Technology Review

• The Download: AI agents’ autonomy, and sodium-based batteries

  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. Are we ready to hand AI agents the keys? In recent months, a new class of agents has arrived on the scene: ones built using large language models. Any action that can be…

• Are we ready to hand AI agents the keys?

  On May 6, 2010, at 2:32 p.m. Eastern time, nearly a trillion dollars evaporated from the US stock market within 20 minutes—at the time, the fastest decline in history. Then, almost as suddenly, the market rebounded. After months of investigation, regulators attributed much of the responsibility for this “flash crash” to high-frequency trading algorithms, which…

• These new batteries are finding a niche

  Lithium-ion batteries have some emerging competition: Sodium-based alternatives are starting to make inroads. Sodium is more abundant on Earth than lithium, and batteries that use the material could be cheaper in the future. Building a new battery chemistry is difficult, mostly because lithium is so entrenched. But, as I’ve noted before, this new technology has…

• The Download: Amsterdam’s welfare AI experiment, and making humanoid robots safer

  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. Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI Amsterdam thought it was on the right track. City officials in the welfare department believed they could build technology that would prevent fraud while…

• Why humanoid robots need their own safety rules

  Last year, a humanoid warehouse robot named Digit set to work handling boxes of Spanx. Digit can lift boxes up to 16 kilograms between trolleys and conveyor belts, taking over some of the heavier work for its human colleagues. It works in a restricted, defined area, separated from human workers by physical panels or laser…