A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from New Jersey, has become the second. Her new kidney has just a single genetic modification—an approach that researchers hope could make scaling up the production of pig organs simpler.
Pisano, who had heart failure and end-stage kidney disease, underwent two operations, one to fit her with a heart pump to improve her circulation and the second to perform the kidney transplant. She is still in the hospital, but doing well. “Her kidney function 12 days out from the transplant is perfect, and she has no signs of rejection,” said Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who led the transplant surgery, at a press conference on Wednesday.
“I feel fantastic,” said Pisano, who joined the press conference by video from her hospital bed.
Pisano is the fourth living person to receive a pig organ. Two men who received heart transplants at the University of Maryland Medical Center in 2022 and 2023 both died within a couple of months after receiving the organ. Slayman, the first pig kidney recipient, is still doing well, says Leonardo Riella, medical director for kidney transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital, where Slayman received the transplant.
“It’s an awfully exciting time,” says Andrew Cameron, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore. “There is a bright future in which all 100,000 patients on the kidney transplant wait list, and maybe even the 500,000 Americans on dialysis, are more routinely offered a pig kidney as one of their options,” Cameron adds.
All the living patients who have received pig hearts and kidneys have accessed the organs under the FDA’s expanded access program, which allows patients with life-threatening conditions to receive investigational therapies outside of clinical trials. But patients may soon have another option. Both Johns Hopkins and NYU are aiming to start clinical trials in 2025.
In the coming weeks, doctors will be monitoring Pisano closely for signs of organ rejection, which occurs when the recipient’s immune system identifies the new tissue as foreign and begins to attack it. That’s a concern even with human kidney transplants, but it’s an even greater risk when the tissue comes from another species, a procedure known as xenotransplantation.
To prevent rejection, the companies that produce these pigs have introduced genetic modifications to make their tissue appear less foreign and reduce the chance that it will spark an immune attack. But it’s not yet clear just how many genetic alterations are necessary to prevent rejection. Slayman’s kidney came from a pig developed by eGenesis, a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts; it has 69 modifications. The vast majority of those modifications focus on inactivating viral DNA in the pig’s genome to make sure those viruses can’t be transmitted to the patient. But 10 were employed to help prevent the immune system from rejecting the organ.
Pisano’s kidney came from pigs that carry just a single genetic alteration—to eliminate a specific sugar called alpha-gal, which can trigger immediate organ rejection, from the surface of its cells. “We believe that less is more, and that the main gene edit that has been introduced into the pigs and the organs that we’ve been using is the fundamental problem,” Montgomery says. “Most of those other edits can be replaced by medications that are available to humans.”
JOE CARROTTA/NYU LANGONE HEALTH
The kidney is implanted along with a piece of the pig’s thymus gland, which plays a key role in educating white blood cells to distinguish between friend and foe. The idea is that the thymus will help Pisano’s immune system learn to accept the foreign tissue. The so-called UThymoKidney is being developed by United Therapeutics Corporation, but the company has also created pigs with 10 genetic alterations. The company “wanted to take multiple shots on goal,” says Leigh Peterson,executive vice president of product development and xenotransplantation at United Therapeutics.
There’s one major advantage to using a pig with a single genetic modification. “The simpler it is, in theory, the easier it’s going to be to breed and raise these animals,” says Jayme Locke, a transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Pigs with a single genetic change can be bred, but pigs with many alterations require cloning, Montgomery says. “These pigs could be rapidly expanded, and more quickly and completely solve the organ supply crisis.”
But Cameron isn’t sure that a single alteration will be enough to prevent rejection. “I think most people are worried that one knockout might not be enough, but we’re hopeful,” he says.
So is Pisano, who is working to get strong enough to leave the hospital. “I just want to spend time with my grandkids and play with them and be able to go shopping,” she says.
Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing.
The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto.
These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps—built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek—basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China.
What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found.
In August 2023, the same researchers found that Sogou, one of the most popular keyboard apps, did not use Transport Layer Security (TLS) when transmitting keystroke data to its cloud server for better typing predictions. Without TLS, a widely adopted international cryptographic protocol that protects users from a known encryption loophole, keystrokes can be collected and then decrypted by third parties.
“Because we had so much luck looking at this one, we figured maybe this generalizes to the others, and they suffer from the same kinds of problems for the same reason that the one did,” says Jeffrey Knockel, a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab, “and as it turns out, we were unfortunately right.”
Even though Sogou fixed the issue after it was made public last year, some Sogou keyboards preinstalled on phones are not updated to the latest version, so they are still subject to eavesdropping.
This new finding shows that the vulnerability is far more widespread than previously believed.
“As someone who also has used these keyboards, this was absolutely horrifying,” says Mona Wang, a PhD student in computer science at Princeton University and a coauthor of the report.
“The scale of this was really shocking to us,” says Wang. “And also, these are completely different manufacturers making very similar mistakes independently of one another, which is just absolutely shocking as well.”
The massive scale of the problem is compounded by the fact that these vulnerabilities aren’t hard to exploit. “You don’t need huge supercomputers crunching numbers to crack this. You don’t need to collect terabytes of data to crack it,” says Knockel. “If you’re just a person who wants to target another person on your Wi-Fi, you could do that once you understand the vulnerability.”
The ease of exploiting the vulnerabilities and the huge payoff—knowing everything a person types, potentially including bank account passwords or confidential materials—suggest that it’s likely they have already been taken advantage of by hackers, the researchers say. But there’s no evidence of this, though state hackers working for Western governments targeted a similar loophole in a Chinese browser app in 2011.
Most of the loopholes found in this report are “so far behind modern best practices” that it’s very easy to decrypt what people are typing, says Jedidiah Crandall, an associate professor of security and cryptography at Arizona State University, who was consulted in the writing of this report. Because it doesn’t take much effort to decrypt the messages, this type of loophole can be a great target for large-scale surveillance of massive groups, he says.
After the researchers got in contact with companies that developed these keyboard apps, the majority of the loopholes were fixed. But a few companies have been unresponsive, and the vulnerability still exists in some apps and phones, including QQ Pinyin and Baidu, as well as in any keyboard app that hasn’t been updated to the latest version. Baidu, Tencent, iFlytek, and Samsung did not immediately reply to press inquiries sent by MIT Technology Review.
One potential cause of the loopholes’ ubiquity is that most of these keyboard apps were developed in the 2000s, before the TLS protocol was commonly adopted in software development. Even though the apps have been through numerous rounds of updates since then, inertia could have prevented developers from adopting a safer alternative.
The report points out that language barriers and different tech ecosystems prevent English- and Chinese-speaking security researchers from sharing information that could fix issues like this more quickly. For example, because Google’s Play store is blocked in China, most Chinese apps are not available in Google Play, where Western researchers often go for apps to analyze.
Sometimes all it takes is a little additional effort. After two emails about the issue to iFlytek were met with silence, the Citizen Lab researchers changed the email title to Chinese and added a one-line summary in Chinese to the English text. Just three days later, they received an email from iFlytek, saying that the problem had been resolved.
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.
Introducing: the Build issue
Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by brick from the imperfect decisions we make in the present.
We don’t often recognize that the seeming steps forward we are taking today could be seen as steps back in the years to come. Sometimes the things we don’t do, or the steps we skip, have bigger implications than the actions we do take.
These are the themes we delve into in our Build issue. Check out these stories from the magazine:
This solar giant is moving manufacturing back to the US
Whenever you see a solar panel, most parts of it probably come from China. The US invented the technology and once dominated its production, but over the past two decades, government subsidies and low costs in China have led most of the solar manufacturing supply chain to be concentrated there.
But the US government is trying to change that. Through high tariffs on imports and hefty domestic tax credits, it is trying to make the cost of manufacturing solar panels in the US competitive enough for companies to want to come back and set up factories.
To understand its chances of success, MIT Technology Review spoke to Shawn Qu, founder and chairman of long-standing solar firm Canadian Solar. After decades of mostly manufacturing in Asia, Canadian Solar is pivoting back to the US. He told Zeyi Yang, our China reporter, why he sees a real chance for a solar industry revival.
To learn more about the state of Chinese tech in the US, including climate tech stars, check out the latest edition of China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech, policy and power in China. 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 The US Senate has passed the bill that could ban TikTok It could either force parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok, or face a national ban. (WP $) + Senators insist that TikTok’s ownership poses a real threat to the US. (FT $)+ But ByteDance is highly unlikely to complete a sale within the narrow timeframe. (Reuters) + Here’s what’s likely to happen next. (NYT $)
2 The AI industry is desperate for more data centers Demand is so high, it’s causing a shortage of essential components. (WSJ $) + Energy-hungry data centers are quietly moving into cities. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Hackers are testing cyberattacks in developing nations Africa, Asia and South America are targeted before they move onto richer countries. (FT $) + Australia is worried that AI is supercharging online extremist activity. (Bloomberg $)
4 Google has pushed back its plan to phase out cookies—again It’s the third time the company has delayed the project. (Bloomberg $)
5 How General Motors spied on its customers It tracked driving data and sold it to the insurance industry. (NYT $) + The advertising industry is kicking its heels as it waits. (WSJ $) + China’s car companies are turning into tech companies. (MIT Technology Review)
6 How AI could help to make sense of complicated theories String theory, anyone? (Quanta Magazine) + Is it possible to really understand someone else’s mind? (MIT Technology Review)
7 The NFL is diving into big data When it comes to optimizing sporting performance, knowledge is power. (Knowable Magazine)
8 A new industry is trying to game Reddit with AI-generated product promo It’s the kind of sneaky approach the Reddit community famously hates. (404 Media) + A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed. (MIT Technology Review)
9 AI beauty pageants are a thing now 💄 Which surely undermines the point of beauty contests. (The Guardian)
10 X’s latest trend is infuriating Look down at my keyboard? Absolutely not. (Insider $)
Quote of the day
“If the Chinese government wants data on Americans, they don’t need TikTok to get it.”
—Alan Z. Rozenshtein, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, reflects on the US Senate’s decision to pressure ByteDance into selling TikTok or face a national ban, Platformer reports.
The big story
The lucky break behind the first CRISPR treatment
December 2023
The world’s first commercial gene-editing treatment is set to start changing the lives of people with sickle-cell disease. It’s called Casgevy, and it was approved last November in the UK.
The treatment, which will be sold in the US by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, employs CRISPR, which can be easily programmed by scientists to cut DNA at precise locations they choose.
But where do you aim CRISPR, and how did the researchers know what DNA to change? That’s the lesser-known story of the sickle-cell breakthrough. Read more about it.
—Antonio Regalado
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ The Monument Valley games are lovely, if you’ve never played them, and their music is particularly poignant. + There’s nothing more satisfying than a good pressure washer video. + Have you ever found your doppelganger in an art gallery? These people have. + Replacing beef with fish in classic recipes—with surprisingly tasty results.
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
I’ve wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was invented in the US, today about 80% of the world’s solar manufacturing takes place in China. For some parts of the process, it’s responsible for even more: 97% of wafer manufacturing, for example.
So I jumped at the opportunity to interview Shawn Qu, the founder and chairman of Canadian Solar, one of the largest and longest-standing solar manufacturing companies in the world, last week.
Qu’s company provides a useful lens on wider efforts by the US to reshape the global solar supply chain and bring more of it back to American shores. Although most of its production is still in China and Southeast Asia, it’s now building two factories in the US, spurred on by incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. You can read my story here.
I met Qu in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was attending the Harvard College China Forum, a two-day annual conference that often draws a fair number of Chinese entrepreneurs. I also attended, hoping to meet representatives of Chinese tech companies there.
At the conference, I noticed three interesting things.
One, there was a glaring absence of Chinese consumer tech companies. With the exception of one US-based manager from TikTok, I didn’t see anyone from Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, or ByteDance.
These companies, with their large influence on Chinese people’s everyday lives, used to be the stars of discussions around China’s tech sector. If you had come to the Harvard conference before covid-19, you would have met plenty of people representing them, as well as the venture capitalists that funded their successes. You can get a sense just by reading past speaker lists: executives from Xiaomi, Ant Financial, Sogou, Sequoia China, and Hillhouse Capital. These are the equivalents of Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel in China’s tech world.
But these companies have become much more low profile since then, for a couple of main reasons. First, they underwent a harsh domestic crackdown after the government decided to tame them. (I recently talked to Angela Zhang, a law professor studying Chinese tech regulations, to understand these crackdowns.) And second, they have become the subject of national security scrutiny in the US, making it politically unwise for them to engage too much on the public stage here.
The second thing I noticed at the conference is what stood in their place: a batch of new Chinese companies, mostly in climate tech. William Li, the CEO of China’s EV startup NIO, was one of the most popular guest speakers during the conference’s opening ceremony this year. There were at least three solar panel companies present—two (JA Solar and Canadian Solar) among the top-tier manufacturers in the world, and a third that sells solar panels to Latin America. There were also many academics, investors, and even influencers working in the field of electric vehicles and other electrified transportation methods.
It’s clear that amid the increasingly urgent task of addressing climate change, China’s climate technology companies have become the new stars of the show. And they are very much willing to appear on the global stage, both bragging about their technological lead and seeking new markets.
“The Chinese entrepreneurs are very eager,” says Jinhua Zhao, a professor studying urban transportation at MIT, who also spoke on one of the panels at the conference. “They want to come out. I think the Chinese government side also started to send signals, inviting foreign leadership and financial industries to visit China. I see a lot of gestures.”
The problem, however, is they are also becoming subject to a lot of political animosity in the US. The Biden administration has started an investigation into Chinese-made cars, mostly electric vehicles; Chinese battery companies have been navigating a minefield of politicians’ resistance to their setting up plants in North America; and Chinese solar panel companies have been subject to sky-high tariffs.
Back in the mid-2010s, when Chinese consumer tech companies emerged onto the global stage, the US and China had a warm relationship, creating a welcoming environment. Unfortunately, that’s not something climate tech companies can enjoy today. Even though climate change is a global issue that requires countries to collaborate, political tensions stand in the way when companies and investors on opposite sides try to work together.
On that note, the last thing I noticed at the conference is a rising geopolitical force in tech: the Middle East. A few speakers at the conference are working in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and they represent other deep-pocketed players who are betting on technologies like EVs and AI in both the United States and China.
But can they navigate the tensions and benefit from the technological advantages on both sides? It’ll be interesting to watch how that unfolds.
What do you think of the role of the Middle East in the future of climate technologies? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.
Now read the rest of China Report
Catch up with China
1. A batch of documents mistakenly unsealed by a Pennsylvania court reveals the origin story of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Who knew it started out as a real estate venture? (New York Times $)
2. Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s richest man, said he would move some of his copper smelting factories to China to reduce the impact of Western sanctions, which block Russian companies from using international payment systems. (Financial Times $)
3. Chinese universities have found a way to circumvent the US export ban on high-end Nvidia chips: by buying resold server products made by Dell, Super Micro Computer, and Taiwan’s Gigabyte Technology. (Reuters $)
4. TikTok is testing “TikTok Notes,” a rival product to Instagram, in Australia and Canada. (The Verge)
5. Since there’s no route for personal bankruptcy in China, those who are unable to pay their debts are being penalized in novel ways: they can’t take high-speed trains, fly on planes, stay in nice hotels, or buy expensive insurance policies. (Wall Street Journal $)
6. The hunt for the origins of covid-19 has stalled in China, as Chinese politicians worry about being blamed for the findings. (Associated Press)
7. Because of pressure from the US government, Mexico will not hand out tax cuts and other incentives to Chinese EV companies. (Reuters $)
Lost in translation
Until last year, it was normal for Chinese hotels to require facial recognition to check guests in, but the city of Shanghai is now turning against the practice, according to the Chinese publication 21st Century Business Herald. The police bureau of Shanghai recently published a notice that says “scanning faces” is required only if guests don’t have any identity documents. Otherwise, they have the right to refuse it. Most hotel chains in Shanghai, and some in other cities, have updated their policies in response.
China has a national facial recognition database tied to the government ID system, and businesses such as hotels can access it to verify customers’ identities. However, Chinese people are increasingly pushing back on the necessity of facial recognition in scenarios like this, and questioning whether hotels are handling such sensitive biometric data properly.
One more thing
The latest queer icon in Asia is Nymphia Wind, the drag persona of a 28-year-old Taiwanese-American named Leo Tsao, who just won the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Fully embracing the color yellow as part of her identity, Nymphia Wind is also called the “Banana Buddha” by her fans. She’s hosting shows in Taoist temples in Taiwan, attracting audiences old and young.
Today’s climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity—which has discharged greenhouse-gas emissions into Earth’s atmosphere for centuries—but reversing course and taming nature’s growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. Yet the dream of human-powered flight—of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of mortal limbs—was also the stuff of myths for thousands of years. Until 1988.
That year, in October, MIT Technology Review published the aeronautical engineer John Langford’s account of his mission to retrace the legendary flight of Daedalus, described in an ancient Greek myth recorded by the Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses. Imprisoned on the island of Crete with his son Icarus, Daedalus, a skilled inventor, crafts wings of feathers and wax to escape. In his exuberance, Icarus defies Daedalus’s warning not to fly too close to the sun. His wings melt and he plummets to his death. With heavy heart, Daedalus completes the flight, landing in Sicily.
“Daedalus became a quest to build a perfect airplane,” says Langford, reflecting on his project team’s mission. By some measures, they succeeded. Their plane, Daedalus 88, still holds the record for absolute distance (71.5 miles, or 115 kilometers) and duration (nearly four hours) of a human-powered flight.
Of course, Langford’s team modified some of the mythical parameters. The aircraft replaced feathers and wax with carbon-fiber wings, and the pilot, the Greek cyclist Kanellos Kanellopoulos, didn’t flap his way into history—he pedaled. Plus, the 500-mile journey to Sicily seemed beyond mortal capacity, so Langford and his team set their sights on Santorini.
The problem with the Daedalus project, and human-powered aircraft of any kind, is the grueling effort to remain aloft, the risk of crashing, and the expense—none of which was lost on Langford. “In itself, our Daedalus project could never answer the question ‘So what?’” he admits.
To Langford, an entrepreneur whose twin passions are climate research and sustainable aeronautics, the perfect plane is an unmanned aerial vehicle able to ply the stratosphere, collect climate data such as ozone readings, and harness the sun for its energy needs. Aurora Flight Sciences, his first company, unveiled such a plane, Odysseus, in 2018. His latest company, Electra, wants to decarbonize all aviation.
That a human-powered plane able to fly mere meters above the sea for a handful of hours managed to inspire solar-powered robotic planes that continuously comb Earth’s stratosphere could make sense only in the context of our climate challenges. Such novel aircraft symbolize the ability of human beings to achieve mythic feats when joined in a common quest, however daunting.
Bill Gourgey is a science writer based in Washington, DC, and teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins University.
As Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn serves up a plate of vegan brie, feta, and blue cheese in his offices in Emeryville, California, I’m keeping my expectations modest. Most vegan cheese falls into an edible uncanny valley full of discomforting not-quite-right versions of the real thing. But the brie I taste today is smooth, rich, and velvety—and delicious. I could easily believe it was made from cow’s milk, but it is made entirely from plants. And it couldn’t have come into existence, says Zahn, without the use of machine learning.
Climax Foods is one of several startups, also including Shiru of Alameda, California, and NotCo of Chile, that have used artificial intelligence to design plant-based foods. The companies train algorithms on datasets of ingredients with desirable traits like flavor, scent, or stretchability. Then they use AI to comb troves of data to develop new combinations of those ingredients that perform similarly.
“Traditional ingredient discovery can take years and tens of millions of dollars, and what results are ingredients only incrementally better than the previous generation,” says Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume, who wrote her PhD thesis on protein engineering. “[Now] we can go from scratch, meaning what nature has to offer; pick out the proteins that will function best; and prototype and test them in about three months.”
Not everyone in the industry is bullish about AI-assisted ingredient discovery. Jonathan McIntyre, a food consultant who formerly headed R&D teams in both beverages and snacks at Pepsi, thinks the technology is “significantly” overhyped as a tool for his field. “AI is only as good as the data you feed it,” he says. And given how jealously food companies guard formulas and proprietary information, he adds, there won’t necessarily be sufficient data to yield productive results. McIntyre has a cautionary tale: during his stint at Pepsi, the company attempted to use IBM’s Watson to create a better soda. “It formulated the worst-tasting thing ever,” he says.
Climax Foods circumvented the data scarcity problem by creating its own training sets to essentially reverse-engineer why cheese tastes so good. “When we started, there was very little data on why an animal product tastes the way it does—animal cheddar, blue, brie, mozzarella—because it is what it is,” says Zahn, who previously headed data science for Google’s massive ads business. “There [was] no commercial reason to understand it.”
In the food science lab on the ground floor of the Climax offices, on the site of an old chocolate factory, Zahn shows off some of the instruments his team used to build its data trove. There’s a machine that uses ion chromatography to show the precise balance of different acids after bacterial strains break down lactose. A mass spectrometer acts like an “electronic nose” to reveal which volatile compounds generate our olfactory response to food. A device called a rheometer tracks how a cheese responds to physical deformation; part of our response to cheese is based on how it reacts to slicing or chewing. The cheese data creates target baselines of performance that an AI can try to reach with different combinations of plant ingredients.
Using educated guesswork about which plants might perform well as substitutes, Climax food scientists have created more than 5,000 cheese prototypes in the past four years. With the same lab instruments employed on animal cheese, the Climax team performs an analysis that includes roughly 50 different assays for texture and flavor, generating millions of data points in the process. The AI is trained on these prototypes, and the algorithm then suggests mixtures that might perform even better. The team tries them out and keeps iterating. “You vary all the input knobs, you measure the outputs, and then you try to squeeze the difference between the output and your animal target to be as small as possible,” Zahn says. Including small-scale “micro-prototypes,” he estimates, Climax has analyzed roughly 100,000 plant ingredient combinations.
Tasting and subtly adjusting the ingredient blends in so many prototypes by hand would take several thousand years, Zahn says. But starting from zero in early 2020, he and his AI-aided team were able to formulate their first cheese and bring it to market in April 2023.
The plant constituents of that product, a vegan blue cheese, are hardly exotic. The top four ingredients are pumpkin seeds, coconut oil, lima beans, and hemp protein powder. And yet Dominique Crenn, a Michelin-starred chef, described it as “soft, buttery, and surprisingly rich—beyond imagination for a vegan cheese.”
Bel Group, the maker of Laughing Cow, has an agreement to license the company’s products, and a second large producer that Zahn cannot yet publicly name has also signed on. He is currently beating the venture capital bushes for a funding round and hopes to begin selling the brie and feta later this year.
Unlike Watson’s ill-fated attempt to formulate a better Pepsi, the Climax algorithms can pull together ingredients in new ways that seem like alchemy. “There is an interaction of one component with another component that triggers a flavor or sensation that you didn’t expect,” Zahn says. “It’s not like just the sum of the two components—it’s something completely different.”
One reason to develop alternatives to dairy-based cheese is its environmental cost: by weight, cheese has a higher carbon footprint than either chicken or pork, and humans eat roughly 22 million tons of it each year. For Zahn, the answer is not asking consumers to settle for a rubbery, bland substitute—but offering a plant-based version that tastes as good or better and could cost much less to make.
Andrew Rosenblum’s writing has appeared in New Scientist, Popular Science, Wired, and many other places.
The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. Companies define it in different ways, but its principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations.
Danai Myrtzani of Sleed, a digital marketing agency in Greece, describes herself as more prompter than engineer. She joined the company in March 2023 as one of two experts on its new experimental-AI team.
Go-to AI experts: Since joining Sleed, Myrtzani has helped develop a tool that generates personalized LinkedIn posts for clients. The tool works with OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform, which automates the writing process using sets of built-in prompts. Myrtzani’s job is to ensure that users get the results they are looking for. She also teaches other employees how to use generative AI tools, hosts workshops, and writes an internal newsletter dedicated to AI. Her employers “want pretty much everyone to be able to use AI,” she says, because these tools have the potential to automate trivial tasks, making more time for work that requires creative thinking. She refers to her department as “the support team for AI.”
An education in language: Myrtzani came to Sleed with experience experimenting with generative AI tools as well as a university education in social anthropology. Her studies gave her an expertise in human language systems that the company thought would be especially valuable in the job. “The more qualified you are at using language, the easier it is to create prompts,” she says.
More than prompt writers: Many writers have been concerned that generative AI could make their jobs obsolete. Prompt engineers are especially vulnerable: demand for their services could disappear if the software becomes better at understanding users’ prompts. But Myrtzani says her own position demands much more than just prompt writing, including identifying and integrating AI-based solutions for business challenges. “The higher tiers of prompt engineering are where the enduring and evolving aspects of the role lie,” she says.
In 1856,Napoleon III commissioned a baby rattle for his newborn son, to be made from one of the most precious metals known at the time: light, silvery, and corrosion-resistant aluminum. Despite its abundance—it’s the third most common element in Earth’s crust—the metal wasn’t isolated until 1824, and the complexity and cost of the process made the rattle a gift fit for a prince. It wasn’t until 1886 that two young researchers, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, developed the method that is still used for refining aluminum commercially. The Hall-Héroult process is extraordinarily energy intensive: the chemically modified ore is dissolved into a high-temperature bath of molten minerals, and an electrical current is passed through it to separate the metallic aluminum. It’s also intrinsically energy intensive: part of the reason the metal was isolated only relatively recently is because aluminum atoms bind so tightly to oxygen. No amount of clever engineering will change that physical reality. The astronomical growth in worldwide aluminum production over the last century was made possible by the build-out of the energy infrastructure necessary to power commercial refineries, and to do so in a way that was economically viable. In the US, that was facilitated by the massive hydroelectricity projects built by the federal government as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, closely followed by World War II and the immense mobilization of resources it entailed: aluminum was the material of choice for the thousands and thousands of aircraft that rolled off wartime assembly lines as fast as others were shot down. Within a century, the metal went from precious and rare to ubiquitous and literally disposable.
Just as much as technological breakthroughs, it’s that availability of energy that has shaped our material world. The exponential rise in fossil-fuel usage over the past century and a half has powered novel, energy-intensive modes of extracting, processing, and consuming matter, at unprecedented scale. But now, the cumulative environmental, health, and social impacts—in economics terms, the negative externalities—of this approach have become unignorable. We can see them nearly everywhere we look, from the health effects of living near highways or oil refineries to the ever-growing issue of plastic, textile, and electronic waste.
We’re accustomed to thinking about the energy transition as a way of solving the environmental problem of climate change. We need energy to meet human needs—for protection from the elements (whether as warmth or cooling), fuel for cooking, artificial light, social needs like mobility and communication, and more. Decarbonizing our energy systems means meeting these needs without burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Largely as a result of public investment in clean-energy research and development, a world powered by electricity from abundant, renewable, nonpolluting sources is now within reach.
Just as much as technological breakthroughs, it’s the availability of energy that has shaped our material world
What is much less appreciated is that this shift also has the potential to power a transformation in our relationship with matter and materials, enabling us to address the environmental problem of pollution and waste. That won’t happen by accident, any more than the growth of these industries in the 20th century was an accident. In order to reach this future, we need to understand, research, invest in, and build it. Every joule of electricity that comes from fossil fuels means paying for what’s burned to produce it. In fact, because of the inefficiency of thermal generation, it means paying for many more joules of heat.
Energy generation from renewable sources has capital and operating costs, of course, but minimal, incremental ones. That’s because the input energy arrives as wind or sunlight, not as boxcars of coal. In the big picture, this means that in a fully decarbonized world, all energy will be closer to hydroelectricity in its economics: while it may never quite be “too cheap to meter,” it may indeed be too cheap to reliably generate a profit on an open energy market. This is a problem for investor-owned energy infrastructure, but it’s potentially transformative for community-owned systems (including public utilities, nonprofit electricity cooperatives, or local microgrids), where cheaper and more abundant energy can power a just transition and a new economy.
Twentieth-century investments in energy infrastructure, like the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act of 1936 and its counterparts worldwide, formed the basis for the global industrial economy. If we can achieve a similar scale of commitment to renewable energy—prioritizing abundance and access over profit—it will lead to another jump in what’s possible in the material world, where what was previously unthinkably expensive becomes quotidian reality. For example, just like refining aluminum, desalinating seawater is intrinsically energy intensive. But in a world with cheap, clean electricity, residents of coastal cities could get a reliable supply of drinking water from oceanside water treatment plants instead of contested freshwater sources.
Desalination is not the only energy-intensive process that would become viable. Aluminum, glass, and steel are among the most recycled materials in part because so much energy is needed to make them from their raw precursors that recovery is economically worthwhile. In contrast, plastics—in their near infinite variety—don’t lend themselves to mechanical recycling except in a handful of cases. Effectively recycling plastics means breaking them down into their chemical building blocks, ready to be put together into new forms. And since most plastics will burn to produce heat, going in the opposite direction—reassembling those carbon atoms into new plastics—requires a significant input of energy. It’s always been easier, cheaper, and more profitable to just dump the waste into landfills and make new plastics out of freshly extracted oil and gas. But if the energy came from inexpensive renewables, the whole economic equation of making plastics could change. Carbon dioxide could be pulled from the air and transformed into useful polymers using energy from the sun, with the waste plastic decomposed into raw materials so the process could begin again.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s how plants work. But, just like Hall and Héroult’s breakthrough for aluminum, new processes would require both energy and technological innovation. Decades of research have gone into creating new kinds of plastics from fossil fuels, and only a proportionally tiny amount into what happens to those plastics at the end of their lives. But now numerous companies, including Twelve, are building on new research to do just this kind of transformation, using renewably sourced energy to turn water and atmospheric carbon dioxide back into hydrocarbons, in the form of fuel and materials.
Prioritizing abundance and access over profit will lead to another jump in what’s possible.
Finally, it’s not just about plastic. If we succeed in building a world of even cheaper and more abundant energy but we again use it to supercharge extraction, consumption, and disposal, then we might “solve” the pressing crisis around energy while worsening the multiple environmental crises posed by pollution. Instead, we can think about community-led investments in energy infrastructure as spinning up a new industrial system in which clean, inexpensive renewable energy makes it possible to recover a broad range of materials. That would cut out the enormous costs of primary extraction and disposal, including environmental depredation and geopolitical conflict.
Building momentum as fast as we can will limit the materials bill for the huge changes that decarbonization will entail, like replacing combustion-powered vehicles with their electric equivalents. This is already happening with companies like Ascend Elements, currently building a facility in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to produce materials for new batteries from recycled lithium batteries. It’s financed by more than half a billion dollars of recent private investment that builds on $480 million in Department of Energy grants, and the work is based on fundamental research that was supported by the National Science Foundation. As more and more clean, renewable energy comes online, we need to continue with policies that support research and development on the new technologies required to recover all kinds of materials—together with regulations that account for the true costs of extraction and disposal. This will facilitate not just an energy transition but also a matter transition, ensuring that the industrial sector aligns with the health of our planet.
Deb Chachra is a professor of engineering at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts, and the author of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (Riverhead, 2023).
Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard’s hat near the northwestern corner of Spain.
Today, Pico Sacro is venerated as a holy site and rumored, in the local mythology, to be a portal to hell. But this magic mountain has also become valued in modern times for a very different reason: the quartz deposits that resulted from these geological processes are some of the purest on the planet. Today, it is a rich source of the silicon used to build computer chips. From this dusty ground, the mineral is plucked and transformed into an inscrutable black void of pure inorganic technology, something that an art director could have dreamed up to stand in for aliens or the mirror image of earthly nature.
In a warehouse just a few miles from the peak, he finds a dazzling pile of fist-size quartz chunks ready to be shoveled into a smoking coal-fired furnace running at 1,800 °C, where they are enveloped in a powerful electrical field. The process is not what he expected—more Lord of the Rings than Bay Area startup—but he relishes every near-mystical step that follows as quartz is coaxed into liquid silicon, drawn into crystals, and shipped to the cleanest rooms in the world.
Conway’s quest to understand how chips are made confronts the reality that no one person, “even those working on the supply chain itself,” can really explain the entire process. Conway soon discovers that even an industrial furnace can be a scene of sorcery and wonder, partly because of the electrical current that passes through the quartz and coal. “Even after more than a hundred years of production, there are still things people don’t understand about what’s happening in this reaction,” he is told by Håvard Moe, an executive at the Norwegian company Elkem, one of Europe’s biggest silicon producers.
Conway explains that the silicon “wafers” used to make the brains of our digital economy are up to 99.99999999% pure: “for every impure atom there are essentially 10 billion pure silicon atoms.” The silicon extracted from around Pico Sacro leaves Spain already almost 99% pure. After that, it is distilled in Germany and then sent to a plant outside Portland, Oregon, where it undergoes what is perhaps its most entrancing transformation. In the Czochralski or “CZ” process, a chamber is filled with argon gas and a rod is dipped repeatedly into molten refined silicon to grow a perfect crystal. It’s much like conjuring a stalactite at warp speed or “pulling candy floss onto a stick,” in Conway’s words. From this we get “one of the purest crystalline structures in the universe,” which can begin to be shaped into chips.
Conway aims to disprove “perhaps the most dangerous of all the myths” that guide our lives today: “the idea that we humans are weaning ourselves off physical materials.” It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized “ethereal world,” he says, ruled by digital startups, artificial intelligence, and financial services. Yet there is little evidence that we have decoupled our economy from its churning hunger for resources. “For every ton of fossil fuels,” he writes, “we exploit six tons of other materials—mostly sand and stone, but also metals, salts, and chemicals. Even as we citizens of the ethereal world pare back our consumption of fossil fuels, we have redoubled our consumption of everything else. But, somehow, we have deluded ourselves into believing precisely the opposite.”
Quartz
Cobalt
Conway delivers rich life stories of the resources without which our world would be unrecognizable, covering sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. He buzzes with excitement at every stage, with a correspondent’s gift for quick-fire storytelling, revealing the world’s material supply chains in an avalanche of anecdote and trivia. The supply chain of silicon, he shows, is both otherworldly and incredibly fragile, encompassing massive, anonymous industrial giants as well as terrifyingly narrow bottlenecks. Nearly the entire global supply of specialized containers for the CZ dipping process, for example, is produced by two mines in the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. “What if something happened to those mines? What if, say, the single road that winds down from them to the rest of the world was destroyed in a landslide?” asks Conway. “Short answer: it would not be pretty. ‘Here’s something scary,’ says one veteran of the sector. ‘If you flew over the two mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months.’” (Conway declines to print the name of the substance.)
Yet after such an impressive journey through deep time and the world economy, how long will any electronic gadget last? The useful life of our electronics and many other products is likely to be a short blip before they return to the earth. As Oliver Franklin-Wallis writes in Wasteland, electronic waste is one stubborn part of the 2 billion tons of solid waste we produce globally each year, with the average American discarding more than four pounds of trash each day.
Wasteland begins with a trip to Ghazipur, India, the “largest of three mega-landfills that ring Delhi.” There, amid an aromatic fug of sticky-sweet vapors, Franklin-Wallis stomps through a swamp-like morass of trash, following his guide, a local waste picker named Anwar, who helps him recognize solid stepping-stones of trash so that he may safely navigate above the perilous system of subterranean rivers that rush somewhere unseen below his feet. Like the hidden icy currents that carve through glaciers, these rivers make the trash mountain prone to cleaving and crumbling, leading to around 100 deaths a year. “Over time, [Anwar] explains, you learn to read the waste the way sailors can read a river’s current; he can intuit what is likely to be solid, what isn’t. But collapses are unpredictable,” Franklin-Wallis writes. For all its aura of decay, this is also a living landscape: there are tomato plants that grow from the refuse. Waste pickers eat the fruits off the vine.
Wasteland is best when excavating the stories buried in the dump. In 1973, academics at the University of Arizona, led by the archaeologist William Rathje, turned the study of landfills into a science, labeling themselves the “garbologists.” “Trash, Rathje found, could tell you more about a neighborhood—what people eat, what their favorite brands are—than cutting-edge consumer research, and predict the population more accurately than a census,” Franklin-Wallis writes. “Unlike people,” he adds, “garbage doesn’t lie.”
Wasteland leaves a lasting impression of the trash-worlds that we make. Most horrifying of all, the contents of landfills don’t decompose the way we expect. By taking geological cores from landfills, Rathje found that even decades later, our waste remains a morbid museum: “onion parings were onion parings, carrot tops were carrot tops. Grass clippings that might have been thrown away the day before yesterday spilled from bulky black lawn and leaf bags, still tied with twisted wire.”
Simply shifting to “sustainable” or “cleaner” technologies doesn’t eliminate the industrial fallout from our consumption.
Franklin-Wallis’s histories help tell us where we as a civilization began to go wrong. In ancient Rome, waste from public latrines was washed away with wastewater from the city’s fountains and bathhouses, requiring a “complex underground sewer system crowned by the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer so great that it had its own goddess, Cloacina.” But by the Victorian age, the mostly circular economy of waste was coming to an end. The grim but eco-friendly job of turning human effluent into farm fertilizer (so-called “nightsoil”) was made obsolete by the adoption of the home flushing toilet, which pumped effluent out into rivers, often killing them. Karl Marx identified this as the beginning of a “metabolic rift” that—later turbocharged by the development of disposable plastics—turned a sustainable cycle of waste reuse into a conveyor between city and dump.
This meditation on trash can be fascinating, but the book never quite lands on a big idea to draw its story forward. While trash piles can be places of discovery, our propensity to make waste is no revelation; it’s an ever-present nightmare. Many readers will arrive in search of answers that Wasteland isn’t offering. Its recommendations are ultimately modest: the author resolves to buy less, learns to sew, appreciates the Japanese art of kintsugi (mending pottery with precious metals to highlight the act of repair). A handful of other lifestyle decisions follow.
As Franklin-Wallis is quick to acknowledge, a journey through our own waste can feel hopeless and overwhelming. What we’re lacking are viable ways to steer our societies from the incredibly resource-intensive paths they are on. This thought, taken up by designers and activists driving the Green New Deal, is aiming to turn our attention away from dwelling on our personal “footprint”—a murky idea that Franklin-Wallis traces to industry groups lobbying to deflect blame from themselves.
Reframing both waste and supply chains as matters that are political and international, rather than personal, could guide us away from guilt and move us toward solutions. Instead of looking at production and waste as separate problems, we can think of them as two aspects of one great challenge: How do we build homes, design transport systems, develop technology, and feed the world’s billions without creating factory waste upstream or trash downstream?
The Shabara artisanal cobalt mine near Kolwezi, Democratic
Republic of Congo.
ARLETTE BASHIZI/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Simply shifting to “sustainable” or “cleaner” technologies doesn’t eliminate the industrial fallout from our consumption, as Siddharth Kara reveals in Cobalt Red. Cobalt is a part of just about every rechargeable device—it is used to make the positively charged end of lithium batteries, for example, and each electric vehicle requires 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of cobalt, 1,000 times the quantity in a smartphone.
Half the world’s reserves of the element are found in Katanga, in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which puts this resource-rich region at the center of the global energy transition. In Kara’s telling, the cobalt rush is another chapter in an age-old story of exploitation. In the last two centuries, the DRC has been a center not only for the bloody trade in enslaved humans but also for the colonial extraction of rubber, copper, nickel, diamonds, palm oil, and much more. Barely a modern catastrophe has unfolded without resources stolen from this soil: copper from the DRC made the bullets for two world wars; uranium made the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; vast quantities of tin, zinc, silver, and nickel fueled Western industrialization and global environmental crises. In return, the DRC’s 100 million people have been left with little by way of lasting benefits. The country still languishes at the foot of the United Nations development index and now faces disproportionate impacts from climate change.
In Cobalt Red, Congo’s history plays out in vignettes of barbarous theft perpetrated by powerful Western-backed elites. Kara, an author and activist on modern slavery, structures the book as a journey, drawing frequent parallels to Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness, with the city of Kolwezi substituting for Kurtz’s ivory-trading station, the destination in the novella. Kolwezi is the center of Katanga’s cobalt trade. It is “the new heart of darkness, a tormented heir to those Congolese atrocities that came before—colonization, wars, and generations of slavery,” Kara writes. The book provides a speedy summary of the nation’s history starting with the colonial vampirism of the Belgian king Leopold’s “Free State,” described by Conrad as the “vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” The king’s private colony forced its subjects to collect rubber under a system of quotas enforced by systematic execution and disfigurement; forced labor continued well into the 20th century in palm oil plantations that supplied the multinational Unilever company.
These three books offer to connect the reader to the feel and smell and rasping reality of a world where materials still matter.
Kara’s multiyear investigation finds the patterns of the past repeating themselves in today’s green boom. “As of 2022, there is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo,” he writes. “All cobalt sourced from the DRC is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm.” Step by step, Kara’s narrative moves from the fringes of Katanga’s mining region toward Kolwezi, documenting the free flow of minerals between two parallel systems supposedly divided by a firewall: the formal industrial system, under the auspices of mining giants that are signatories to sustainability pacts and human rights conventions, and the “artisanal” one, in which miners with no formal employer toil with shovels and sieves to produce a few sacks of cobalt ore a day.
We learn of the system of creuseurs and négociants—diggers and traders—who move the ore from denuded fields into the formal supply chain, revealing that an unknown percentage of cobalt sold as ethical comes from unregulated toil. If Material World tells a neat story of capitalism’s invisible hand, the force that whisks resources around the planet, Cobalt Red documents a more brutal and opaque model of extraction. In Kara’s telling, the artisanal system is grueling and inefficient, involving countless middlemen between diggers and refineries who serve no purpose except to launder ore too low-grade for industrial miners and obscure its origins (while skimming off most of the earnings).
Everywhere Kara finds artisanal mining, he finds children, including girls, some with babies on backs, who huddle together to guard against the threat of sexual assault. There is no shortage of haunting stories from the frontlines. Cobalt ore binds with nickel, lead, arsenic, and uranium, and exposure to this metal mixture raises the risk of breast, kidney, and lung cancers. Lead poisoning leads to neurological damage, reduced fertility, and seizures. Everywhere he sees rashes on the skin and respiratory ailments including “hard metal lung disease,” caused by chronic and potentially fatal inhalation of cobalt dust.
One woman, who works crushing 12-hour days just to fill one sack that she can trade for the equivalent of about 80 cents, tells how her husband recently died from respiratory illness, and the two times she had conceived both resulted in miscarriage. “I thank God for taking my babies,” she says. “Here it is better not to be born.” The book’s handful of genuinely devastating moments arrive like this—from the insights of Congolese miners, who are too rarely given the chance to speak.
All of which leaves you to question Kara’s strange decision to mold the narrative around the 125-year-old Heart of Darkness. It has been half a century since the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe condemned Conrad’s novella as a “deplorable book” that dehumanized its subjects even as it aimed to inspire sympathy for them. Yet Kara doubles down by mirroring Conrad’s storytelling device and style, from the first sentence (featuring “wild and wide-eyed” soldiers wielding weapons). When Kara describes how the “filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt,” who is the object of disgust: the forces of exploitation or the miners and their families, often reduced to abstract figures of suffering?
Following Conrad, Cobalt Red becomes, essentially, a story of morality—an “unholy tale” about the “malevolent force” of capital—and reaches a similarly moralistic conclusion: that we must all begin to treat artisanal miners “with equal humanity as any other employee.” If this seems like an airy response after the hard work of detailing the intricacies of cobalt’s broken supply chain, it is doubly so after Kara documents both the past waves of injustice and the moral crusades that have brought the Free State and old colonial structures to an end. Such calls for humanistic fairness toward Congo have echoed down the ages.
Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization Ed Conway
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives Siddharth Kara
Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future Oliver Franklin-Wallis
All three books offer to connect the reader to the feel and smell and rasping reality of a world where materials still matter. But in Kara’s case, such a strong focus on documenting firsthand experience edges out a deeper understanding. There is little space given to the numerous scholars from across the African continent who have made sense of how politics, commerce, and armed groups together rule the DRC’s deadly mines. The Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe has described sites like Katanga not only as places where Western-style rule of law is absent but as “death-worlds” constructed and maintained by rich actors to extract resources at low cost. More than simply making sense of the current crisis, these thinkers address the big questions that Kara asks but struggles to answer: Why do the resources and actors change but exploitation remains? How does this pattern end?
Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in London.
One of the formative memories of my youth took place on a camping trip at an Alabama state park. My dad’s friend brought an at-the-time gee-whiz gadget, a portable television, and we used it to watch the very first space shuttle launch from under the loblolly pines. It was thrilling. And it was hard not to believe, watching that shuttle go up (and, a few days later, land), that we were entering an era when travel into the near reaches of space would become common.
But as it turns out, that’s not the future we built.
This is our Build issue, and although it’s certainly about creating the future we want, in many ways this issue is also about a future that never arrived. Interplanetary space stations. Friendly robots. Even (if you squint and accept a generous definition) terraforming an increasingly uninhabitable Earth.
Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms following an influential essay by Marc Andreessen that lamented America’s seeming inability to build just about anything. That essay was published four years ago, at the apex of the country’s disastrous response to covid-19, when masks, PPE, and even hospital beds were in short supply. (As were basic necessities of day-to-day life like eggs, flour, and toilet paper.) It’s an alluring argument.
Yet the future is built brick by brick from the imperfect decisions we make in the present. We don’t often recognize that the seeming steps forward we are taking today could be seen as steps back in the years to come. This could very well be how we come to view some of the efforts we are making in terms of climate remediation. Xander Peters (accompanied by some incredible photography from Virginia Hanusik) writes about Louisiana’s attempts to protect communities against increased flooding—and wonders if perhaps a managed retreat might not be the better course of action.
Sometimes the things we don’t do, or the steps we skip, have bigger implications than the actions we do take. For the space program, the decision to race to the moon rather than to first build a way station—as was originally envisioned by some of the pioneers of space travel—may have had the long-term effect of keeping us more earthbound than we might otherwise be. David W. Brown looks at the fallout of those skipped steps and recounts the race to build a new, privately operated space station before the International Space Station comes plummeting back to Earth around 2030.
Other times, we’re just held back because we haven’t figured out how to do things yet. Simply put: the tech just isn’t quite there. For our cover story on home robots, Melissa Heikkilä looks at how the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence, and especially large language models, could at last be ushering in the era of helper robots that we’ve been dreaming of since the days of The Jetsons. It’s such a fertile area of development, with action from both big industry incumbents like Google and highly specialized, sometimes secretive startups, that there is far more than we could get into in a single story.
“There was an entire interview with Meta that I didn’t end up using,” Melissa told me. “They have a team working on ‘embodied AI,’ which believes that true general intelligence needs a physical element to it, such as robots or glasses. They’ve built an entire mock apartment in one of their offices, including a full-size living room, kitchen, dining room, and so on, in which they conduct experiments with robots and virtual reality. It’s pretty cool!”
