The company published a form on its website Thursday soliciting info from people who are interested in “Cybercab fleet vehicle purchasing.”
Read more The AI era has completely broken enterprise buying patterns, and startups haven’t yet figured out how to navigate.
Read more The company is about to formally launch the gold two-seater, with no steering wheel or pedals — a move that could change Tesla forever.
Read more 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.
Child-monitoring apps might need a reboot
Digital harms have become the defining fear of American parents. In response, they’re increasingly turning to content-monitoring apps that scan their children’s texts, photos, emails, and chats, issuing alerts whenever an algorithm flags something it deems dangerous.
These tools have had genuine successes, preventing suicide attempts, intercepting predators, and averting school shootings. But they can also cause harm themselves, from false alarms and unnecessary interventions to damaged trust and anxiety.
Child-safety researchers say better approaches exist. Here’s what they think those could look like.
—Kelly Clancy
This article is from our latest print magazine, which is all about kids. Subscribe now to get every issue as soon as it lands.
Agriculture relies on fossil fuels. It’s costing us.
Fertilizer prices have been on a roller coaster this year, driven in part by trade disruptions and high natural-gas prices. That’s because natural gas is both an energy source and a chemical input in the production of ammonia, a key fertilizer ingredient.
The war in Iran has pushed natural-gas prices higher and disrupted fertilizer trade through the Strait of Hormuz—and its closure could make access harder still for some of the world’s poorest countries.
—Casey Crownhart
This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 New York City has banned AI in elementary and middle schools
The one-year moratorium will affect 600,000 students. (Politico)
+ It applies to any software using student-facing generative AI. (AP)
+ Here’s how kids feel about AI, in their own words. (MIT Technology Review
2 Taiwan has uncovered a hidden Chinese network targeting its chip sector
It’s linked 166 cases to illegal operations and talent poaching. (Rest of World)
+ Taiwan’s president says its chip prowess is built on democracy. (Reuters $)
+ But its “silicon shield” could be weakening. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Uber has launched the UK’s first commercial robotaxi service
It’s using tech from UK startup Wayve and, initially, safety drivers. (Verge)
+ But in the US, Uber has allied with driver unions to slow robotaxis. (FT $)
+ And, back in the UK, Uber’s being sued over algorithmic pay. (Guardian)
4 Google has avoided a breakup of its ad tech business
A US judge rejected the government’s demand to force a sale. (Guardian)
+ But it must change how it treats rivals and shares information. (NYT $)
+ The decision is a big deal for antitrust investigations. (WSJ $)
5 Serbians have been targeted with mercenary spyware after elections
Targets included student activists, lawmakers and a local councilor. (Reuters $)
6 The Trump administration has backed OpenAI in its NYT lawsuit
The Justice Department says AI training can be fair use. (Quartz)
+ It added that national security depended on US tech dominance. (NYT $)
+ The US is also urging G20 countries to allow AI training on creators’ work. (Reuters $)
+ Does AI know too much? (MIT Technology Review)
7 Public housing tenants are suing over sensors monitoring their homes
The devices collect minute-by-minute data on noise and motion. (NYT $)
8 Anthropic seems to have won back the Trump administration’s trust
The commerce secretary said the firm is “back on the right side.” (Axios)
9 Humble exoskeletons are proving more useful than combat supersuits
Smaller devices are assisting workers, patients, and athletes. (Economist $)
10 AI food slop has made its way onto real restaurant menus
It’s providing cheap images, which frequently look revolting. (NBC News)
Quote of the day
“I think this will be the end of an era of the US trying to break up platforms this complex. The courts remain hesitant to dismantle these really complex tech systems, even when finding conduct that is anticompetitive.”
—Nikhil Lai, a principal analyst at Forrester, tells the New York Times that Google’s legal win against antitrust enforcers trying to break up its ad business is a seminal victory.
One more thing
COURTESY OF COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES
Colossal Biosciences said it cloned red wolves. Is it for real?
Last year, Colossal Biosciences announced that it had cloned four red wolves, surprising scientists working to save the species and even people whose canids supplied the DNA. They also disagreed about the company’s big idea: de-extinction.
Colossal kept the location of the mystery clones secret, and even their purpose was murky to some scientists. Just how they might restore red wolf populations was unclear. Perhaps the most curious question, though, was whether the company had cloned red wolves at all.
Can cloning really help save the red wolf? And what should we really be trying to preserve? Read the full story to find out.
—Boyce Upholt
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.)
+ Zelda gets a very British makeover in this charming Wallace and Gromit parody.
+ The “ugliest shark on the planet” has been spotted alive in its natural habitat for the first time.
+ The Euclid space telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of the Milky Way’s heart.
+ Take a tour through the history of web browsers on game consoles in this illuminating dive into a corner of juvenile web.
If you’ve had to fill up your vehicle’s gas tank or buy a plane ticket lately, you’ve probably felt the effects of rising fossil-fuel prices. But farmers buying fertilizer for their crops are especially aware of just how far the ripple effects of the conflict in Iran have spread.
Fertilizer prices have been on a roller coaster this year, kicked off in part by trade disruptions and high prices for natural gas, a key ingredient in fertilizer production. Let’s take a closer look at why conventional fertilizer prices are so sky-high, and how a few more climate-friendly alternatives could bring farmers some relief.
As fossil-fuel prices go up, nearly all industries are affected, since most of our economy relies on these fuels to move goods and people around.
But fertilizer is even more intertwined with these fluctuations, because natural gas is used as both an energy source and a chemical input in the production of ammonia, a key fertilizer ingredient. So as natural-gas prices have spiked in recent months because of the war in Iran, fertilizer prices have followed. (It’s worth briefly noting here that fertilizer production is also a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions, accounting for about 2% of the global total.)
Fertilizer trade is being directly affected as well, since about one-third of global seaborne trade in fertilizers passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed to commercial traffic because of the conflict. Access to fertilizer could get worse for some of the poorest countries around the world because of the strait’s closure, according to a report from the World Bank. While the US largely meets demand for nitrogen fertilizers with domestic production, some imports do come from the Persian Gulf.
At one point in April, the price of urea (the most commonly applied fertilizer) climbed above $850 per metric ton. That’s 80% higher than it was before the conflict and the highest level since 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting conflict caused fertilizer costs to hit record highs. Prices have come down significantly, but forecasts remain uncertain.
“There’s just this out-of-control supply chain that’s a lot more volatile than it’s ever been,” says Travis Frey, chief technology officer of Pivot Bio, a company making fertilizer with genetically edited microbes. (For more on these microbes, how they work, and what research is still needed, check out my latest story here.)
Pivot says its products are cost-competitive with chemical fertilizers today. And because they don’t use natural gas as an input, they aren’t subject to the same price spikes. When the war in Iran started, Pivot increased the volume it planned to produce, dropped prices, and allowed farmers to lock in prices for three years, Frey says.
That could be a major help for those farmers, because high prices could be here to stay for a while. Some fertilizer prices could remain high through at least 2028, according to a report from CoBank, one of the largest banks for the agriculture industry in the US.
That’s partly because the war has caused long-lasting damage: 31 ammonia plants in the Middle East have been affected or shut down completely. That’s on top of 20 ammonia plants that have been damaged in Russia in recent years.
Ongoing high prices can be extremely challenging for farmers. “The fertilizer price spikes, and because farmers have paper-thin margins, this is a real problem,” says Tim Schnabel, founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, another company working on advanced microbe fertilizers.
Higher costs can help push food prices higher, causing all of us to pay more at the grocery store. (It’s not just fertilizer, by the way. Farmers are also getting hit with wild diesel prices this year.) As long as we’re relying on fertilizers made with fossil fuels, food prices will be tied up with energy prices.
Switch and Pivot are among the companies looking to make alternative fertilizers that use microbes to provide nitrogen to plants. There’s a limit to how much synthetic fertilizers these products can actually replace: Depending on the crop and conditions, Pivot says, its products can replace about 25% of synthetic fertilizer today, and the company hopes to reach 40% to 50% of the total. But these alternatives could be a start to untangling fossil fuels and food.
“We can’t keep doing it like this,” Switch’s Schnabel says. “There’s no way we can build a society where the basis of the food chain depends on fossil fuels.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
As agentic AI moves from experimentation toward enterprise deployment, the challenge is figuring out how agents can work together, connect to the systems and data they need, and operate safely across the workflows that run a business. Although agentic AI has been adopted by some 80% of Fortune 500 companies, progress toward meaningful scale remains uneven, with many organizations still working through isolated pilots.
For Arun Chandra, chief operating officer at NiCE, the first step is moving beyond experimentation for its own sake. “Everybody’s trying to figure out what can we do with this technology?” he says. But scaling requires a clearer connection to business strategy: Organizations need to define whether they are trying to increase revenue, reduce costs, or pursue another strategic or financial objective. From there, they need to rethink the workflows where agents will operate instead of just layering AI onto existing processes. “The last thing you want to do is to apply AI on an outdated or an inefficient workflow,” Chandra says.
That shift requires organizations to treat agentic AI as a cohesive system. Agents need access to the data, knowledge, and context required to make effective decisions, as well as connections to back-end systems if they are expected to take action. Fragmented information can undermine those capabilities: “The efficacy of these AI agents is purely a function of the context, the knowledge, and the data they can ingest and use,” Chandra says.
The organizational implications are equally noteworthy. Scaling agents can create a new form of fragmentation if teams build isolated systems that don’t connect with one another, while governance, privacy, security, and change management become more important as agents take on more consequential work. Chandra argues that AI agents should ultimately be held to the same standards as human workers, with organizations thinking of their workforce as a combination of humans and AI agents.
Looking ahead, that connected approach could enable agents to work proactively and even communicate with other agents to resolve customer needs. For organizations making the transition from pilots to scale, the priority is not to “boil the ocean,” Chandra says, but to instead build a connected strategy around high-value use cases, workflows, workforce changes, and measurable outcomes.
This webcast is produced in partnership with NiCE.
This content was produced by Insights, MIT Technology Review’s custom content arm, not its editorial staff. It was researched and written by humans, with any AI tools that may have been used limited to production processes under human oversight.
Want to run TikTok ads but find the Ads Manager interface overwhelming and the learning curve too steep? Wondering how new AI-powered tools can help create, manage, and optimize TikTok ad campaigns without needing deep platform expertise? In this article, you’ll discover how TikTok’s latest AI tools, including Agentic Hub, Symphony Creative Studio, and Content […]
The post Is AI Making It So Anyone Can Run Effective TikTok Ads? appeared first on Social Media Examiner.
Friday is almost here! Before you unplug, here’s one last round of insights and updates. Whether you read them now or save them for later, you won’t want to miss these. In today’s edition: Convert Gems and GPTs into Skills Build AI employees that match your standards and work autonomously 🗞️ Industry news from Gemini, […]
The post Change Gems and GPTs Into Skills, Train Autonomous AI Employees, and Industry News appeared first on Social Media Examiner.
App owner Meta has been working to create a messaging platform similar to China’s WeChat, and this new functionality is a step toward that goal.
The platform is running a new local affiliate shopping test and clarifying some of its language around sponsored acknowledgments.