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Microsoft-owned Minecraft has become an especially popular way to push Russia's claim that its invasion was justified. As reported by The New York Times, pro-invasion players use the game to reenact a battle from January where Russian forces captured the city of Soledar in Ukraine, posting their clips on social...

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Intel reported a surprisingly strong set of Q2 earnings last week. Revenue came in at $12.9 billion, above expectations, and they turned a profit of $0.36 per share, while the Street was expecting them to lose money. The company also guided Q3 EPS above estimates, while their revenue guide was...

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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.

Cryptography may offer a solution to the massive AI-labeling problem 

The White House wants big AI companies to disclose when content has been created using artificial intelligence, and very soon the EU will require some tech platforms to label AI-generated content.

There’s a big problem, though: identifying material that was created by AI is a massive technical challenge. The best options currently available—detection tools powered by AI, and watermarking—are inconsistent, impermanent, and sometimes inaccurate.

But another approach has been attracting attention lately: C2PA. It’s an open-source internet protocol that relies on cryptography to encode details about the origins of a piece of content. The problem is, it’s far from a fix-all solution. Read the full story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley

If you’re interested in reading more about the search for a better way to label AI, check out the latest issue of The Technocrat, Tate’s weekly newsletter covering policy and power in Silicon Valley. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Friday.

The must-reads

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

1 Twitter as we knew it is dead
What comes next, in its new guise of X, is anyone’s guess. (Wired $)
+ The company has reinstated Kanye West’s account after an eight-month ban. (WP $)
+ We’re not tweeting anymore—we’re just posting. (The Verge)
+ Why doesn’t Elon Musk understand that he’s not above needing permits? (NYT $)
+ We’re witnessing the brain death of Twitter. (MIT Technology Review)

2 It looks like another covid wave is brewing
Cases are slowly creeping up, but we still don’t know if covid exhibits a seasonal pattern. (The Atlantic $)
+ Cases are on the rise in the UK, too. (The Guardian)

3 Starlink controls nearly all satellite internet services
That disproportionate power doesn’t bode well for international relations. (NYT $)+ Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Amazon is asking some of its remote workers to resign
If they can’t join office hubs, they’re being asked to vacate their positions. (Insider $)
+ Things aren’t great for UPS drivers either. (The Atlantic $)

5 Evangelical Christians are spying on sex workers online
Their surveillance tactics are helping police to obtain search warrants. (The Intercept)
+ Evangelicals are looking for answers online. They’re finding QAnon instead. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Why EV bikes keep catching fire
Though lithium-ion batteries are generally safe. (WSJ $)
+ The speed limit on certain e-bikes can be circumvented. (NYT $)

7 Military start-ups are booming
AI is supercharging weapons and systems, with potentially deadly consequences. (FT $)
+ Silicon Valley has been capitalizing on the war in Ukraine. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Creating prosthetic arms has always been challenging
The Boston Arm was among the first to harness electrical signals from its wearer’s muscles. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ These prosthetics break the mold with third thumbs, spikes, and superhero skins. (MIT Technology Review)

9 3D-printing is helping to protect rare species
By providing convincing replicas of animal body parts used to decorate traditional headdresses. (The Guardian)

10 Please don’t drink laundry detergent
Despite what you might see on TikTok. (Vox)

Quote of the day

“To them, we are like robots rather than people. The little things that make us human, you can feel them being ground out of you.”

—An anonymous Amazon worker in the UK describes the punishing reality of life inside the company’s warehouses to the Guardian.

The big story

Eight ways scientists are unwrapping the mysteries of the human brain

August 2021

There is no greater scientific mystery than the brain. It’s made mostly of water; much of the rest is largely fat. Yet this roughly three-pound blob of material produces our thoughts, memories, and emotions. It governs how we interact with the world, and it runs our body.

Increasingly, scientists are beginning to unravel the complexities of how it works and understand how the 86 billion neurons in the human brain form the connections that produce ideas and feelings, as well as the ability to communicate and react. Here’s our whistle-stop tour of some of the most cutting-edge research—and why it’s important. Read the full story.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ The cast of the US version of The Office were avid readers of an early fansite (but if you haven’t seen the British original, you really should.)
+ Timelapses of cakes rising is my latest obsession.
+ Bring back the women’s restroom lounge!
+ A pasta recipe for every week of the year is true public service journalism.
+ Clear your mind and your schedule—it’s time to take the perfect weekend nap.

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Today, we're comparing the GeForce RTX 4060 with its more upscale sibling from a different silicon wafer, the RTX 4060 Ti, to determine if the Ti variant is worth the extra $100.

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This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here.

I recently wrote a short story about a project backed by some major tech and media companies trying to help identify content made or altered by AI. 

With the boom of AI-generated text, images, and videos, both lawmakers and average internet users have been calling for more transparency. Though it might seem like a very reasonable ask to simply add a label (which it is), it is not actually an easy one, and the existing solutions, like AI-powered detection and watermarking, have some serious pitfalls. 

As my colleague Melissa Heikkilä has written, most of the current technical solutions “don’t stand a chance against the latest generation of AI language models.” Nevertheless, the race to label and detect AI-generated content is on.

That’s where this protocol comes in. Started in 2021, C2PA (named for the group that created it, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) is a set of new technical standards and freely available code that securely labels content with information clarifying where it came from.

This means that an image, for example, is marked with information by the device it originated from (like a phone camera), by any editing tools (such as Photoshop), and ultimately by the social media platform that it gets uploaded to. Over time, this information creates a sort of history, all of which is logged.

The tech itself—and the ways in which C2PA is more secure than other AI-labeling alternatives—is pretty cool, though a bit complicated. I get more into it in my piece, but it’s perhaps easiest to think about it like a nutrition label (which is the preferred analogy of most people I spoke with). You can see an example of a deepfake video here with the label created by Truepic, a founding C2PA member, with Revel AI.

“The idea of provenance is marking the content in an interoperable and tamper-evident way so it can travel through the internet with that transparency, with that nutrition label,” says Mounir Ibrahim, the vice president of public affairs at Truepic. 

When it first launched, C2PA was backed by a handful of prominent companies, including Adobe and Microsoft, but over the past six months, its membership has increased 56%. Just this week, the major media platform Shutterstock announced that it would use C2PA to label all of its AI-generated media.  

It’s based on an opt-in approach, so groups that want to verify and disclose where content came from, like a newspaper or an advertiser, will choose to add the credentials to a piece of media. 

One of the project’s leads, Andy Parsons, who works for Adobe, attributes the new interest in and urgency around C2PA to the proliferation of generative AI and the expectation of legislation, both in the US and the EU, that will mandate new levels of transparency.

The vision is grand—people involved admitted to me that real success here depends on widespread, if not universal, adoption. They said they hope all major content companies adopt the standard. 

For that, Ibrahim says, usability is key: “You wanna make sure no matter where it goes on the internet, it’ll be read and ingested in the same way, much like SSL encryption. That’s how you scale a more transparent ecosystem online.”

This could be a critical development as we enter the US election season, when all eyes will be watching for AI-generated misinformation. Researchers on the project say they are racing to release new functionality and court more social media platforms before the expected onslaught. 

Currently, C2PA works primarily on images and video, though members say that they are working on ways to handle text-based content. I get into some of the other shortcomings of the protocol in the piece, but what’s really important to understand is that even when the use of AI is disclosed, it might not stem the harm of machine-generated misinformation. Social media platforms will still need to decide whether to keep that information on their sites, and users will have to decide for themselves whether to trust and share the content. 

It’s a bit reminiscent of initiatives by tech platforms over the past several years to label misinformation. Facebook labeled over 180 million posts as misinformation ahead of the 2020 election, and clearly there were still considerable issues. And though C2PA does not intend to assign indicators of accuracy to the posts, it’s clear that just providing more information about content can’t necessarily save us from ourselves. 

What I am reading this week

• We published a handy roadmap that outlines how AI might impact domestic politics, and what milestones to watch for. It’s fascinating to think about AI submitting or contributing to a public testimony, for example. 
• Vittoria Elliott wrote a very timely story about how watermarking, which is also meant to bring transparency to AI-generated content, is not sufficient in managing the threat of disinformation. She explains that experts say the White House needs to do more than just push voluntary agreements on AI.
  • And here’s another story I thought was interesting on the race to develop better watermarking tech. 
• Speaking of AI … our AI reporter Melissa also wrote about a new tool developed by MIT researchers that can help prevent photos from being manipulated by AI. It might help prevent problems like AI-generated porn that uses real photos from unconsenting women. 
• TikTok is dipping its toe further into e-commerce. New features on the app allow users to purchase products directly from influencers, leading some to complain about a feed that feels like a flood of sponsored content. It’s a mildly alarming development in the influencer economy and highlights the selling power of social media platforms.

What I learned this week

Researchers are still trying to sort out just how social media platforms, and their algorithms, affect our political beliefs and civic discourse. This week, four new studies about the impact of Facebook and Instagram on users’ politics during the 2020 election showed that the effects are quite complicated. The studies, published by University of Texas, New York University, Princeton, and other institutions, found that while the news people read on the platforms showed a high degree of segregation by political views, removing reshared content from feeds on Facebook did not change political beliefs. 

The size of the studies is making them sort of a big deal in the academic world this week, but the research is getting some scrutiny for its close collaboration with Meta.

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Barry Sherry of Virginia wanted to travel to Europe for what was probably the 68-year-old's last "epic" bike trip abroad, cycling through Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Finland, writes CNN.

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The settlement originates from Meta's most controversial incident in its history (so far): Cambridge Analytica. The now-defunct British political consulting firm harvested the personal data of almost 90 million users without their consent for targeted political ads during the 2016 US presidential campaign and the UK's Brexit referendum. That was...

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On Friday, Call of Duty's official update account, @CODUpdates, announced the team's most recent account ban wave, aimed at players using hacks, cheats, and exploits that undermine the game's experience. According to the announcement, over 14,000 accounts were successfully targeted and banned within 24 hours. Online discourse following the ban...

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The Musk v. Zuckerberg fight has been making headlines for a while now. It began with Musk's June 21 post in which he declared being "Up for a cage match" with Zuck if the Meta boss felt the same way. Zuckerberg's response was an Instagram post reading, "Send Me Location,"...

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In an interview with IGN, Larian Studios confirmed its plans to eventually continue the Divinity: Original Sin series, but not before taking a creative break. The company's next release, Baldur's Gate 3, ships on August 3 for PC and September 6 for PlayStation 5.

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The 2.3 magnitude quake, analyzed by Western Washington University's Dr. Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, wasn't due to any tectonic activity below the streets of Seattle. Instead, the recorded seismic activity was the result of energetic fans at Swift's Eras tour stop at Seattle's Lumen Field.

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Cooler vendor Thermalright has revealed thermal pads designed for desktop CPUs. Meant for application between the processor and the heatsink, the pads replace the often tricky task of manually applying thermal paste.

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Blizzard recently stressed that using any mods in Diablo IV is forbidden. All mods, no matter how benign their effects, are treated the same as cheating, and can lead to permanent account suspension.

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The Acer Predator X27U is a high-end OLED gaming monitor with a straightforward name that is similar to other 27-inch gaming displays from LG, Asus and Corsair. Can the Acer differentiate?

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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.

Six ways that AI could change politics

—Bruce Schneier & Nathan E. Sanders

When it comes to how AI may threaten our democracy, much of the public conversation lacks imagination. People talk about the danger of campaigns that attack opponents with fake images, audio or video because we already have decades of experience dealing with doctored images and misinformation spread by foreign governments.

Threats of this sort seem urgent and disturbing because we know what to look for, and we can easily imagine their effects. But the truth is, the future will be much more interesting. Here are six milestones that will herald a new era of democratic politics driven by AI. Read the full story.

Interested in AI and politics? Why not check out:

+ How AI could write our laws. ChatGPT and other AIs could supercharge the influence of lobbyists—but only if we let them. Read the full story.

+ Read our early guide to policymaking on generative AI.

+ How judges, not politicians, could dictate America’s AI rules. With politicians struggling to curb AI harms, it’s boom time for tech lawyers. Read the full story.

The must-reads

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

1 It’s tricky to know what to make of new studies into Facebook 
Meta disagrees with how independent researchers interpreted its data. (WSJ $)
+ The company collaborated with them on a multi-year project. (WP $)
+ The findings make it even more complicated to discern social media’s effects. (NYT $)
+ It also means there are no simple answers. (The Atlantic $)

2 Generative AI companies are desperate for your data 
And it’s incredibly difficult to stop them from scraping it. (Vox)
+ YouTube is dubbing videos with AI-generated voices. (Rest of World)
+ Meta’s Llama 2 might not be as open-source as it claims. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ It looks like LinkedIn is developing an AI job application coach. (The Verge)
+ OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The quest for EV metals comes with a human cost
Miners are dying in Indonesia attempting to extract nickel. (Rest of World)

4 Won’t somebody please think of the kidfluencers?
Regulators are circling, and it’s harder to make money than it used to be. (Economist $)
+ Meet the wannabe kidfluencers struggling for stardom. (MIT Technology Review)

5 US intelligence services are trying to preserve a spying loophole
They’re trying to convince lawmakers to keep phone surveillance measures in place. (Wired $)

6 Infusing older mice with young blood helps them live longer
However, it doesn’t prove it’d work for humans. (NYT $)
+ Aging clocks aim to predict how long you’ll live. (MIT Technology Review)

7 The Cook Islands don’t know what to do about deep-sea mining
Residents are reluctant to publicly oppose their government’s pro-mining stance. (Hakai Magazine)
+ These deep-sea “potatoes” could be the future of mining for renewable energy. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Gene-edited food is on the rise
CRISPR works like natural breeding, just much faster. (Proto.Life)
+ How CRISPR could help save crops from devastation caused by pests. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Maybe aliens really are out there
That’s what a respected US intelligence official told a committee earlier this week. (FT $)
+ The internet didn’t seem too bothered by the revelation, though. (NBC News)
+ Some UFO whistleblowers are more reliable than others. (Vox)

10 TikTok is a shopping app now|
It’s basically QVC for Gen Z. (The Atlantic $)

Quote of the day

“When it comes to polarization, or people’s political beliefs, there’s a lot more that goes into this than social media.”

—Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of public policy, tells the Guardian why it’s so hard to tease out the effect social media has on people’s opinions. 

The big story

Inside Australia’s plan to survive bigger, badder bushfires

April 2019

Australia’s colonial history is dotted with fires so enormous they have their own names. The worst, Black Saturday, struck the state of Victoria on February 7, 2009. Fifteen separate fires scorched the state over just two days, killing 173 people.

While Australia is notorious for spectacular blazes, it actually ranks below the United States, Indonesia, Canada, Portugal, and Spain when it comes to the economic damage caused by wildfires over the past century.

That’s because while other nations argue about the best way to tackle the issue, the horrors of Black Saturday led Australia to drastically change its response—one of the biggest of which was also one of the most basic: taking another look at the way fire risk is rated. Read the full story.

—Bianca Nogrady

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.)

+ The friendship between a cat and rabbit is the most heartwarming thing you’ll see today.
+ Looking to buy your friend the weirdest gift possible? This website’s got your back.
+ These ancient glass artifacts discovered in the Czech Republic are really beautiful.
+ It’s time to embrace cabbage, in all its glory.
+ These never-before-seen photos of Chris Cornell in Paris are quite something.

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Chatbots such as Bard and ChatGPT are known for their hallucinations, spitting out incorrect answers from time to time. It's something Bard creator Google is well aware of and is advising people to confirm any information it produces.

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ChatGPT was released just nine months ago, and we are still learning how it will affect our daily lives, our careers, and even our systems of self-governance. 

But when it comes to how AI may threaten our democracy, much of the public conversation lacks imagination. People talk about the danger of campaigns that attack opponents with fake images (or fake audio or video) because we already have decades of experience dealing with doctored images. We’re on the lookout for foreign governments that spread misinformation because we were traumatized by the 2016 US presidential election. And we worry that AI-generated opinions will swamp the political preferences of real people because we’ve seen political “astroturfing”—the use of fake online accounts to give the illusion of support for a policy— grow for decades.

Threats of this sort seem urgent and disturbing because they’re salient. We know what to look for, and we can easily imagine their effects.

The truth is, the future will be much more interesting. And even some of the most stupendous potential impacts of AI on politics won’t be all bad. We can draw some fairly straight lines between the current capabilities of AI tools and real-world outcomes that, by the standards of current public understanding, seem truly startling.

With this in mind, we propose six milestones that will herald a new era of democratic politics driven by AI. All feel achievable—perhaps not with today’s technology and levels of AI adoption, but very possibly in the near future.

What makes for a political AI milestone?

Good benchmarks should be meaningful, representing significant outcomes that come with real-world consequences. They should be plausible; they must be realistically achievable in the foreseeable future. And they should be observable—we should be able to recognize when they’ve been achieved.

Worries about AI swaying an election will very likely fail the observability test. While the risks of election manipulation through the robotic promotion of a candidate’s or party’s interests is a legitimate threat, elections are massively complex. Just as the debate continues to rage over why and how Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, we’re unlikely to be able to attribute a surprising electoral outcome to any particular AI intervention.

Thinking further into the future: Could an AI candidate ever be elected to office? In the world of speculative fiction, from The Twilight Zone to Black Mirror, there is growing interest in the possibility of an AI or technologically assisted, otherwise-not-traditionally-eligible candidate winning an election. In an era where deepfaked videos can misrepresent the views and actions of human candidates and human politicians can choose to be represented by AI avatars or even robots, it is certainly possible for an AI candidate to mimic the media presence of a politician. Virtual politicians have received votes in national elections, for example in Russia in 2017. But this doesn’t pass the plausibility test. The voting public and legal establishment are likely to accept more and more automation and assistance supported by AI, but the age of non-human elected officials is far off.

The next political milestones for AI

Let’s start with some milestones that are already on the cusp of reality. These are achievements that seem well within the technical scope of existing AI technologies and for which the groundwork has already been laid.

Milestone #1: The acceptance by a legislature or agency of a testimony or comment generated by, and submitted under the name of, an AI.

Arguably, we’ve already seen legislation drafted by AI, albeit under the direction of human users and introduced by human legislators. After some early examples of bills written by AIs were introduced in Massachusetts and the US House of Representatives, many major legislative bodies have had their “first bill written by AI,” “used ChatGPT to generate committee remarks,” or “first floor speech written by AI” events.

Many of these bills and speeches are more stunt than serious, and they have received more criticism than consideration. They are short, have trivial levels of policy substance, or were heavily edited or guided by human legislators (through highly specific prompts to large language model–based AI tools like ChatGPT).

The interesting milestone along these lines will be the acceptance of testimony on legislation, or a comment submitted to an agency, drafted entirely by AI. To be sure, a large fraction of all writing going forward will be assisted by—and will truly benefit from—AI assistive technologies. So to avoid making this milestone trivial, we have to add the second clause: “submitted under the name of the AI.”

What would make this benchmark significant is the submission under the AI’s own name; that is, the acceptance by a governing body of the AI as proffering a legitimate perspective in public debate. Regardless of the public fervor over AI, this one won’t take long. The New York Times has published a letter under the name of ChatGPT (responding to an opinion piece we wrote), and legislators are already turning to AI to write high-profile opening remarks at committee hearings.

Milestone #2: The adoption of the first novel legislative amendment to a bill written by AI.

Moving beyond testimony, there is an immediate pathway for AI-generated policies to become law: microlegislation. This involves making tweaks to existing laws or bills that are tuned to serve some particular interest. It is a natural starting point for AI because it’s tightly scoped, involving small changes guided by a clear directive associated with a well-defined purpose.

By design, microlegislation is often implemented surreptitiously. It may even be filed anonymously within a deluge of other amendments to obscure its intended beneficiary. For that reason, microlegislation can often be bad for society, and it is ripe for exploitation by generative AI that would otherwise be subject to heavy scrutiny from a polity on guard for risks posed by AI.

Milestone #3: AI-generated political messaging outscores campaign consultant recommendations in poll testing.

Some of the most important near-term implications of AI for politics will happen largely behind closed doors. Like everyone else, political campaigners and pollsters will turn to AI to help with their jobs. We’re already seeing campaigners turn to AI-generated images to manufacture social content and pollsters simulate results using AI-generated respondents.

The next step in this evolution is political messaging developed by AI. A mainstay of the campaigner’s toolbox today is the message testing survey, where a few alternate formulations of a position are written down and tested with audiences to see which will generate more attention and a more positive response. Just as an experienced political pollster can anticipate effective messaging strategies pretty well based on observations from past campaigns and their impression of the state of the public debate, so can an AI trained on reams of public discourse, campaign rhetoric, and political reporting.

More futuristic achievements of AI as democratic actors

With these near-term milestones firmly in sight, let’s look further to some truly revolutionary possibilities. While these concepts may have seemed absurd just a year ago, they are increasingly conceivable with either current or near-future technologies.

Milestone #4: AI creates a political party with its own platform, attracting human candidates who win elections.

While an AI is unlikely to be allowed to run for and hold office, it is plausible that one may be able to found a political party. An AI could generate a political platform calculated to attract the interest of some cross-section of the public and, acting independently or through a human intermediary (hired help, like a political consultant or legal firm), could register formally as a political party. It could collect signatures to win a place on ballots and attract human candidates to run for office under its banner.

A big step in this direction has already been taken, via the campaign of the Danish Synthetic Party in 2022. An artist collective in Denmark created an AI chatbot to interact with human members of its community on Discord, exploring political ideology in conversation with them and on the basis of an analysis of historical party platforms in the country. All this happened with earlier generations of general purpose AI, not current systems like ChatGPT. However, the party failed to receive enough signatures to earn a spot on the ballot, and therefore did not win parliamentary representation.

Future AI-led efforts may succeed. One could imagine a generative AI with skills at the level of or beyond today’s leading technologies could formulate a set of policy positions targeted to build support among people of a specific demographic, or even an effective consensus platform capable of attracting broad-based support. Particularly in a European-style multiparty system, we can imagine a new party with a strong news hook—an AI at its core—winning attention and votes.

Milestone #5: AI autonomously generates profit and makes political campaign contributions.

Let’s turn next to the essential capability of modern politics: fundraising. “An entity capable of directing contributions to a campaign fund” might be a realpolitik definition of a political actor, and AI is potentially capable of this.

Like a human, an AI could conceivably generate contributions to a political campaign in a variety of ways. It could take a seed investment from a human controlling the AI and invest it to yield a return. It could start a business that generates revenue. There is growing interest and experimentation in auto-hustling: AI agents that set about autonomously growing businesses or otherwise generating profit. While ChatGPT-generated businesses may not yet have taken the world by storm, this possibility is in the same spirit as the algorithmic agents powering modern high-speed trading and so-called autonomous finance capabilities that are already helping to automate business and financial decisions.

Or, like most political entrepreneurs, AI could generate political messaging to convince humans to spend their own money on a defined campaign or cause. The AI would likely need to have some humans in the loop, and register its activities to the government (in the US context, as officers of a 501(c)(4) or political action committee).

Milestone #6: AI achieves a coordinated policy outcome across multiple jurisdictions.

Lastly, we come to the most meaningful of impacts: achieving outcomes in public policy. Even if AI cannot—now or in the future—be said to have its own desires or preferences, it could be programmed by humans to have a goal, such as lowering taxes or relieving a market regulation.

An AI has many of the same tools humans use to achieve these ends. It may advocate, formulating messaging and promoting ideas through digital channels like social media posts and videos. It may lobby, directing ideas and influence to key policymakers, even writing legislation. It may spend; see milestone #5.

The “multiple jurisdictions” piece is key to this milestone. A single law passed may be reasonably attributed to myriad factors: a charismatic champion, a political movement, a change in circumstances. The influence of any one actor, such as an AI, will be more demonstrable if it is successful simultaneously in many different places. And the digital scalability of AI gives it a special advantage in achieving these kinds of coordinated outcomes.

Will we know when the future is here?

The greatest challenge to most of these milestones is their observability: will we know it when we see it? The first campaign consultant whose ideas lose out to an AI may not be eager to report that fact. Neither will the campaign. Regarding fundraising, it’s hard enough for us to track down the human actors who are responsible for the “dark money” contributions controlling much of modern political finance; will we know if a future dominant force in fundraising for political action committees is an AI?

We’re likely to observe some of these milestones indirectly. At some point, perhaps politicians’ dollars will start migrating en masse to AI-based campaign consultancies and, eventually, we may realize that political movements sweeping across states or countries have been AI-assisted.

While the progression of technology is often unsettling, we need not fear these milestones. A new political platform that wins public support is itself a neutral proposition; it may lead to good or bad policy outcomes. Likewise, a successful policy program may or may not be beneficial to one group of constituents or another.

We think the six milestones outlined here are among the most viable and meaningful upcoming interactions between AI and democracy, but they are hardly the only scenarios to consider. The point is that our AI-driven political future will involve far more than deepfaked campaign ads and manufactured letter-writing campaigns. We should all be thinking more creatively about what comes next and be vigilant in steering our politics toward the best possible ends, no matter their means.

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While I spend a lot of time gaming, my main consideration when it comes to a keyboard is how good it is for typing. However, somewhat shamefully, I had never used a Ducky. Here are my impressions.

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This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

The unending heat this summer has kept the air conditioners in my apartment windows wildly busy. When I’m not taking guesses about what my electric bill might look like this month, I’ve been thinking a lot about how air-conditioning is the double-edged sword of climate technologies. 

On one hand, temperatures are rising around the globe, shattering extreme heat records on basically every continent. That’s making air-conditioning less of a “nice to have” and more of an absolute necessity in some parts of the world. 

On the other hand, air-conditioning is becoming a monster when it comes to energy demand. We might have to add a whole US electrical grid’s worth of new energy generation just to power all the air conditioners that will come online in the next few decades. 

This dynamic is heating up along with the planet, so for the newsletter this week, let’s talk about the climate problem/solution that is air-conditioning. 

Cold take

Air-conditioning seems ubiquitous where I live in the US, to the point that I carry around a sweater in the summer in anticipation of over-cooled offices and restaurants. 

But in many parts of the world, including some of the countries at highest risk for extreme heat, most people go without it. Roughly 5% of households in India have air-conditioning. Of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, roughly one in 10 has access to AC, according to the International Energy Agency. 

That’s expected to change in the coming decades, as the world’s largest AC manufacturers target growing markets in Asia and Africa. By 2050, over two-thirds of the world could have an air conditioner, and half those units will likely be in three countries, according to the IEA: China, Indonesia, and India.

Wider access to cooling is absolutely essential: it will save lives as heat waves become more common and more extreme because of climate change. But adding more air conditioners presents a challenge, because they’ll increase energy demand—by a lot. 

Space cooling makes up nearly 40% of all expected growth in energy demand between now and 2050. 

In 2018, cooling consumed about 2,000 terawatt-hours of energy globally. In 2050, that could grow to 6,200 TWh. The difference, 4,200 TWh, is roughly the same amount of energy the entire US electrical grid supplied in 2022. So if things don’t change, we’ll need to build enough renewable energy not only to replace all the fossil fuels still on the grid, but also to power a metric boatload of air conditioners. 

Hot off the press

The good news is that there’s a ton of room for improvement in air-conditioning technology. 

I spoke about this with Ankit Kalanki, who recently helped run a massive competition called the Global Cooling Prize. He’s also a manager in the program on carbon-free buildings at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy think tank.

The Global Cooling Prize wrapped up in 2021 and awarded prize money to teams from academia and industry that came up with better ways to cool buildings. The target was a cooling system that produced one-fifth the climate impact of conventional air conditioners while meeting a host of other criteria. 

There were eight finalists with a range of approaches, some improving on existing technology and some looking for entirely new ways to do cooling. 

The two winning teams built better versions of existing air conditioners, which are called vapor-compression systems. By swapping out certain parts for better ones (more effective heat exchangers, variable-speed compressors, and so on), the teams were able to come up with a much more efficient version of the air conditioners that we know and love today. 

But several of the other finalists were looking to mix up how we cool buildings. While these didn’t reach the climate target or one of the other criteria, all of them had “very interesting, innovative approaches,” Kalanki says. 

A few of the finalists belong to a category of startups looking to materials called desiccants, which can suck up moisture from the air like a sponge. By using these materials to deal with humidity, cooling devices could greatly reduce electricity use while keeping us comfortable on hot days. 

I just took a close look at these desiccant cooling systems for my latest story. Basically, there’s a long way to go before these materials find their way into homes and commercial buildings, but the physics behind how they might work is fascinating. If you’re interested in hearing more, check out my reporting for all the details. And for more on both the impending problem of air conditioners and some potential solutions, check out some other stories from the Tech Review vault. 

Related reading

I wrote last summer about the summer heat waves in Europe, and what adding more air-conditioning could mean for the continent.

My colleague James Temple reported in 2020 about how big a problem AC was shaping up to be.

James also took a look at how caloric materials, which can release heat when they’re subjected to pressure or an electric field, could chart a new method of cooling buildings.  

Keeping up with climate

Texas and California have historically faced a stressed grid in the summer. This year, however, things have so far been quiet for the two states. California’s had a lot of hydropower capacity because of an excessively wet winter, and Texas has installed a ton of solar recently. (Wall Street Journal) 

Some experts say that paying people to use less energy during high-stress times on the grid could help keep blackouts at bay, but Texas hasn’t put any residential demand-response programs in place. (Canary Media)

Geothermal startup Fervo reached a new milestone, completing a 30-day demonstration of its 3.5-megawatt commercial pilot plant. (Bloomberg) 

→ Fervo showed earlier this year that it can use its wells as a massive underground battery. (MIT Technology Review)

The hottest new corporate climate trend is “greenhushing,” or keeping quiet about climate pledges. Nobody can ask questions about your goals if you never talk about them. (Grist) 

While agriculture has struggled in some parts of the world, crop yields are still on the rise in the US. Experts aren’t sure how long that trend will last. (Modern Farmer)

The US federal government has been pumping money into clean energy since the Inflation Reduction Act passed nearly a year ago. More than a third of the manufacturing funding has gone to South Korean companies, which have positioned themselves as key partners, especially in batteries. (Inside Climate News)

Intense storms are causing severe flooding around the world. Climate change is playing a role in these storms, and we’re only going to see more of them. (Vox)

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