2026-04-22 20:10:00
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.
What actually matters in AI right now? It’s getting harder to tell amid the constant launches, hype, and warnings. To cut through the noise, MIT Technology Review’s reporters and editors have distilled years of analysis into a new essential guide: the 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now.
The list builds on our annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies, but takes a wider view of the ideas, topics, and research shaping AI, spotlighting the trends and breakthroughs shaping the world.
We’ll be unpacking one item from the list each day here in The Download, explaining what it means and why it matters. Read the full rundown now—and stay tuned for the days ahead.
As the conflict in Iran has escalated, a crucial resource is under fire: the desalinization technology that supplies water in the region.
President Donald Trump recently threatened to destroy “possibly all desalinization plants” in Iran if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened. The impact on farming, industry, and—crucially—drinking in the Middle East could be severe. Find out why.
—Casey Crownhart
This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 An unauthorized group has reportedly accessed Anthropic’s Mythos
Users in a private online forum may have gained access. (Bloomberg $)
+ Anthropic said the model was too dangerous for a full release. (Axios)
+ Mozilla used it to find 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox. (Wired $)
2 Meta will track workers’ clicks and keystrokes for AI training
Tracking software is being installed on workers’ computers.(Reuters $)
+ Employees are up in arms about the program. (Business Insider)
+ LLMs could supercharge mass surveillance in the US. (MIT Technology Review)
3 ChatGPT allegedly advised the Florida State shooter
About when and where to strike, and which ammunition to use. (Washington Post $)
+ Florida’s attorney general is probing ChatGPT’s role in the shooting. (Ars Technica)
+ Does AI cause delusions or just amplify them? (MIT Technology Review)
4 SpaceX has secured the option to buy AI startup Cursor for $60 billion
Or pay $10 billion for the work they’re doing together. (The Verge)
+ SpaceX made the deal as it prepares to go public. (NYT $)
+ Musk’s endgame for the company may be a land grab in space. (The Atlantic $)
5 The Pentagon wants $54 billion for drones
That would rank among the top 10 military budgets for entire nations. (Ars Technica)
+ Shoplifters could soon be chased down by drones. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Apple’s new chief hardware officer signals a sprint to build in-house chips
Apple silicon lead Johny Srouji has been promoted to the role. (CNBC)
7 China’s government is tightening its grip on AI firms that try to leave
It’s doing all it can to stop firms like Manus sending talent and research overseas. (Washington Post $)
8 The FBI is probing the deaths of scientists tied to sensitive research
Including a nuclear physicist and MIT professor shot outside his home. (CNN)
9 The US is accelerating research into psychedelic medical treatment
Including the mysterious ibogaine. (Nature)
+ But psychedelics are (still) falling short in clinical trials. (MIT Technology Review)
10 The first retail boutique run by an AI agent has opened—and it’s chaos
The San Francisco shop is reassuringly mismanaged. (NYT $)
Quote of the day
—Donald Trump pays a classy tribute to Tim Cook on Truth Social.
One More Thing
A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death. His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain.
Jean Hébert, a program manager at the US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), believes we can beat aging by adding youthful tissue to people’s brains. Read the full story on his futuristic plan to extend human life.
—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.)
+ A Lego set was sent to the edge of space—and survived.
+ Go behind the scenes with Werner Herzog as he guides a new generation of filmmakers.
+ This video about enshittification perfectly captures the frustration of the degrading internet.
+ NASA’s latest deep-space capture offers a rare view of planetary systems in their absolute infancy.
2026-04-22 18:05:06
Artificial intelligence is moving quickly in the enterprise, from experimentation to everyday use. Organizations are deploying copilots, agents, and predictive systems across finance, supply chains, human resources, and customer operations. By the end of 2025, half of companies used AI in at least three business functions, according to a recent survey.
But as AI becomes embedded in core workflows, business leaders are discovering that the biggest obstacle is not model performance or computing power but the quality and the context of the data on which those systems rely. AI essentially introduces a new requirement: Systems must not only access data — they must understand the business context behind it.
Without that context, AI can generate answers quickly but still make the wrong decision, says Irfan Khan, president and chief product officer of SAP Data & Analytics.
“AI is incredibly good at producing results,” he says. “It moves fast, but without context it can’t exercise good judgment, and good judgment is what creates a return on investment for the business. Speed without judgment doesn’t help. It can actually hurt us.”
In the emerging era of autonomous systems and intelligent applications, that context layer is becoming essential. To provide context, companies need a well-designed data fabric that does more than just integrate data, Khan says. The right data fabric allows organizations to scale AI safely, coordinate decisions across systems and agents, and ensure that automation reflects real business priorities rather than making decisions in isolation.
Recognizing this, many organizations are rethinking their data architecture. Instead of simply moving data into a single repository, they are looking for ways to connect information across applications, clouds, and operational systems while preserving the semantics that describe how the business works. That shift is driving growing interest in data fabric as a foundation for AI infrastructure.
Traditional data strategies have largely focused on aggregation. Over the past two decades, organizations have invested heavily in extracting information from operational systems and loading it into centralized warehouses, lakes, and dashboards. This approach makes it easier to run reports, monitor performance, and generate insights across the business, but in the process, much of the meaning attached to that data — how it relates to policies, processes, and real-world decisions — is lost.
Take two companies using AI to manage supply-chain disruptions. If one uses raw signals such as inventory levels, lead times, and supply scores, while the other adds context across business processes, policies, and metadata, both systems will rapidly analyze the data but likely come up with different conclusions.
Information such as which customers are strategic accounts, what tradeoffs are acceptable during shortages, and the status of extended supply chains will allow one AI system to make strategic decisions, while the other will not have the proper context, Khan says.
“Both systems move very quickly, but only one moves in the right direction,” he says. “This is the context premium and the advantage you gain when your data foundation preserves context across processes, policies and data by design.”
In the past, companies implicitly managed a lack of context because human experts provided the missing information, but with AI, there is a shortfall and that creates serious limitations. AI systems do not just display information; they act on it. If a system does not explain why data matters, an AI model may optimize for the wrong outcome. Inventory numbers, payment histories, or demand signals might be accurate, but they do not necessarily reveal which customers must be prioritized, which contractual obligations apply, or which products are strategically important. As a result, the system can produce answers that are technically correct but operationally flawed.
This realization is changing how companies think about AI readiness. Most acknowledge that they do not have the mature data processes and infrastructure in place to trust their data and their AI systems. Only one in five organizations consider their approach to data to be highly mature, and only 9% feel fully prepared to integrate and interoperate with their data systems.
The emerging solution is a data fabric: An abstraction layer that spans infrastructure, architecture, and logical organization. For agentic AI, the fabric becomes the primary interface, allowing agents to interact with business knowledge rather than raw storage systems. Knowledge graphs play a central role, enabling agents to query enterprise data using natural language and business logic.
The value of the data fabric relies on three components: Intelligent compute to provide speed, a knowledge pool to provide business understanding and context, and agents to provide autonomous action are grounded in that understanding. What makes this powerful is how these capabilities work together, says Khan.
The technology provides the architecture — a foundation that makes agent-to-agent communication and coordination possible. The process will define how businesses and IT share ownership, and establish governance and a culture in which people trust enough to adopt it. Now all three things must work together for a business data fabric to truly be successful.
“It empowers confident, consistent decisions, and when these elements all come together, AI just doesn’t analyze and interpret the data — it drives smarter, faster decisions that really create business impact,” he says. “This is the promise of a thoughtfully designed business data fabric, where every part reinforces the other, and every insight is grounded in trust and clarity.”
Technically, building a data-fabric layer requires several capabilities. Data must be accessible across multiple environments through federation rather than forced consolidation. A semantic or knowledge layer is needed to harmonize meaning across systems, often supported by knowledge graphs and catalog-driven metadata. Governance and policy enforcement must also operate across the fabric so that AI systems can access data securely and consistently.
Together, these elements create a foundation where AI interacts with business knowledge instead of raw storage systems — an essential step for moving from experimentation to real enterprise automation.
In the emerging era of agentic AI, the responsibility for monitoring, analyzing, and making decisions based on data increasingly shifts to software. AI agents can monitor events, trigger workflows, and make decisions in real time, often without direct human intervention. That speed creates new opportunities, but it also raises the stakes. When multiple agents operate across finance, supply chain, procurement, or customer operations, they must be guided by the same understanding of business priorities.
Without a common knowledge layer connecting disparate data together, coordination between systems quickly breaks down. One system might optimize for margin, another for liquidity, and another for compliance, each working from a different slice of data.
Importantly, most enterprises already possess much of the knowledge needed to make this work, says Khan. Years of operational data, master data, workflows, and policy logic already exist across business applications — companies just need to make it accessible. Companies that deploy data fabrics gain greater trust in their data, with more than two thirds of enterprises seeing improved data accessibility, data visibility, and exerting more control over their data.
“The opportunity isn’t just inventing context from scratch, it’s activating and connecting the context across your business that already exists,” he continues, adding that a data fabric is the “architecture that ensures data semantics, business processes and policies are connected as a unified system across all the clouds.”
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
2026-04-22 18:00:00
Los Angeles deserves its reputation as the quintessential car city—the rhythms of its 2,200 square miles are dictated by wide boulevards and concrete arcs of freeways. But it once had a world-class rail transit system, and for the last three decades, the city has been rebuilding a network of trolleys and subways. In May, a new four-mile segment with three new subway stations will open along Wilshire Boulevard, a key east-west corridor that connects downtown LA to the Pacific Ocean. What today can be an hours-long drive through a busy, museum-packed stretch of the city will be, if all goes well, a 25-minute train ride.
The existence of subway stops in this part of town—known as Miracle Mile—is a technological triumph over geography and geology. The ground underneath it is literally a disaster waiting to happen—it’s tarry and full of methane. One of those methane deposits actually exploded in 1985, destroying a department store in the neighborhood. In response, the city pushed its new train routes to other parts of town.
These days, dirt full of flammable goo is no longer a problem. “The technology finally caught up with the concerns,” says LA Metro’s James Cohen, a longtime manager of the engineering for this stretch of subway. The key was an earth-pressure-balance tunnel-boring machine, an automated digger that is designed to chew through ground packed with explosive gas. It sends removed dirt topside via conveyor belts and slides precast concrete liner segments into the tunnel, which are joined together with gaskets to create a gas- and waterproof tube. All that let the machine dig about 50 feet every day.
Meanwhile, engineers excavated the stations from the street level down. They worked mostly on weekends, digging out a space and then decking it with concrete so that work could go on underneath while LA drivers continued to exercise their God-given right to get around by car above.
Did the project finish on time? No. Did it come in under budget? Also no; this segment alone cost nearly $4 billion. Is the city now racing to build housing and walkable areas to take full advantage of the extension? Oh, please. Yet the new stations still manage to feel, in the end, transformative—as if Los Angeles’s train has finally come in.
2026-04-22 18:00:00
When people talk about “nature,” they’re generally talking about things that aren’t made by human beings. Rocks. Reefs. Red wolves. But while there is plenty of God’s creation to go around, it is hard to think of anything on Earth that human hands haven’t affected.
In the Brazilian rainforest, scientists have found microplastics in the bellies of animals ranging from red howler monkeys to manatees. In remotest Yakutia, where much of the earth remains untrodden by human feet, the carbon in the sky above melts the permafrost below. In the Arctic Ocean, artificial light from ship traffic—on the rise as the polar ice cap melts away—now disrupts the nightly journey of zooplankton to the ocean surface, one of the largest animal migrations on the planet. The remote mountain lakes of the Alps are contaminated with all kinds of synthetic chemicals. Polar bears are full of flame retardants. Cesium-137, fallout from nuclear bomb explosions, lightly rimes the entire planet.
These examples are mostly pollution—nuclear, carbon, chemical, light—but I raise them not to highlight the ways human industry and technology degrade the environment but to note how the things humans build change it. Nobody really knows what the exact effects of all that will be, but my point is that no part of the globe is free of human fingerprints. We have literally changed the world.
We’ve changed ourselves as well. Humans are especially adept at bending human nature. Everything about us is up for grabs—appearance, health, our very thoughts. Pharmaceuticals, surgeries, vaccines, and hormones give us longer lives, take away our pain, ease our anxiety and depression, make us faster, stronger, more resilient. We’re getting glimpses of technologies that will let us change who our children will become before they’re even born. Electrodes implanted in people’s brains let them control computers and translate thoughts into speech. Prosthetics and exoskeletons straight out of comic books restore and enhance physical abilities, while gene-editing technologies like CRISPR are rewriting our very DNA. And meanwhile, people have taken the sum total of all the information we have ever written down and poured it into vast calculating machines in an effort—at least by some—to build an intelligence greater than our own.
So what even is nature, or natural, in this context? Is it “environmentalist,” in the conventional sense, to try to preserve what one could argue no longer exists? Should we employ technology to try to make the world more “natural”?
Those questions led us to approach this Nature issue with humility. We try to grapple with them all the time—MIT Technology Review is, after all, a review of how people have altered and built upon nature.
And it’s a place to think about how we might repair it. Take solar geoengineering, for example—a subject we have covered with increasing frequency over the past few years. The basic idea of geoengineering is to find a technological fix for a problem technology caused: Burning petrochemicals to fuel the Industrial Revolution turned Earth’s atmosphere into a heat sink, fundamentally breaking the climate. Some geoengineers think that releasing particulate matter into the stratosphere would reflect sunlight back into space, thus reducing global temperatures. After years of theoretical discussions, some companies have begun to actively experiment with such technologies. This might seem like a great way to restore the world to a more natural state. It’s also fraught with controversy and peril. It could, for example, benefit some nations while harming others. It may give us license to continue burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases. The list goes on.
Nature isn’t easy.
In our May/June issue, we have attempted to take a hard look at nature in our unnatural world. We have stories about birds that can’t sing, wolves that aren’t wolves, and grass that isn’t grass. We look for the meaning of life under Arctic ice and within ourselves—and in the far future, on a distant world, courtesy of new fiction by the renowned author Jeff VanderMeer. I don’t know if any of that will answer the questions I’ve been asking here—but we can’t help but try. It’s in our nature.
2026-04-22 18:00:00
“Pull over!” I order my brother one sunny February afternoon. Our target is in sight: a gaggle of Canada geese, pecking at grass near the dog park. As I approach, tiptoeing over their grayish-white poop, I notice that one bird wears a white cuff around its slender black neck. It’s a GPS tracker—part of a new tech-centered campaign to drive the geese out of my hometown of Foster City, California.
About 300 geese live in this sleepy Bay Area suburb, equal to nearly 1% of our human population—and some say this town isn’t big enough for the both of us. Goose poop notoriously blanketed our middle school’s lawn, and the birds have hassled residents for generations. My own grandmother remembers when geese took over her garage for five whole minutes before waddling out. She says, “I wanted to kill them, but I thought I’d get in trouble.”
Indeed, that idea doesn’t fly here. City officials backed out of a previous plan to kill 100 geese following uproar from local environmentalists. Still, the poop creates a public health hazard; the birds need to go.
So the city paid nearly $400,000—roughly $1,300 per goose—to Wildlife Innovations, a company that resolves conflicts between humans and wildlife, to haze the geese with gadgets. The company’s approach is “basically, making the geese less comfortable,” Dan Biteman, head of the goose management plan and senior wildlife biologist at Wildlife Innovations, tells me.
The need for such conflict resolution is on the rise as land development collides with changes in animal behavior. Though overpopulation of Canada geese is a national nuisance in the US, such tensions also surface with other species in this country and elsewhere, including grizzlies on the Montana prairies, coyotes on San Francisco streets, and savanna elephants in Tanzania parks.
So the people whose job it is to deal with recalcitrant critters are bringing on the gadgets.
Back in Foster City, I spot a black camera mounted to a tree trunk at Gull Park by the lagoon. They’re in seven parks around town, programmed to snap photos every 15 minutes and transmit them back to Wildlife Innovations HQ. If they detect geese, a biologist immediately drives over to disperse the birds. One team member uses devices like lasers or drones; another brings along a goose-hating border collie named Rocky.
As a special measure, staff deploy the “Goosinator,” a small, remote-controlled neon-orange pontoon boat with a fearsome dog-like mouth painted on its bow, meant to evoke geese’s fear of coyotes and bright colors. It comes with attachable wheels and can zoom around on land or water to chase birds away. Biteman tells me the company is thinking about mounting speakers on trees and flying drones that will screech the calls of goose predators like red-tailed hawks or golden eagles.
The company received federal permits required by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to stick GPS trackers on 10 geese, too. This way, staff can surveil the geese and research their behavior and movements.
At local goose hangouts, signs that look like “Wanted” posters alert the public to the new plan. As I watch some culprits graze (and defecate) on a church lawn, I think to myself: Enjoy it while it lasts.
Annika Hom is an award-winning independent journalist. She’s written for National Geographic, Wired, and more.
2026-04-22 18:00:00
If you thought K-pop was weird, virtual idols—humans who perform as anime-style digital characters via motion capture—will blow your mind. My favorite is a girl group called Isegye Idol, created by Woowakgood, a Korean VTuber (a streamer who likewise performs as a digital persona). Isegye Idol’s six members are anonymous, which seems to let them deploy a rare breed of honesty and humor. They play games (League of Legends, Go, Minecraft), chitchat, and perform kitschy music that’s somewhere between anime soundtrack and video-game score. It’s very DIY—and very intimate. And the group’s wild popularity speaks to the mood of Gen Z South Koreans, famously lonely and culturally adrift—struggling to find work, giving up on dating, trying to find friendships online. Isegye Idol shows what a magical online universe people can build when reality stops working for them.
Pavel Talankin didn’t have the easiest life as a schoolteacher in the copper-smelting town of Karabash, Russia; UNESCO once called it the most toxic place on Earth. But video he shot, partially in secret, makes it clear he loved it—the smokestacks, the cold, the ice mustache he’d get walking around outside, and, most of all, his bright-eyed students. That makes it all the more painful when a distant, grinding war and state propaganda change the town. An antiwar progressive with a democracy flag in his classroom, Talankin had to deal with a new patriotic curriculum, mandatory parades, visits from mercenaries—and the loss of the creative space he’d built with his students. Talankin’s footage tells his story in this Oscar-winning documentary from director David Borenstein, and what struck me most is how strange it is being an adult around kids. We shape them in profound ways we might not even recognize.
I am the kind of person who will pay $150 to watch a comedian in a smelly theater in San Francisco that charges $20 for a can of water—because I am crazy enough to hope that standup will not die. In February, I saw the British comedian James Acaster perform live … and it was a mediocre show. But Repertoire, his 2018 miniseries on Netflix, is gold. Shot shortly after Acaster went through a breakup, the four-part show features him portraying, among other characters, a cop who goes undercover as a standup comedian, forgets who he is, and gets divorced. And then things get weird. “What if every relationship you’ve ever been in,” Acaster asks, “is somebody slowly figuring out they didn’t like you as much as they hoped they would?” If the best comedy comes from paying attention to the hellhole that you’re in, I wish Acaster many more pitfalls.
