by savings from clean energy technologies replacing fossil fuels, Wang says. Progress on cutting emissions from heavy industry, like steel and cement, could also help reduce the climate impact of setting up renewable energy infrastructure.
This study only focused on technologies that generate electricity. It didn’t include all the materials that would be needed to store and use that electricity, like the batteries in electric vehicles or grid storage.
Demand for battery materials is expected to explode between now and 2050. Annual production of graphite, lithium, and cobalt will all need to be ramped up by more than 450% from 2018 levels to meet expected demand for electric cars and grid storage, according to a 2020 study from the World Bank.
Even considering battery materials, the basic takeaway is the same, Wang says: the world’s reserves of the materials needed for clean energy infrastructure are sufficient for even the highest-demand scenarios.
Getting them out of the ground will be the tricky part. Increasing production of some materials, especially those needed for batteries, will present social and environmental challenges.
Silicon is used in semiconductor chips as well as solar panels.
“There is an underappreciation about what needs to happen in mining,” says Demetrios Papathanasiou, global director for energy and extractives at the World Bank.
Take copper, for example: the world has mined about 700 million tons of copper since we started mining thousands of years ago. We’ll need to mine another 700 million tons just in the next three decades, Papathanasiou says, in order to meet climate targets. It’s not an issue of reserves: the minerals are there.
The problem is that mining, whether for fossil fuels or for renewable energy, can cause significant environmental harm. In the western US, for example, proposed mines for materials like copper and lithium could force Indigenous people from their lands and cause pollution.
Figuring out how to get the materials we need to build a cleaner future without destroying people or environments in the process should be a major focus of the renewable energy transition moving forward, Papathanasiou says. “We really need to come up with solutions that get us the material that we need sustainably, and time is very short.”
So far, newsrooms have pursued two very different approaches to integrating the buzziest new AI tool, ChatGPT, into their work. Tech news site CNET secretly started using ChatGPT to write entire articles, only for the experiment to go up in flames. It ultimately had to issue corrections amid accusations of plagiarism. Buzzfeed, on the other hand, has taken a more careful, measured approach. Its leaders want to use ChatGPT to generate quiz answers, guided by journalists who create the topics and questions.
You can boil these stories down to a fundamental question many industries now face: How much control should we give to an AI system? CNET gave too much and ended up in an embarrassing mess, whereas Buzzfeed’s more cautious (and transparent) approach of using ChatGPT as a productivity tool has been generally well received, and led its stock price to surge.
But here’s the dirty secret of journalism: a surprisingly large amount of it could be automated, says Charlie Beckett, a professor at the London School of Economics who runs a program called JournalismAI. Journalists routinely reuse text from news agencies and steal ideas for stories and sources from competitors. It makes perfect sense for newsrooms to explore how new technologies could help them make these processes more efficient.
“The idea that journalism is this blossoming flower bed of originality and creativity is absolute rubbish,” Beckett says. (Ouch!)
It’s not necessarily a bad thing if we can outsource some of the boring and repetitive parts of journalism to AI. In fact, it could free journalists up to do more creative and important work.
One good example I’ve seen of this is using ChatGPT to repackage newswire text into the “smart brevity” format used by Axios. The chatbot seems to do a good enough job of it, and I can imagine that any journalist in charge of imposing that format will be happy to have time to do something more fun.
That’s just one example of how newsrooms might successfully use AI. AI can also help journalists summarize long pieces of text, comb through data sets, or come up with ideas for headlines. In the process of writing this newsletter, I’ve used several AI tools myself, such as autocomplete in word processing and transcribing audio interviews.
But there are some major concerns with using AI in newsrooms. A major one is privacy, especially around sensitive stories where it’s vital to protect your source’s identity. This is a problem journalists at MIT Technology Review have bumped into with audio transcription services, and sadly the only way around it is to transcribe sensitive interviews manually.
New report: Generative AI in industrial design and engineering
Generative AI has the potential to transform industrial design and engineering, making it more important than ever for leaders in those industries to stay ahead. So MIT Technology Review has created a new research report that highlights the potential benefits—and pitfalls— of this new technology.
The report includes two case studies from leading industrial and engineering companies that are already applying generative AI to their work—and a ton of takeaways and best practices from industry leaders. It is available now to download for $195.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 China’s nuclear weapons lab bought forbidden US chips It obtained US semiconductors at least six times in the past few years despite decades-old export restrictions. (WSJ $)
2 Baidu is developing a ChatGPT rival With a view to integrating the chatbot into its search engine, just like Microsoft plans to. (WSJ $) + Here’s what ChatGPT can tell us about technohumanism. (The Atlantic $) + Here’s how Microsoft could use ChatGPT. (MIT Technology Review)
3 San Francisco’s self-driving cars are getting weird To the point that residents are calling 911 about their erratic behavior. (Motherboard) + It’s forcing the city to reconsider its robotaxi expansion. (NBC News) + The big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Tech’s biggest companies are channeling their inner startup Everything’s getting too messy—it’s time to go back to basics. (Vox) + The new AI arms race is being led by agile startups, not Big Tech. (WP $)
5 The shape of water politics in the US Tribal nations in Southwest control much of the drought-stricken region’s water. (New Yorker $) + Who truly pays the price of climate change? (Wired $) + The architect making friends with flooding. (MIT Technology Review)
6 The UK’s universities are turning on their spinouts Commercializing technology developed on-campus comes at a price. (FT $)
7 What it takes to update the human genome The current code is mostly based on one man, which is far from representative. (The Guardian)
Explosions in Armenia, broadcast on YouTube in 2020, revealed this new shape of war to the world. There, in a blue-tinted video, a radar dish spins underneath cyan crosshairs until it erupts into a cloud of smoke. The action repeats twice: a crosshair targets a vehicle mounted with a spinning dish sensor, its earthen barriers no defense against aerial attack, leaving an empty crater behind.
The clip, released on YouTube on September 27, 2020, was one of many the Azerbaijan military published during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, which it launched against neighboring Armenia that same day. The video was recorded by the TB2.
It encompasses all the horrors of war, with the added voyeurism of an unblinking camera.
In that conflict and others, the TB2 has filled a void in the arms market created by the US government’s refusal to export its high-end Predator family of drones. To get around export restrictions on drone models and other critical military technologies, Baykar turned to technologies readily available on the commercial market to make a new weapon of war.
The TB2 is built in Turkey from a mix of domestically made parts and parts sourced from international commercial markets. Investigations of downed Bayraktars have revealed components sourced from US companies, including a GPS receiver made by Trimble, an airborne modem/transceiver made by Viasat, and a Garmin GNC 255 navigation radio. Garmin, which makes consumer GPS products, released a statement noting that its navigation unit found in TB2s “is not designed or intended for military use, and it is not even designed or intended for use in drones.” But it’s there.
Commercial technology makes the TB2 appealing for another reason: while the US-made Reaper drone costs $28 million, the TB2 only costs about $5 million. Since its development in 2014, the TB2 has shown up in conflicts in Azerbaijan, Libya, Ethiopia, and now Ukraine. The drone is so much more affordable than traditional weaponry that Lithuanians have run crowdfunding campaigns to help buy them for Ukrainian forces.
The TB2 is just one of several examples of commercial drone technology being used in combat. The same DJI Mavic quadcopters that help real estate agents survey property have been deployed in conflicts in Burkina Faso and the Donbas region of Ukraine. Other DJI drone models have been spotted in Syria since 2013, and kit-built drones, assembled from commercially available parts, have seen widespread use.
That’s why the team behind a new decision-making tool hope it will help to clear up some of the misconceptions around the procedure—and give would-be parents a much-needed insight into its real costs, benefits, and potential pitfalls. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This story is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things health and biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Elon Musk held a surprise meeting with US political leaders Allegedly in the interest of ensuring Twitter is “fair to both parties.” (Insider $) + Kanye West’s presidential campaign advisors have been booted off Twitter. (Rolling Stone $) + Twitter’s trust and safety head is Musk’s biggest champion. (Bloomberg $)
2 We’re treating covid like flu now Annual covid shots are the next logical step. (The Atlantic $)
3 The worst thing about Sam Bankman-Fried’s spell in jail? Being cut off from the internet. (Forbes $) + Most crypto criminals use just five exchanges. (Wired $) + Collapsed crypto firmFTX has objected to a new investigation request. (Reuters)
4 Israel’s tech sector is rising up against its government Tech workers fear its hardline policies will harm startups. (FT $)
5 It’s possible to power the world solely using renewable energy At least, according to Stanford academic Mark Jacobson. (The Guardian) + Tech bros love the environment these days. (Slate $) + How new versions of solar, wind, and batteries could help the grid. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Generative AI is wildly expensive to run And that’s why promising startups like OpenAI need to hitch their wagons to the likes of Microsoft. (Bloomberg $) + How Microsoft benefits from the ChatGPT hype. (Vox) + BuzzFeed is planning to make quizzes supercharged by OpenAI. (WSJ $) + Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone? (MIT Technology Review)
7 It’s hard not to blame self-driving cars for accidents Even when it’s not technically their fault. (WSJ $)
8 What it’s like to swap Google for TikTok It’s great for food suggestions and hacks, but hopeless for anything work-related. (Wired $) + The platform really wants to stay operational in the US. (Vox) + TikTok is mired in an eyelash controversy. (Rolling Stone $)
9 CRISPR gene editing kits are available to buy online But there’s no guarantee these experiments will actually work. (Motherboard) + Next up for CRISPR: Gene editing for the masses? (MIT Technology Review)
10 Tech workers are livestreaming their layoffs It’s a candid window into how these notoriously secretive companies treat their staff. (The Information $)
For example, since OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT was launched in November students have already started using it to cheat by writing essays for them. News website CNET has used ChatGPT to write articles, only to have to issue corrections amid accusations of plagiarism. But there is a promising way to spot AI text: by embedding hidden patterns that let us identify AI-generated text into these systems before they’re released.
In studies, these watermarks have already shown that they can identify AI-generated text with near certainty. One, developed by a team at the University of Maryland, was able to spot text created by Meta’s open source language model, OPT-6.7B, using a detection algorithm they built. The work is described in a paper that’s yet to be peer reviewed, and the code will be available for free around February 15.
AI language models work by predicting and generating one word at a time. After each word, the watermarking algorithm randomly divides the language model’s vocabulary into words on a “greenlist” and a “redlist,” and then prompts the language model to choose words on the greenlist.
The more greenlisted words in a passage, the more likely it is that the text is generated by a machine. Text written by a person tends to contain a more random mix of words. For example, for the word “beautiful”, the watermarking algorithm could classify the word “flower” as green, and “orchid” as red. The AI model with the watermarking algorithm would be more likely to use the word “flower” than “orchid,” explains Tom Goldstein, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, who was involved in the research.
The tool is currently being trialed in a group of research volunteers and is not yet widely available. But I’m hoping it represents a move toward more transparency and openness about the real costs and benefits of egg freezing. Yes, it is a remarkable technology that can help people become parents. But it might not be the best option for everyone.
Read more from Tech Review’s archive
Anna Louie Sussman had her eggs frozen in Italy and Spain because services in New York were too expensive. Luckily, there are specialized couriers ready to take frozen sex cells on international journeys, she wrote.
Michele Harrison was 41 when she froze 21 of her eggs. By the time she wanted to use them, two years later, only one was viable. Although she did have a baby, her case demonstrates that egg freezing is no guarantee of parenthood, wrote Bonnie Rochman.
What happens if someone dies with eggs in storage? Frozen eggs and sperm can still be used to create new life, but it’s tricky to work out who can make the decision, as I wrote in a previous edition of The Checkup.
Meanwhile, the race is on to create lab-made eggs and sperm. These cells, which might be made from a person’s blood or skin cells, could potentially solve a lot of fertility problems—should they ever prove safe, as I wrote in a feature for last year’s magazine issue on gender.
Researchers are also working on ways to mature eggs from transgender men in the lab, which could allow them to store and use their eggs without having to pause gender-affirming medical care or go through other potentially distressing procedures, as I wrote last year.
From around the web
The World Health Organization is set to decide whether covid still represents a “public health emergency of international concern.” It will probably decide to keep this status, because of the current outbreak in China. (STAT)
Researchers want to study the brains, genes, and other biological features of incarcerated people to find ways to stop them from reoffending. Others warn that this approach is based on shoddy science and racist ideas. (Undark)
