Tech
The Download: China’s social credit law, and robot dog navigation
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.
Here’s why China’s new social credit law matters
It’s easier to talk about what China’s social credit system isn’t than what it is. Ever since 2014, when China announced plans to build it, it has been one of the most misunderstood things about China in Western discourse. Now, with new documents released in mid-November, there’s an opportunity to correct the record.
Most people outside China assume it’ll act as a Black Mirror-esque system powered by technologies to automatically score every Chinese citizen based on what they did right and wrong. Instead, it’s a mix of attempts to regulate the financial credit industry, to enable government agencies to share data with each other, and to promote state-sanctioned moral values—however vague that may sound.
Although the system itself will still take a long time to materialize, by releasing a draft law last week, China is now closer than ever to defining what it will look like—and how it will affect the lives of millions of citizens. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Watch this robot dog scramble over tricky terrain just by using its camera
The news: When Ananye Agarwal took his dog out for a walk up and down the steps in the local park near Carnegie Mellon University, other dogs stopped in their tracks. That’s because Agarwal’s dog was a robot—and a special one at that. Unlike other robots, which tend to rely heavily on an internal map to get around, his robot uses a built-in camera and uses computer vision and reinforcement learning to walk on tricky terrain.
Why it matters: While other attempts to use cues from cameras to guide robot movement have been limited to flat terrain, Agarwal and his fellow researchers managed to get their robot to walk up stairs, climb on stones, and hop over gaps. They’re hoping their work will help make it easier for robots to be deployed in the real world, and vastly improve their mobility in the process. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
Trust large language models at your own peril
When Meta launched Galactica, an open-source large language model, the company was hoping for a big PR win. Instead, all it got was flak on Twitter and a spicy blog post from one of its most vocal critics, ending with its embarrassing decision to take the public demo of the model down after only three days.
Galactica was intended to help scientists by summarizing academic papers, and solving math problems, among other tasks. But outsiders swiftly prompted the model to provide “scientific research” on the benefits of homophobia, anti-Semitism, suicide, eating glass, being white, or being a man—demonstrating not only how its botched launch was premature, but just how insufficient AI researchers’ efforts to make large language models safer have been. Read the full story.
This story is from The Algorithm, our 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 Verified anti-vax Twitter accounts are spreading health misinformation
And perfectly demonstrating the problem with charging for verification in the process. (The Guardian)
+ Maybe Twitter wasn’t helping your career as much as you thought it was. (Bloomberg $)
+ A deepfake of FTX’s founder has been circulating on Twitter. (Motherboard)
+ Some of Twitter’s liberal users are refusing to leave. (The Atlantic $)
+ Twitter’s layoff bloodbath is over, apparently. (The Verge)
+ Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history. (MIT Technology Review)
2 NASA’s Orion spacecraft has completed its lunar flyby
Paving the way to humans returning to the moon. (Vox)
3 Amazon’s warehouse-watching algorithms are trained by humans
Poorly-paid workers in India and Costa Rica are reviewing thousands of hours of mind-numbing footage. (The Verge)
+ The AI data labeling industry is deeply exploitative. (MIT Technology Review)
4 How to make sense of climate change
Accepting the hard facts is the first step towards avoiding the grimmest ending for the planet. (New Yorker $)
+ The world’s richest nations have agreed to pay for global warming. (The Atlantic $)
+ These three charts show who is most to blame for climate change. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Apple uncovered a cybersecurity startup’s dodgy dealings
It compiled a document that illustrates the extent of Corellium’s relationships, including with the notorious NSO Group. (Wired $)
+ The hacking industry faces the end of an era. (MIT Technology Review)
6 The crypto industry is still feeling skittish
Shares in its largest exchange have dropped to an all-time low. (Bloomberg $)
+ The UK wants to crack down on gamified trading apps. (FT $)
7 The criminal justice system is failing neurodivergent people
Mimicking an online troll led to an autistic man being sentenced to five and a half years in jail. (Economist $)
8 Your workplace could be planning to scan your brain 
All in the name of making you a more efficient employee. (IEEE Spectrum)
9 Facebook doesn’t care if your account is hacked
A series of new solutions to rescue accounts doesn’t seem to have had much effect. (WP $)
+ Parent company Meta is being sued in the UK over data collection. (Bloomberg $)
+ Independent artists are building the metaverse their way. (Motherboard)
10 Why training image-generating AIs on generated images is a bad idea
The ‘contaminated’ images will only confuse them. (New Scientist $)
+ Facial recognition software used by the US government reportedly didn’t work. (Motherboard)
+ The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“It feels like they used to care more.”
—Ken Higgins, an Amazon Prime member, is losing faith in the company after a series of frustrating delivery experiences, he tells the Wall Street Journal.
The big story
What if you could diagnose diseases with a tampon?
February 2019
On an unremarkable side street in Oakland, California, Ridhi Tariyal and Stephen Gire are trying to change how women monitor their health.
Their plan is to use blood from used tampons as a diagnostic tool. In that menstrual blood, they hope to find early markers of endometriosis and, ultimately, a variety of other disorders. The simplicity and ease of this method, should it work, will represent a big improvement over the present-day standard of care. Read the full story.
—Dayna Evans
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.)
+ Happy Thanksgiving—in your nightmares!
+ Why Keith Haring’s legacy is more visible than ever, 32 years after his death.
+ Even the gentrified world of dinosaur skeleton assembly isn’t immune to scandals.
+ Pumpkins are a Thanksgiving staple—but it wasn’t always that way.
+ If I lived in a frozen wasteland, I’m pretty sure I’d be the world’s grumpiest cat too.
My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in the mail and seeing all my college-bound friends plan out their classes and dorm decor, I got cold feet. Every time I mentioned my plans, I was met with questions like “But what about school?” and “MIT is cool with this?”
Yeah. MIT totally is. Postponing your MIT start date is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
COURTESY PHOTO
Now, having finished my first year of classes, I’m really grateful that I stuck with my decision to delay MIT, as I realized that having a full year of unstructured time is a gift. I could let my creative juices run. Pick up hobbies for fun. Do cool things like work at an AI startup and teach myself how to create latte art. My favorite part of the year, however, was backpacking across Europe. I traveled through Austria, Slovakia, Russia, Spain, France, the UK, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.
Moreover, despite my fear that I’d be losing a valuable year, traveling turned out to be the most productive thing I could have done with my time. I got to explore different cultures, meet new people from all over the world, and gain unique perspectives that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. My travels throughout Europe allowed me to leave my comfort zone and expand my understanding of the greater human experience.
“In Iceland there’s less focus on hustle culture, and this relaxed approach to work-life balance ends up fostering creativity. This was a wild revelation to a bunch of MIT students.”
When I became a full-time student last fall, I realized that StartLabs, the premier undergraduate entrepreneurship club on campus, gives MIT undergrads a similar opportunity to expand their horizons and experience new things. I immediately signed up. At StartLabs, we host fireside chats and ideathons throughout the year. But our flagship event is our annual TechTrek over spring break. In previous years, StartLabs has gone on TechTrek trips to Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. On these fully funded trips, StartLabs members have visited and collaborated with industry leaders, incubators, startups, and academic institutions. They take these treks both to connect with the global startup sphere and to build closer relationships within the club itself.
Most important, however, the process of organizing the TechTrek is itself an expedited introduction to entrepreneurship. The trip is entirely planned by StartLabs members; we figure out travel logistics, find sponsors, and then discover ways to optimize our funding.
COURTESY PHOTO
In organizing this year’s trip to Iceland, we had to learn how to delegate roles to all the planners and how to maintain morale when making this trip a reality seemed to be an impossible task. We woke up extra early to take 6 a.m. calls with Icelandic founders and sponsors. We came up with options for different levels of sponsorship, used pattern recognition to deduce the email addresses of hundreds of potential contacts at organizations we wanted to visit, and all got scrappy with utilizing our LinkedIn connections.
And as any good entrepreneur must, we had to learn how to be lean and maximize our resources. To stretch our food budget, we planned all our incubator and company visits around lunchtime in hopes of getting fed, played human Tetris as we fit 16 people into a six-person Airbnb, and emailed grocery stores to get their nearly expired foods for a discount. We even made a deal with the local bus company to give us free tickets in exchange for a story post on our Instagram account.
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.
How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.
QWERTY keyboards are inefficient as many Chinese characters share the same latinized spelling. As a result, many switch to smart, localized keyboard apps to save time and frustration. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones.
But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Why we should all be rooting for boring AI
Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. It hopes they could improve intelligence and operational planning.
But those might not be the right use cases, writes our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkila. Generative AI tools, such as language models, are glitchy and unpredictable, and they make things up. They also have massive security vulnerabilities, privacy problems, and deeply ingrained biases.
Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. The DoD’s best bet is to apply generative AI to more mundane things like Excel, email, or word processing. Read the full story.
This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past
To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules.
By analyzing those cores, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Now, a new European-led initiative hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. But that impressive feat is still only the first step. Once they’ve done that, they’ll have to figure out how they’re going to extract the air from the ice. Read the full story.
—Christian Elliott
This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine, set to go live tomorrow. Subscribe today for as low as $8/month to ensure you receive full access to the new Ethics issue and in-depth stories on experimental drugs, AI assisted warfare, microfinance, and more.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How AI got dragged into the culture wars
Fears about ‘woke’ AI fundamentally misunderstand how it works. Yet they’re gaining traction. (The Guardian)
+ Why it’s impossible to build an unbiased AI language model. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Researchers are racing to understand a new coronavirus variant
It’s unlikely to be cause for concern, but it shows this virus still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. (Nature)
+ Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand. (MIT Technology Review)
+ Why we can’t afford to stop monitoring it. (Ars Technica)
3 How Hilary became such a monster storm
Much of it is down to unusually hot sea surface temperatures. (Wired $)
+ The era of simultaneous climate disasters is here to stay. (Axios)
+ People are donning cooling vests so they can work through the heat. (Wired $)
4 Brain privacy is set to become important
Scientists are getting better at decoding our brain data. It’s surely only a matter of time before others want a peek. (The Atlantic $)
+ How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chips
Today it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models. (NYT $)
+ The chips it’s selling to China are less effective due to US export controls. (Ars Technica)
+ These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Inside the complex world of dissociative identity disorder on TikTok
Reducing stigma is great, but doctors fear people are self-diagnosing or even imitating the disorder. (The Verge)
7 What TikTok might have to give up to keep operating in the US
This shows just how hollow the authorities’ purported data-collection concerns really are. (Forbes)
8 Soldiers in Ukraine are playing World of Tanks on their phones
It’s eerily similar to the war they are themselves fighting, but they say it helps them to dissociate from the horror. (NYT $)
9 Conspiracy theorists are sharing mad ideas on what causes wildfires
But it’s all just a convoluted way to try to avoid having to tackle climate change. (Slate $)
10 Christie’s accidentally leaked the location of tons of valuable art 
Seemingly thanks to the metadata that often automatically attaches to smartphone photos. (WP $)
Quote of the day
“Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?”
—An anonymous air traffic controller warns that staffing shortages in their industry, plus other factors, are starting to threaten passenger safety, the New York Times reports.
The big story
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present
October 2022
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Watch Andrew Scott’s electrifying reading of the 1965 commencement address ‘Choose One of Five’ by Edith Sampson.
+ Here’s how Metallica makes sure its live performances ROCK. ($)
+ Cannot deal with this utterly ludicrous wooden vehicle.
+ Learn about a weird and wonderful new instrument called a harpejji.
