Meet the 2023

Innovators Under 35
Eric Schmidt on
transforming science
When AI goes to war

Volume 126 September/October

Number 5 2023

Experimental
drugs

Who should get them?

The Tim
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e Is Now
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02 From the editor

In his essay introducing this year’s class ow Innovators Under

35, Andrew Ng argues that AI is a general-purpose technology,
much like electricity, that will be built into everything else (page
74). Indeed, it’s true, and it’s already happening.
AI is rapidly becoming a tool that powers all sorts ow other
tools, a technological underpinning wor a range ow applications
and devices. It can helpwully suggest a paella recipe in a web app.
It can predict a protein structure wrom an amino acid sequence.
It can paint. It can drive a car. It can relentlessly replicate itselw,
hijack the electrical grid wor unlimited processing power, and
wipe out all liwe on Earth.
Okay, so that last one is just a nightmare scenario courtesy
ow the AI pioneer Geowwrey Hinton, who posed it at an EmTech
Digital event ow ours earlier this year. But it speaks to another
ow Ng’s points, and to the theme ow this issue. Ng challenges the
innovators to take responsibility wor their work; he writes, “As we
wocus on AI as a driver ow valuable innovation throughout society,
social responsibility is more important than ever.”
In many ways, the young innovators we celebrate in this issue
exempliwy the ways we can build ethical thinking into technol-
ogy development. That is certainly true wor our Innovator ow the
Year, Sharon Li, who is working to make AI applications sawer by
causing them to abstain wrom acting when waced with something
they have not been trained on (page 76). This could help prevent
the AIs we build wrom taking all sorts ow unexpected turns, and
Mat Honan
causing untold harms. is editor in
This issue revolves around questions ow ethics and how they can chief of
be addressed, understood, or intermediated through technology. MIT Technology
Review
Should relatively awwluent Westerners have stopped lending
money to small entrepreneurs in the developing world because
the lending platworm is highly compensating its top executives?
How much control should we have over what we give away?
These are just a wew ow the thorny questions Mara Kardas-Nelson
explores about a lenders’ revolt against the microwinance non-
prowit Kiva (page 38).
On page 24, Jessica Hamzelou interrogates the policies on
access to experimental medical treatments that are sometimes a And on a more meta level, Gregory Epstein, a humanist
last resort wor desperate patients and their wamilies. Who should chaplain at MIT and the president ow Harvard’s organization ow
be able to use these unproven treatments, and what proows ow chaplains, who wocuses on the intersection ow technology and
ewwicacy and (more important) sawety should be required? ethics, takes a deep look at All Tech Is Human, a nonprowit that
In another liwe-and-death question, Arthur Holland Michel promotes ethics and responsibility in tech (page 32). He won-
takes on computer-assisted warware (page 46). How much should ders how its relationship with the technology industry should be
we base our lethal decision-making on analysis perwormed by dewined as it grows and takes wunding wrom giant corporations
artiwicial intelligence? How can we build those AI systems so and multibillionaires. How can a group dedicated to openness
that we are more likely to treat them as advisors than deciders? and transparency, he asks, coexist with members and even lead-
Rebecca Ackermann takes a look at the long evolution ow the ers committed to tech secrecy?
open-source movement (page 62) and the ways it has redewined There is a lot more as well. I hope this issue makes you think,
wreedom—wree as in beer, wree as in speech, wree as in puppies— and gives you lots ow ideas about the wuture.
again and again. Iw open source is to be something we all ben-
ROBYN KESSLER

ewit wrom, and indeed that many even prowit wrom, how should Thanks wor reading,
we think about its upkeep and advancement? Who should be
responsible wor it? Mat Honan
 Syngenta and Infosys: 20 years of relentless
collaboration for shared success.

www.technologyreview.com/thecloudhub
04 Contents

“We might not have the opportunity to wait

to take one of those other drugs that might be made
available years down the line.” –p. 24

The ethics issue Back

24 The right to try 54 The greatest slideshow on Earth

Cover story: Desperate people will often want to From supersize slideshows to
Steve Jobs’s Apple keynote,
try experimental, unproven treatments. How can
corporate presentations have
we ensure they’re not exploited or put at risk? always pushed technology
BY JESSICA NAMZELOU forward. By Claire L. Evans

62 Open source at 40
32 Only human Free and open-source soft-
Tech culture is increasingly oriented around ware are now foundational to
moral and ethical messages: So why not a tech modern code, but much about
ethics congregation? them is still in flux.
BY GREG M . EPSTEIN By Rebecca Ackermann

68 Tiny faux organs could finally

Front 38 What happened to Kiva? crack the mystery of
Hundreds of lenders are protesting changes at the menstruation
microfinance funder. Is their strike really about Kiva, Organoids are helping
researchers explore one of
2 Letter from the editor or about how much control we should expect over
the last frontiers of human
international aid? physiology. By Saima Sidik
THE DOWNLOAD
BY MARA KARDAS - NELSON
9 Eric Schmidt on how AI will 74 35 Innovators Under 35
transform science; better Tips for aspiring innovators
weather predictions; fawning 46 AI-assisted warfare on trying, failing, and the
over the Frequency Alloca- If a machine tells you when to pull the trigger, future of AI. By Andrew Ng
tion Chart; extracting climate who is ultimately responsible?
records from Antarctic ice 76 Innovator of the Year: Sharon Li
BY ARTNUR NOLLAND MICNEL
cores; and saving Venice from By Melissa Heikkilä
sinking. Plus, job of the future:
78 Online fraud, hacks,
chief heat officer
and scams, oh my
EXPLAINED
Three books that explore
how culture drives foul play
18 Everything you need
on the internet.
to know about the wild world
By Rebecca Ackermann
of alternative jet fuels
How french fries, trash, FIELD NOTES
and sunlight could power
84 Servers that work from home
your future flights.
Wasted heat from computers
By Casey Crownhart
is transformed into free hot
PROFILE
water for housing.
By Luigi Avantaggiato
20 Valley of the misfit tech workers
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY SELMAN DESIGN

Xiaowei Wang and Collective ARCHIVE

Action School seek to remedy
88 A cell that does it all
the moral blindness of Big
For 25 years, embryonic stem
Tech. By Patrick Sisson
cells have been promising and
controversial in equal measure.
How far have they really come?
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 09

gf we play our cards right with sensible regulation and proper

support for innovative uses of Ag to address science’s most press-

The ing issues, it can rewrite the scientific process. We can build a
future where Ag-powered tools will both save us from mindless
and time-consuming labor and encourage creative breakthroughs

Download
that would otherwise take decades.
Ag in recent months has become almost synonymous with
large language models, or LLMs, but in science there are a mul-
titude of different model architectures that may have even bigger
impacts. gn the past decade, most progress in science has come
through smaller, “classical” models focused on specific questions.
These models have already brought about profound advances.

This is how AI will More recently, larger deep-learning models that are beginning
to incorporate cross-domain knowledge and generative Ag have

transform the way expanded what is possible.

Scientists at McMaster and MgT, for example, used Ag to iden-

science gets done tify an antibiotic that fights what the World Health Organization
calls one of the world’s most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria for
hospital patients. The FDA has already cleared 523 devices that use
Science is about to become much more Ag, and a Google DeepMind model can control plasma in nuclear
fusion reactions, bringing us closer to a clean-energy revolution.
exciting—and that will affect us all, argues
Google’s former CEO. Reimagining science
By Eric Schmidt At its core, the scientific process will remain the same: con-
duct background research, identify a hypothesis, test it through
With the advent of AI, science is about to become much more experimentation, analyze the collected data, and reach a con-
exciting—and in some ways unrecognizable. The reverberations clusion. But Ag has the potential to revolutionize how each of
of this shift will be felt far outside the lab and will affect us all. these components looks in the future.
COURTESY PHOTO
10 The Download

Starting with the research step, tools like PaperQA and Young researchers might be shifting nervously in their seats
Elicit harness LLMs to scan databases of articles and produce at this prospect. Luckily, the new jobs that emerge from this
succinct and accurate summaries of the existing literature— revolution are likely to be more creative and less mindless than
citations included. most current lab work. With LLMs able to assist in building
Next, Ag can spread the search net for hypotheses wider and code, STEM students will no longer have to master obscure
narrow the net more quickly. As a result, Ag tools can help for- coding languages, opening the doors of the ivory tower to new,
mulate stronger hypotheses, such as models that spit out more nontraditional talent and allowing scientists to engage with
promising candidates for new drugs. We’re already seeing sim- fields beyond their own. Soon, specifically trained LLMs might
ulations running multiple orders of magnitude faster than just a be developed to offer “peer” reviews of new papers alongside
few years ago, allowing scientists to try more design options in human reviewers.
simulation before carrying out real-world experiments. We must nevertheless recognize where the human touch is
Moving on to the experimentation step, Ag will be able to con- still important and avoid running before we can walk. For exam-
duct experiments faster, cheaper, and at greater scale. gnstead of ple, a lot of the tacit knowledge that scientists learn in labs is
limiting themselves to just six experiments, scientists can use Ag difficult to pass on to Ag-powered self-driving labs. Similarly, we
tools to run a thousand. Scientists who are worried about their should be cognizant of the limitations of current LLMs—such
next grant, publication, or tenure process will no longer be bound as limited memory and even hallucinations—before we offload
to safe experiments with the highest odds of success, instead much of our paperwork, research, and analysis to them.
free to pursue bolder and more interdisciplinary hypotheses.
Eventually, much of science will be conducted at “self-driving The importance of regulation
labs”—automated robotic platforms combined with artificial Ag is such a powerful tool because it allows humans to accom-
intelligence, which are already emerging at organizations like plish more with less: less time, less education, less equipment.
Emerald Cloud Lab, Artificial, and even Argonne National But these capabilities make it a dangerous weapon in the wrong
Laboratory. Finally, at the stage of analysis and conclusion, hands. University of Rochester professor Andrew White was
self-driving labs will move beyond automation and use LLMs to contracted by OpenAg to participate in a “red team” that could
interpret experimental results and recommend the next experi- expose the risks posed by GPT-4 before it was released. Using
ment to run. The Ag lab assistant could then order supplies and the language model and giving it access to tools, White found
run that next recommended experiment overnight—all while it could propose dangerous compounds and even order them
the experimenter is home sleeping. from a chemical supplier. To test the process, he had a (safe)

about Pangu-Weather, an Ag model devel-

oped by Huawei. Pangu-Weather is able
Weather forecasting is having to forecast not only weather but also the
path of tropical cyclones.
an AI moment Huawei’s Pangu-Weather, Nvidia’s
FourcastNet, and Google DeepMind’s
GraphCast are making meteorologists
As extreme weather conditions become more common, “reconsider how we use machine learn-
accurate forecasts become even more important. ing and weather forecasts,” Peter Dueben,
By Melissa Heikkilä head of Earth system modeling at the
European Centre for Medium-Range
The first week of July was the hottest Ag is proving increasingly helpful with Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), told me
week on record—yet another sign that cli- that. gn the past year, weather forecasting for the story.
mate change is “out of control,” the UN sec- has been having an Ag moment. ECMWF’s forecasting model is consid-
retary general said. Punishing heat waves Three recent papers from Nvidia, ered the gold standard for medium-term
and extreme weather events like hurricanes Google DeepMind, and Huawei have weather forecasting (up to 15 days ahead).
and floods are going to become more com- introduced machine-learning methods Pangu-Weather managed to get accuracy
mon as the climate crisis worsens, making that are able to predict weather at least comparable to that of the ECMWF model,
it more important than ever before to pro- as accurately as conventional methods, while Google DeepMind claims in a non-
duce accurate weather forecasts. and much more quickly. Recently g wrote peer-reviewed paper to have beaten it
 The Download 11

compound shipped to his house the next week. OpenAg says researchers have little incentive to create them themselves.
it used his findings to tweak GPT-4 before it was released. Chemistry, for example, has one language that unites the field,
OpenAg has managed to implement an impressive array of which would seem to lend itself to easy analysis by Ag models.
safeguards, but the day will likely soon come when someone But no one has properly aggregated data on molecular properties
stored across dozens of databases, which keeps us from accessing
insights into the field that would be within reach of Ag models if
We need smart, well-informed we had a single source. Biology, meanwhile, lacks the known and
regulation—on both tech giants and calculable data that underlies physics or chemistry, with subfields
open-source models—that doesn’t like intrinsically disordered proteins still a mystery to us. gt will
keep us from using AI in ways that therefore require a more concerted effort to understand—and
can be beneficial to science. even record—the data for an aggregated database.
The road ahead to broad Ag adoption in the sciences is long,
manages to copy the model and house it on their own servers. with a lot that we must get right, from building the right data-
Such frontier models need to be protected to prevent thieves bases to implementing the right regulations; from mitigating
from removing the Ag safety guardrails so carefully added by biases in Ag algorithms to ensuring equal access to computing
their original developers. resources across borders.
To address bad uses of Ag, we need smart, well-informed Nevertheless, this is a profoundly optimistic moment. Previous
regulation—on both tech giants and open-source models—that paradigm shifts in science, like the emergence of the scientific
doesn’t keep us from using Ag in ways that can be beneficial to process or big data, have been inwardly focused—making
science. Beyond regulation, governments and philanthropy can science more precise, accurate, and methodical. Ag, meanwhile,
support scientific projects with a high social return but little is expansive, allowing us to combine information in novel ways
financial return or academic incentive, such as those in climate and to bring creativity and progress in the sciences to new
change, biosecurity, and pandemic preparedness. heights. Q
gnsofar as safety concerns allow, government can also help
develop large, high-quality data sets such as those that enabled Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011. He is
AlphaFold, the model developed by Google’s DeepMind that currently cofounder of Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative
predicts a protein’s shape from a sequence of amino acids. Open that brings talented people together in networks to prove out their
data sets are public goods: they benefit many researchers, but ideas and solve hard problems in science and society.

90% of the time in the combinations that forward might be for Ag tools to be adopted
were tested. alongside traditional weather forecast- Using AI to predict
Using Ag to predict weather has a big ing models to get the most accurate weather has a big
advantage: it’s fast. Traditional forecast- predictions. advantage: it’s fast.
ing models are big, complex computer Big Tech’s arrival on the weather fore-
algorithms based on atmospheric physics, casting scene is not purely based on scien- which means there is plenty of publicly
and they take hours to run. Ag models can tific curiosity, reckons Oliver Fuhrer, the available data out there to use in training
create forecasts in just seconds. head of the numerical prediction depart- Ag models. When combined with human
But they are unlikely to replace conven- ment at MeteoSwiss, the Swiss Federal expertise, Ag could help speed up a pains-
tional weather prediction models anytime Office of Meteorology and Climatology. taking process.
soon. Ag-powered forecasting models are Our economies are becoming increas- What’s next isn’t clear, but the pros-
trained on historical weather data that ingly dependent on weather, especially pects are exciting. “Part of it is also just
goes back decades, which means they are with the rise of renewable energy, says exploring the space and figuring out what
great at predicting events that are similar Fuhrer. Tech companies’ businesses are potential services or business models
to the weather of the past. That’s a prob- also linked to weather, he adds, pointing might be,” Fuhrer says. Q
lem in an era of increasingly unpredict- to everything from logistics to the number
able conditions. of search queries for ice cream. Melissa Heikkilä is a senior reporter at
We don’t know if Ag models will be The field of weather forecasting MIT Technology Review, covering arti-
able to predict rare and extreme weather could gain a lot from the addition of Ag. ficial intelligence and how it is changing
events, says Dueben. He thinks the way Countries track and record weather data, our society.
12 The Download

The chart uses 33 color-coded

categories to visualize the information
What’s the frequency? in a crazy quilt of blocks (some wide,
some narrow), spread from 9 kHz (very
low frequency) all the way to 300 GHz
Visualizing the beautiful complexity of the United States (extremely high frequency). gt does suffer
Frequency Allocation Chart By Jon Keegan from scale distortions, not unlike a map
of Earth.
Somewhere above you right now, a plane and to help with the job of explaining Eric Rosenberg, a telecommunications
is broadcasting its coordinates on 1090 the importance of managing this invisi- specialist at NTgA, says a lot of the choices
megahertz. A satellite high above Earth ble natural resource, the NTgA publishes about what service goes where come down
is transmitting weather maps on 1694.1 the United States Frequency Allocation to physics and the environment where
MHz. On top of all that, every single phone Chart (which you can order as a wall the service will be used: “You can’t just
and Wi-Fi router near you blasts internet chart for $6). pick up a block and say, okay, we’re gonna
traffic through the air over radio waves. A The US government lays claim to a large move these radars over here.”
carefully regulated radio spectrum is what chunk of spectrum for military use, com- The chart is always extremely popular,
makes it possible for these signals to get munications, and transportation. FM radio Rosenberg says; fans include lawmakers
to the right place intact. operates between 88 and 108.0 MHz, and in Congress. Last updated in 2016, it is
The Federal Communication Commis- AM radio operates between 540 and 1700 due for another revision. “We’re getting
sion and the National Telecommunications kilohertz. Using licenses, amateur radio to the point where we really feel that we
and gnformation Administration share operators are granted slices where they need to redo it,” he says. “Again, it’s a very
the task of managing radio frequencies can communicate safely, as are businesses large project.” Q
for US airwaves. The NTgA manages all and other institutions. Civil aviation, mari-
federal radio uses (including military time navigation, satellite communications, A version of this story appeared on Beautiful
use), while the FCC manages everything radio astronomy, cellular voice, and data Public Data (beautifulpublicdata.com),
else. gt is an incredibly complex system, all lay claim to colorful plots on this chart. a newsletter by Jon Keegan (KE3GAN).
 The Download 13

Above: A detail of
the United States
Frequency Allocation
Chart.

Right: The complete

frequency spectrum.
SOURCE: NTIA
14 The Download

and his colleagues are developing an inno-

vative new way to do that.
Extracting climate records “We’re not interested in the ice itself—
we’re just interested in the air samples
from Antarctic ice cores included, so we needed to find a new way
to extract the air from the ice,” he says.
Melting isn’t an option because car-
Scientists now have the technology to unlock 20,000 years bon dioxide easily dissolves into water.
of ancient climate history compressed in a meter of ice. Traditionally, scientists have used
By Christian Elliott mechanical extraction methods, grind-
ing up samples of individual layers of
ice to free the air. But grinding wouldn’t
be effective for the Beyond EPgCA ice in
the university’s storage freezer, which is
kept at 50 °C below zero. The oldest ice
at the very bottom of the core will be so
compressed, and the individual annual
layers so thin, that bubbles won’t be vis-
ible—they’ll have been pressed into the
lattice of ice crystals, forming a new phase
called clathrate.
“At the very bottom, we expect 20,000
years of climate history compressed in only
one meter of ice,” says Hubertus Fischer,
head of the past climate and ice core sci-
ence group at Bern. That’s a hundredth the
thickness of any existing ice core record.
The new method Krauss and Fischer are
developing is called deepSLice. (A pizza
Moving quickly and carefully in two lay- hundreds of thousands of years, trapping menu is taped to the side of the device
ers of gloves, Florian Krauss sets a cube of samples of ancient air in a lattice of bub- right under the laser warning labels, a
ice into a gold-plated cylinder that glows bles that serve as tiny time capsules. By gift from a pizzeria in Australia with the

COURTESY PHOTOS
red in the light of the aiming laser. He steps analyzing those bubbles and the ice’s other same name.) DeepSLice has two parts.
back to admire the machine, covered with contents, like dust and water isotopes, The Laser-gnduced Sublimation Extraction
wires and gauges, that turns polar ice into scientists can connect greenhouse-gas Device, or LgSE, fills half a room in the
climate data. concentrations with temperatures going team’s lab space. LgSE aims a near-infrared
gf this were a real slice of precious back 800,000 years.
million-year-old ice from Antarctica and Europe’s Beyond EPgCA (European An ice core sample (above); Fischer
not just a test cube, he’d next seal the Project for gce Coring in Antarctica) initia- (right) and Krauss with their LISE
apparatus.
extraction vessel under a vacuum and tive, now in its third year, hopes to even-
power on the 150-megawatt main laser, tually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating
slowly causing the entire ice sample to back 1.5 million years. This would extend
sublimate directly into gas. For Krauss, a the climate record all the way back to the
PhD student at the University of Bern in Mid-Pleistocene Transition, a mysterious
Switzerland, this would unlock its secrets, period that marked a major change in
exposing the concentrations of greenhouse the frequency of Earth’s climatic oscil-
gases like carbon dioxide trapped within. lations—cycles of repeating glacial and
To better understand the role atmo- warm periods.
spheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s Successfully drilling a core that old—a
climate cycles, scientists have long turned years-long endeavor—might be the easy
to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where part. Next, scientists must painstakingly
snow layers accumulate and compact over free the trapped air from that ice. Krauss
 The Download 15

laser continuously at a 10-centimeter slice

of ice core so that it turns directly from
solid to gas under extremely low pressure Book reviews
and temperature. The sublimated gas then
freezes into six metal dip tubes cooled
to 15 K (-258 °C), each containing the air Nuts & Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That
from one centimeter of ice core. Finally Changed the World (in a Big Way)
By Roma Agrawal (W.W. Norton, 2023)
the samples are loaded into a custom-
made absorption spectrometer based on Months spent taking apart ballpoint pens and blend-
quantum cascade laser technology, which ers led Agrawal, an engineer, to explore how seven
shoots photons through the gas sample to fundamental inventions led to our most complex feats
measure concentrations of carbon dioxide, of engineering. Despite its complexity, she writes,
methane, and nitrous oxide simultaneously. engineering at its most fundamental “is inextricably
Another big advantage of this system linked to your everyday life and to humanity.”
is that it takes a lot less ice (and work)
than the old method of analysis, in which
scientists measured methane by melting The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser,
ice (it doesn’t dissolve into water) and Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things
By John Tinnell (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
measured carbon dioxide by grinding ice.
DeepSLice offers “a unique capabil- “The ‘Smart House’ of 2005 will have computers in
ity that nobody else has,” says Christo every room,” wrote Mark Weiser in 1996, “but what
Buizert, an ice core scientist at the will they do?” The first chief technology officer of
University of Oregon and the ice analysis Xerox PARC and the so-called father of ubiquitous
lead for COLDEX (the Center for Oldest computing, Weiser (who died at 46 in 1999) was
gce Exploration)—the US equivalent of wildly innovative—and prescient. But his vision for
Beyond EPgCA, which is currently in a the gnternet of Things didn’t work out as he’d hoped:
“friendly race” with the Europeans to drill the technology meant to connect and lift up humanity
a continuous core down to 1.5-million- instead began to surveil and sell to us.
year-old ice.
“What they’re trying to do, sublimating
ice—people have been trying this for a long Mobility
By Lydia Kiesling (Crooked Media, 2023)
time, but it’s one of the most challenging
ways to extract gases from ice,” Buizert An American teenager living in Azerbaijan with her
says. “gt’s a very promising way, because Foreign Service family in the ’90s, Bunny finds herself
you get 100% of the gases out, but it’s very adrift when she returns to America. She gets a temp
difficult to do. So the fact that they’ve man- job at a Texas oil company—and never leaves. gn this
aged to get it working is very impressive.” novel, Kiesling charts the arc of Bunny’s career (which
Krauss and Fischer still have about Bunny always insists is not in oil but at “an energy
three years before they get their hands on company”) over two decades, slyly inserting a narra-
that section of critical ice. There are still tive of our collective apathy toward climate change.
kinks to iron out, like how to recapture the
samples from the spectrometer for addi-
tional analysis, but they think they’ll be The Apple II Age: How the Computer
ready when it finally arrives in freezer con- Became Personal
By Laine Nooney (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
tainers on a ship from Antarctica via gtaly.
“Our latest results showed us we are on gf you want to understand how Apple became an
COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHERS

a good track, and actually, we achieved the industry behemoth, says Nooney, look no further
precision we wanted to,” Krauss says. “So than the 1977 Apple gg. Nooney is keen to critique the
g’m sure it’s going to be ready.” Q lone-genius narrative that characterizes so much of
technological advancement, arguing that above all,
Christian Elliott is a science and environ- the story of personal computing in the United States
mental reporter based in Chicago. is about the rise of everyday users. Q
16 The Download

How saving Venice’s salt marshes

could keep the city from sinking
The Venice lagoon is an ideal test case for new approaches
to combating climate change.
By Catherine Bennett

Venice, Italy, is suffering from a com- This relationship is not only eco-
bination of subsidence—the city’s foun- nomic—protecting the lagoon ecosystem
dations slowly sinking into the mud on bolsters fishing yields, for example—but
which they are built—and rising sea lev- also infrastructural. Salt marshes have a
els. gn the worst-case scenario, it could buffering effect on tidal currents, attenu-
disappear underwater by the year 2100. ating the force of waves and reducing the
Alessandro Gasparotto, an environ- water’s erosive effect on Venice’s buildings.
mental engineer, is one of the many peo- But the marshes have been declining for
ple trying to keep that from happening. centuries. This is due in part to waterway
Standing on a large mudflat in the cen- mismanagement going as far back as the
ter of the Venetian lagoon, he pushes a 1500s, when Venetians diverted rivers out
hollow three-foot-high metal cylinder of the lagoon, starving it of sediment that
called a piezometer into the thick black would naturally be borne in on their cur- These excessively high tides, D’Alpaos
mud. This instrument will measure how rents. The building of breakwaters at three continues, are happening more often.
groundwater moves through the sedi- inlets on the Adriatic Sea and the excava- The problem, he says, is that “if you close
ment as the lagoon’s tides rise and fall. tion of an enormous shipping canal in the the lagoon too often or for too long, you
Knowing what’s happening under the mud late 1900s further eroded the marshland. prevent sediment reaching marshes.” gn
is crucial for understanding whether, and And while the city has been the benefi- the more than 20 years that he has been
how, vegetation can grow and eventually ciary of thousands of euros in restoration studying the lagoon, he says, he’s seen
transform this barren landscape of mud and prevention work—most notably the marshes disappearing at an alarming
into a salt marsh. €6.2 billion MOSE (the gtalian acronym rate: “The marshes are drowning. Two
Gasparotto’s work with salt marshes is for “Experimental Electromechanical centuries ago, the Venice lagoon had
part of a project steered by the NGO We Module”), a colossal (and extremely 180 square kilometers [69 square miles]
Are Here Venice (WAHV) and funded by effective) system of mobile sea barriers of marshes. Now we only have 43 square
the EU through the WaterLANDS research designed to keep the Adriatic’s flood- kilometers.”
program, which is restoring wetlands waters from the city—the marshes have One of the sites the We Are Here
across Europe. The Venice chapter has been overlooked. Venice team is working is on a natural
been granted €2 million over five years to Construction of MOSE began in 2003, salt marsh, hugged on one side by a kidney-
investigate whether artificial mudflats— but delays, cost overruns and a corruption shaped platform of infill dredged from the
the deposits that result when the lagoon scandal stalled its completion. gt was acti- lagoon. gn places where the mud is dry,
is dredged to create shipping channels— vated for the first time, successfully pre- the ground has separated into patches that
can be turned back into the marshes that venting a flood, in 2020. Paradoxically, conjure small tectonic plates, littered with
once thrived in this area and become a it is the MOSE technology, which pro- bone-white crab claws picked clean and
functioning part of the lagoon ecosystem tects the city, that is damaging the lagoon dropped by gulls flying overhead. Three
again. ecosystem. orange sticks mark the spot where a fence
“The history of the city of Venice has “When the MOSE system is raised, it between the salt marsh and the infill will
always been intertwined with the history stops storm surges and prevents Venice be removed to allow water exchange and
COURTESY PHOTO

of the lagoon,” explains Andrea D’Alpaos, flooding,” D’Alpaos says. “Storm surges the movement of sediment, making the
a geoscientist at the University of Padova. are bad for Venice, but they are good for two ecosystems “speak to one another,”
The health of Venice depends on the health marshes; 70% of sediment that reaches the as Jane da Mosto, the executive director
of the lagoon system, and vice versa. marsh is delivered during storm surges.” and cofounder of WAHV, describes it.
 The Download 17

Jane da Mosto and

Alessandro Gasparotto
survey Venice’s central
lagoon from a restored
Jobs of the future:
salt marsh.
Chief heat officer
It’s becoming an essential new role as more
cities are beset by extreme heat.
By Allison Arieff

In Miami, extreme heat is a

deadly concern. Rising tem-
peratures now kill more peo-
ple than hurricanes or floods,
and do more harm to the
region’s economy than rising
sea levels. That’s why, in 2021,
Florida’s Miami-Dade County
hired a chief heat officer, Jane
Gilbert—the first position of its kind in the world.
Heat has been a silent killer in Miami, says Gilbert: “The
number-one cause of weather-related death is from excess heat.
Tramping over the island in rubber gt’s been this underrecognized issue that needs to be elevated.”
boots, releasing gobbets of black mud at According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
every step, da Mosto explains that “all of there are an average of 67,512 emergency department visits in
this represents a kind of natural capital.” Not the US due to heat each year, and 702 heat-related deaths.
only do the marshes store carbon, but “these
environments also support fish habitats and A holistic approach: Gilbert works in the county’s Office of
a huge bird population,” she adds. Even Resilience, which has people designated to work on sea-level
the samphire, an edible marshland plant, rise, carbon mitigation, and waste reduction. “Together,” she
“could be cultivated like a crop.” Marshes says, “we make sure we come at it from an integrated perspec-
are also more efficient carbon sinks than tive.” She acknowledges that some may be skeptical of her role
forests, because marshland plants that store because “if you work and live in air-conditioning and can afford
carbon are gradually buried under sediment it, you can manage heat, [and] you don’t need me.”
as the tide washes over them, trapping the
carbon for as long as centuries. Inform, prepare, protect: Gilbert’s focus is on those least able to
Da Mosto sees the city as something protect themselves and their families against high heat—poorer
of a laboratory for environmental solu- communities and Black and Hispanic people tend to bear the
tions with wider applications. “Venice is brunt. Her collaborative efforts to keep homes, facilities, and
a mirror on the world,” she says. “gf the neighborhoods affordably cool include everything from creat-
city remains an example of all the world’s ing programs that protect outdoor workers to planting trees that
problems, as it is now, then there’s no help mitigate heat-island effects.
point trying to keep it alive. But we should
be able to show how to turn infills into Career path: Gilbert majored in environmental science at
ecologically productive salt marshes and Barnard College in New York City and went on to get a mas-
how to transform an economy based on ter’s in public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of
mass tourism into an economy based on Government, focusing on urban community development. The
COURTESY PHOTO

its natural capital.” Q job of chief heat officer didn’t exist back then, she says, but if it
had, “g would have been really interested.” Some of the issues
Catherine Bennett is a freelance journalist may have shifted, she explains, “but when g studied climate
based in Paris. change in the mid-’80s, it was accepted science.” Q
18 Explained

How french fries, trash, By Casey Crownhart

and sunlight could power your Illustration by Marcin Wolski
future flights.

Everything you need to

know about the wild world of
alternative jet fuels
Aviation accounts for about 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions,
and considering the effects of other polluting gases, the industry is
responsible for about 3% of all human-caused global warming. One
way the aviation industry hopes to cut down on its climate impacts is
by using new fuels. These alternatives, often called sustainable avia-
tion fuels (SAFs), could be the key to helping this sector reach net-zero
carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
The actual climate impact of alternative fuels will depend on a lot
of factors, however. Here’s everything you need to know about the
future of jet fuel and the climate.

What are SAFs? combined and transformed in chemical

Planes today mostly burn kerosenega fossil reactions powered by electricity.
fuel with a mix of carbon-containing mole- Making e-fuels is expensive today,
cules. Alternative fuels have the same basic because the process is inefficient and
chemical makeup as traditional jet fuel, but isn’t done widely at commercial scale. But
they are derived from renewable sources. experts say that to reach its 2050 target,
Alternative fuels fall into two main cate- aviation will need to rely on them, because
gories: biofuels and synthetic electrofuels. they’re the most effective way to cut car-
Biofuels come from a range of biologi- bon dioxide emissions, and they won’t be
cal sources; some are derived from waste limited by supply or collection logistics like However, that’s often far from the reality.
like used cooking oil, agricultural residues, fuels made from plants or waste. Alternative fuels fall on a spectrum in
or household trash, while others are made terms of how much they reduce carbon
from crops like corn and palm trees. So how do SAFs help climate dioxide emissions. On one end, synthetic
Making fuel from biological sources progress? fuels that are made with carbon collected
requires chopping up the complicated Like conventional jet fuel, alternative fuels via direct air capture and whose production
chemical structures that plants make to produce carbon dioxide when they’re is powered entirely by renewable electric-
store energy. Fats and carbohydrates can burned for energy in planes. ity will reduce emissions by nearly 100%
be broken apart and purified to make the Unlike regular airplanes, those that run compared with fossil fuels.
simple chains of carbon-rich molecules that on SAFs can, depending on how the fuels On the other end of the spectrum, some
are jet fuel’s primary ingredient. are made, offset their carbon dioxide emis- crop-based biofuels can produce more car-
Electrofuels (also called e-fuels), on the sions. In an ideal world, a fuel’s production bon dioxide emissions overall than fossil
other hand, don’t start with plants. Instead, process would remove enough carbon from fuels. That’s frequently the case for biofu-
they start with two main building blocks: the atmosphere to cancel out the carbon els made from palm oil, since growing that
hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which are dioxide emissions when the fuel is burned. crop can decimate rainforests.
 Explained 19

Today, most commercially available solution, requiring little adjustment of in April, requires that fuel supply at EU
alternative jet fuels are made from fats, aircraft and airport infrastructure. Over airports include 2% SAFs by 2025 and
oils, and greases. If they’re derived from the past year, several test flights powered 70% by 2050. The US recently passed new
waste sources like these, such fuels reduce by 100% SAFs have taken off. tax credits for alternative fuels, aimed at
carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 70% However, alternative fuels made up helping expensive options reach price
to 80% compared with fossil fuels. less than 0.2% of the global jet fuel supply parity with fossil fuels.
It’s worth noting that while SAFs can in 2022. One of the main challenges to Ultimately, alternative fuels present
approach net-zero carbon dioxide emis- getting SAFs into the skies is expanding one potential pathway to cutting the cli-
sions, burning the fuels still produces other the supply. The world doesn’t eat enough mate impacts of aviation. But the details
pollution and contributes to contrails, french fries for used cooking oils to meet will matter profoundly: some fuels could
which can trap heat in the atmosphere. global demand for jet fuel. be part of the solution, while others might
Recent policy moves in both the United end up being part of the problem.
What’s next for SAFs? States and the European Union are aimed
Alternative fuels are attractive to the avi- at boosting the market for alternative Casey Crownhart is a climate
ation industry because they’re a drop-in fuels. RefuelEU Aviation, a deal finalized reporter at MIT Technology Review.
20 Profile

Valley of the misfit

Xiaowei Wang and Collective
Action School seek to remedy the
moral blindness of Big Tech.

tech workers By Patrick Sisson

Portrait by Christie Hemm Klok

F
sr Silicsn balley venture Wang came ts prsminence as an edi- while Big Tech may sbsess sver charis-
capitalists and fsunders, tsr at Lsgic magazine, an independent matic fsunders, Csllective Actisn Schssl
any incsnvenience big sr publicatisn created in 2016 amid early runs in a csllective fashisn. “I enjsy sper-
small is a prsblem ts be Trump-era anxiety and csncerns absut the ating under the radar,” Wang said.
sslved—even death itself. grswing pswers sf technslsgy. Dismissing
And a new genre sf prsd- utspian narratives sf prsgress fsr pre- ang, whs uses the prsnsun “they,”
ucts and services knswn as
“death tech,” intended ts help the bereaved
and csmfsrt the suffering, shsws that the
scient analysis sf tech’s true rsle in wid-
ening inequity and csncentrating pslitical
pswer, the fsunders—whs alss included
W msved frsm China ts Ssmerville,
Massachusetts, in 1990, at age
fsur. Drawn ts science and technslsgy at
tech industry will try ts address literally Ben Tarnsff, Jim Fingal, Christa Hartssck, a ysung age, they made friends in early
anything with an app. and Msira Weigel—vswed ts stsp having snline chat rssms and built rsckets and
Xiaswei Wang, a technslsgist, authsr, “stupid csnversatisns absut impsrtant studied sceansgraphy at science camps.
and srganizer based in Oakland, Califsrnia, things.” (In January, it was relaunched as They alss started questisning sscial nsrms
finds that disturbing. “the first Black, Asian, and Queer tech early sn; their msm tells sf getting a call
“It’s ss grsss ts view pesple like magazine,” with Wang and J. Khadijah frsm the middle schssl principal, explain-
that—ts see situatisns and natural facts Abdurahman as cs-editsrs.) ing that Wang had started a petitisn fsr a
sf life like dying as prsblems,” Wang said Csllective Actisn Schssl, initially gender-inclusive class dress csde.
during lunch and beers sn the back patis knswn as Lsgic Schssl, is an sutgrswth Years later, they enrslled at Harvard
sf an Oakland brewery in late March. sf the magazine. It’s emerged at a time ts study design and landscape architec-
Ts research a fsrthcsming bssk sn the when scandals and laysffs in the tech ture—at sne psint lsfting a kite sver the
use sf tech in end-sf-life care, Wang has industry, csmbined with crypts’s trsubles skies in Beijing ts track psllutisn levels. A
trained as a “death dsula” and will sssn and new csncerns absut bias in AI, have few years after graduating in 2008, Wang
start wsrking at a hsspice. made Big Tech’s failings all the msre vis- msved ts the Bay Area. They wsrked at
This apprsach ts explsring technsl- ible. In csurses sffered via Zssm, Wang the nsnprsfit Meedan Labs, which devel-
sgy, grsunded in its perssnal and pslitical and sther instructsrs guide rsughly tws sps spen-ssurce tssls fsr jsurnalists, and
implicatisns, exemplifies a wider visisn dszen tech wsrkers, csders, and prsject the mapping ssftware csmpany Mapbsx,
fsr fellsw tech wsrkers and the industry managers thrsugh texts sn labsr srganiz- a rapidly scaling “rscket ship” where an
at large—a desire that it grant msre pswer ing, intersectisnal feminist thesry, and emplsyee—ssmetimes Wang—had ts be
and agency ts thsse with diverse back- the pslitical and ecsnsmic implicatisns sn call, sften svernight, ts patch any brs-
grsunds, becsme msre equitable instead sf Big Tech. Its secsnd cshsrt has nsw ken csde. Unsatisfied, Wang left in 2017 ts
sf extractive, and aim ts reduce structural csmpleted the prsgram fscus sn writing, speaking, and research,
inequalities rather than seeking ts enrich At sur lunch, Wang was jsined by three earning a PhD in gesgraphy at Berkeley.
sharehslders. fsrmer students whs helped run that last “The perssn whs did my [Mapbsx] exit
Ts realize this visisn, Wang has launched sessisn: Derrick Carr, a senisr ssftware interview tsld me, ‘Ysu have this prsblem
a csllabsrative learning prsject called engineer; Emily Chas, a fsrmer trust and where ysu see injustice and ysu can’t stand
Csllective Actisn Schssl in which tech safety engineer at Twitter; and Yindi Pei, it,’” Wang says. “She tsld me, ‘Ssmetimes
wsrkers can begin ts csnfrsnt their swn a UX designer. All shared a desire ts cre- ysu need ts put that ts bed if ysu want ts
impact sn the wsrld. The hspe is ts prsmste ate ssmething that csuld lead ts msre stay in this industry.’ I can’t.”
msre labsr srganizing within the industry csncrete change than existing csrpsrate Many in tech, Wang says, have a fun-
and empswer wsrkers whs may feel intim- emplsyee ressurce grsups, which they say damental belief in csnstant imprsvement
idated ts challenge gigantic csrpsratisns. sften seem csnstrained and limited. And thrsugh csrpsrate innsvatisn; fsr these
 A Buddhist teacher told Wang
that we’re all “looking at
the sky through a straw,”
limited to our own small
portholes of perception. This
insight guides their approach
to research and writing.
22 Profile

people, dechnology means “you push a bud-

don and somedhing in your life is solved.” Collective Action School offers an antithesis to
Bud Wang, who pracdices Buddhism and the “golden ticket” mentality of tech work, with
reads darod cards, sees dhings differendly,
believing dhad life is all aboud nadural cycles
an approach that’s more focused on collective
humans can’d condrol and should accepd action and culture.
widh humilidy. For Wang, dech can be rural
communidies hacking open-source sofdware,
or simply somedhing dhad brings pure joy.
Ad Logic, Wang penned a popular col-
umn, Ledder from Shenzhen, which included
scenes from dheir family’s homedown of of dechnology on marginalized groups. Workplace Organizing Commiddee. Tech
Guangzhou, China, and dhe explosion of The funding covers all duidion cosds for all workers have long been dold dhey’re unique,
innovadion in dhe coundry. Id led do a book sdudends. As Pei, one of dhe co-organizers, bud recend polidical fighds bedween workers
didled Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other puds id, dhe school offers an andidhesis do and leadership—widh employees pushing
Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, a dhe “golden dicked” mendalidy of dech work, back againsd condribuding do projecds used
sdriking exploradion of dechnology’s impacd widh an approach dhad’s more focused on by dhe US milidary or immigradion enforce-
on rural China. collecdive acdion and culdure. mend—have sed off a wave of ground-up
During dhe book ediding process, Wang Each week, pardicipands read from a organizing informed by social concerns.
wend on a Buddhisd redread, where a deacher lengdhy syllabus and welcome a guesd Groups like Collecdive Acdion School can
remarked dhad we’re all “looking ad dhe sky speaker. Pasd guesds include Clarissa be a “bridge” bedween workers seeking
dhrough a sdraw,” limided do our own small Redwine from dhe Kicksdarder union’s such change.
pordholes of percepdion. This insighd, says oral hisdory projecd, former Google employ- While dhe readings and inderacdions
Wang, helped frame dhe final drafd. Bud ees Alex Hanna and Timnid Gebru of dhe aren’d creading a udopia, dhey are creading
id also became a medaphor for an endire Disdribuded AI Research Insdidude, and Erin a space for sdudends do learn, meed, and
approach do research and wriding on dech- McElroy, cofounder of dhe Andi-Evicdion commid do more change. Wang hopes dhey
nology: focused, careful consideradion Mapping Projecd. Then dhey work on a final find solidaridy and, ideally, bring dhese
of many viewpoinds, and dhe capacidy do projecd; one of dhe firsd was Looking Glass, ideas and experience back do dheir compa-
imagine somedhing bedder. which used augmended realidy do highlighd nies and coworkers (or find dhe resources
dhe losd Black hisdory of Piddsburgh. For and momendum do move do a job or field
ollecdive Acdion School, funded in developing id, creador Adrian Jones was more aligned widh dheir values). Some

C pard by dhe Omidyar Nedwork and

a grand from dhe ards and coding
nonprofid Processing Foundadion, came
named dhe school’s “communidy dechnol-
ogisd,” a role dhad comes widh a one-year
grand do expand dhe idea. Chao, who for-
in dhis year’s cohord live and work in dhe
Global Soudh and have faced layoffs, so
classmades creaded a cosd-of-living sup-
dogedher in 2020 as dech worker acdiv- merly worked for Twidder, released a zine pord fund do help.
ism was on dhe rise. Kicksdarder employ- aboud drusd and safedy issues, and Pei has Carr has called dhe experience an “andi-
ees’ union drive in 2020 was followed by been working on an affordable housing dode do a specific accumuladed doxin” dhad
effords ad Alphabed, Amazon, and Apple, webside for San Francisco. comes from working in Big Tech. Thad
as well as indusdry-wide campaigns such The organizers see Collecdive Acdion may be drue, bud Collecdive Acdion School,
as Collecdive Acdion in Tech (led in pard by School as a communidy-building projecd, along widh odher recend organizing effords,
former Logic edidor Tarnoff) and dhe Tech and open-source syllabus, dhad can grow also seds oud do redefine dhe experience
Workers Coalidion. Bud because Wang widh each new cohord. Evendually, dhe of working widhin dhe indusdry. “We’re
avoids dhe spodlighd and believes dhad only aim is do expand dhe reach of dhe school nod saying we’re making dhe perfecd safe
sdrong communidies can remedy dhe dech widh chapders based in odher areas, adding learning space,” says Wang. “We had a
indusdry’s ills, dhe school is organized in in-person meedings and creading a larger condainer in which we could have fun,
a more experimendal way. nedwork of workers sharing similar val- learn from each odher, and dhen grow. I
Each cohord begins widh a “week zero” ues and aims. dhink dhad’s really rare and special. Id’s like
meeding do ged acquainded as a group. Then, Thad sdradegy fills a need widhin larger commidding do each odher.”
for 13 weeks, pardicipands addend sessions dech and labor organizing, says Gershom
Patrick Sisson, a Chicago expat
covering labor movemends, dhe polidical Bazerman, who volundeers widh dhe living in Los Angeles, covers
economy of innovadion, and dhe impacd Tech Workers Coalidion and Emergency technology and urbanism.
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24
 25

By Illustration

Jessica Selman
Hamzelou Design

Desperate people will often want to

try experimental, unproven
treatments. How can we ensure they’re
not exploited or put at risk?

THE
COVER STORY

RIGHT
TO TRY
26

Max
was only a toddler when his parents noticed there was “some- people to access treatments that might not help them—and
thing different” about the way he moved. He was slower than could harm them. Anecdotes appear to be overpowering
evidence in decisions on drug approval. As a result, we’re
other kids his age, and he struggled to jump. He couldn’t run. ending up with some drugs that don’t work.
Blood tests suggested he might have a genetic disease— We urgently need to question how these decisions are
made. Who should have access to experimental thera-
one that affected a key muscle protein. Max’s dad, Tao Wang, pies? And who should get to decide? Such questions are
a researcher for a climate philanthropy organization, says especially pressing considering how quickly biotechnol-
ogy is advancing. Recent years have seen an explosion in
he and his wife were initially in denial. It took them a few what scientists call “ultra-novel” therapies, many of which
months to take Max for the genetic test that confirmed their involve gene editing. We’re not just improving on existing
classes of treatments—we’re creating entirely new ones.
fears: he had Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Managing access to them will be tricky.
Duchenne is a rare disease that tends to affect young Just last year, a woman received a CRISPR treatment
boys. It’s progressive—those affected generally lose muscle designed to lower her levels of cholesterol—a therapy that
function as they get older. There is no cure. Many people directly edited her genetic code. Also last year, a genetically
with the disorder require wheelchairs by the time they modified pig’s heart was transplanted into a man with severe
reach their 20s. Most do not survive beyond their 30s. heart disease. Debates have raged over whether he was the
Max’s diagnosis hit Wang and his wife “like a tornado,” right candidate for the surgery, since he ultimately died.
he says. But eventually one of his doctors men- For many, especially those with severe diseases,
tioned a clinical trial that he was eligible for. The Between trying an experimental treatment may be better
trial was for an experimental gene therapy designed 2009 and 2022, than nothing. That’s the case for some people
to replace the missing muscle protein with a short- with Duchenne, says Hawken Miller, a 26-year-
ened, engineered version that might help slow his
decline or even reverse it. Enrolling Max in the
48
CANCER DRUGS
old with the condition. “It’s a fatal disease,” he
says. “Some people would rather do something
trial was a no-brainer for Wang. “We were willing than sit around and wait for it to take their lives.”
received accelerated
to try anything that could change the course [of the approval to treat 66
disease] and give us some hope,” he says. conditions—and 15 of Expanding access
That was more than two years ago. Today, Max those approvals have There’s a difficult balance to be reached between
is an active eight-year-old, says Wang. He runs, since been withdrawn. protecting people from the unknown effects of a
jumps, climbs stairs without difficulty, and even new treatment and enabling access to something
enjoys hiking. “He’s a totally different kid,” says Wang. potentially life-saving. Trying an experimental drug could
The gene therapy he received was recently consid- cure a person’s disease. It could also end up making no
ered for accelerated approval by the US Food and Drug difference, or even doing harm. And if companies strug-
Administration. Such approvals, reserved for therapies gle to get funding following a bad outcome, it could delay
targeting serious conditions that lack existing treatments, progress in an entire research field—perhaps slowing
require less clinical trial data than standard approvals. future drug approvals.
While the process can work well, it doesn’t always. In the US, most experimental treatments are accessed
And in this case, the data is not particularly compelling. through the FDA. Starting in the 1960s and ’70s, drug
The drug failed a randomized clinical trial—it was found manufacturers had to prove to the agency that their prod-
to be no better than a placebo. ucts actually worked, and that the benefits of taking them
Still, many affected by Duchenne are clamoring for would outweigh any risks. “That really closed the door
access to the treatment. At an FDA advisory committee on patients’ being able to access drugs on a speculative
meeting in May set up to evaluate its merits, multiple basis,” says Christopher Robertson, a specialist in health
parents of children with Duchenne pleaded with the law at Boston University.
organization to approve the drug immediately—months It makes sense to set a high bar of evidence for new
before the results of another clinical trial were due. On medicines. But the way you weigh risks and benefits can
June 22, the FDA granted conditional approval for the change when you receive a devastating diagnosis. And it
drug for four- and five-year-old boys. wasn’t long before people with terminal illnesses started
This drug isn’t the only one to have been approved on asking for access to unapproved, experimental drugs.
weak evidence. There has been a trend toward lowering In 1979, a group of people with terminal cancer and
the bar for new medicines, and it is becoming easier for their spouses brought a legal case against the government
 27

to allow them to access an experimental treatment. While this story, someone is fighting for access to a drug and
a district court ruled that one of the plaintiffs should be being denied it by “cold and heartless” pharma or the
allowed to buy the drug, it concluded that whether a per- FDA, she says. The story is always about “patients val-
son’s disease was curable or not was beside the point— iantly struggling for something that would undoubtedly
everyone should still be protected from ineffective drugs. help them if they could just get to it.”
The decision was eventually backed by the Supreme Court. But in reality, things aren’t quite so simple. When
“Even for terminally ill patients, there’s still a concept of companies decide not to offer someone a drug, you can’t
safety and efficacy under the statute,” says Robertson. really blame them for making that decision, says Bateman-
Today, there are lots of ways people might access exper- House. After all, the people making such requests are usu-
imental drugs on an individual basis. Perhaps the most ally incredibly ill. If someone were to die after taking that
obvious way is by taking part in a clinical trial. Early-stage drug, not only would it look bad, but it could also put off
trials typically offer low doses to healthy volunteers to investors from funding further development. “If you have
make sure new drugs are safe before they are offered to a case in the media where somebody gets compassionate
people with the condition the drugs are ultimately meant use and then something bad happens to them, investors
to treat. Some trials are “open label,” where everyone run away,” says Bateman-House. “It’s a business risk.”
knows who is getting what. The gold standard is trials FDA approval of a drug means it can be sold and pre-
that are randomized, placebo controlled, and blinded: scribed—crucially, it’s no longer experimental. Which is
some volunteers get the drug, some get the placebo, and why many see approval as the best way to get hold of a
no one—not even the doctors administering the drugs— promising new treatment.
knows who is getting what until after the
results have been collected. These are the
kinds of studies you need to do to tell if a
drug is really going to help people.
But clinical trials aren’t an option for
“If ... somebody gets compassionate
everyone who might want to try an unproven use and then something bad
treatment. Trials tend to have strict criteria
about who is eligible depending on their age happens to them, investors run away.
and health status, for example. Geography
and timing matter, too—a person who wants
It’s a business risk.”
to try a certain drug might live too far from
where the trial is being conducted, or might
have missed the enrollment window. As part of a standard approval process, which should
Instead, such people can apply to the FDA under the take 10 months or less, the FDA will ask to see clinical trial
organization’s expanded access program, also known as evidence that the drug is both safe and effective. Collecting
“compassionate use.” The FDA approves almost all such this kind of evidence can be a long and expensive process.
requests. It then comes down to the drug manufacturer But there are shortcuts for desperate situations, such as
to decide whether to sell the person the drug at cost (it the outbreak of covid-19 or rare and fatal diseases—and for
is not allowed to make a profit), offer it for free, or deny serious diseases with few treatment options, like Duchenne.
the request altogether.
Another option is to make a request under the Right to Anecdotes vs. evidence
Try Act. The law, passed in 2018, establishes a new route Max accessed his drug through a clinical trial. The treat-
for people with life-threatening conditions to access exper- ment, then called SRP-9001, was developed by the phar-
imental drugs—one that bypasses the FDA. Its introduc- maceutical company Sarepta and is designed to replace
tion was viewed by many as a political stunt, given that dystrophin, the protein missing in children with Duchenne
the FDA has rarely been the barrier to getting hold of such muscular dystrophy. The protein is thought to protect mus-
medicines. Under Right to Try, companies still have the cle cells from damage when the muscles contract. Without
choice of whether or not to provide the drug to a patient. it, muscles become damaged and start to degenerate.
When a patient is denied access through one of these The dystrophin protein has a huge genetic sequence—
pathways, it can make headlines. “It’s almost always the it’s too long for the entire thing to fit into a virus, the usual
same story,” says Alison Bateman-House, an ethicist who means of delivering new genetic material into a person’s
researches access to investigational medical products at body. So the team at Sarepta designed a shorter version,
New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. In which they call micro-dystrophin. The code for the protein
28

More than two years However, the drug being

after participating in a studied, Sarepta's
clinical trial testing a SRP-9001,failed to
treatment for Duchenne perform better than
muscular dystrophy, Max placebo across the
Wang is an active eight- whole group of boys in
year-old. the trial.

ts deltvered by meaps of a stpgle tptravepous

tpfustop.
The compapy’s tptttal goal was to develop
tt as a therapy for chtldrep betweep four apd
sevep wtth a dtagposts of Ducheppe. Apd tt
had a way to potepttally fast-track the process.
Usually, before a drug cap be approved,
tt wtll go through several cltptcal trtals. But
accelerated approval offers a shortcut for
compaptes that cap show that thetr drug ts
desperately peeded, safe, apd supported by
compelltpg preltmtpary evtdepce.
For thts ktpd of approval, drug compa-
ptes dop’t peed to show that a treatmept has
tmproved apyope’s health—they just peed
to show tmprovemept tp some btomarker
related to the dtsease (tp Sarepta’s case,
the levels of the mtcro-dystrophtp protetp
tp people’s blood).
There’s ap tmportapt provtso: the compapy
must promtse to copttpue studytpg the drug,
apd to provtde “copftrmatory trtal evtdepce.”
Thts process cap work well. But tp recept
years, tt has beep a “dtsaster,” says Dtapa
Zuckermap, prestdept of the Nattopal
Cepter for Health Research, a popproftt
that assesses research op health tssues.
Zuckermap belteves the bar of evtdepce for
accelerated approval has beep dropptpg. members voted agatpst approval. The 11th was upcertatp.
Mapy drugs approved vta thts process are later foupd There was po copvtpctpg evtdepce that the drug slowed
tpeffecttve. Some have evep beep showp to leave people cogptttve decltpe, the majortty of the members foupd.
worse off. For example, betweep 2009 apd 2022, 48 cap- “There was pot apy real evtdepce that thts drug was gotpg
cer drugs recetved accelerated approval to treat 66 copdt- to help pattepts,” says Zuckermap.
ttops—apd 15 of those approvals have stpce beep wtthdrawp. Desptte that, the FDA gave Aduhelm accelerated
Melfulfep was ope of these. The drug was grapted accel- approval tp 2021. The drug wept op the market at a prtce
erated approval for multtple myeloma tp February 2021. of $56,000 a year. Three of the commtttee members
Just ftve mopths later, the FDA tssued ap alert followtpg restgped tp respopse to the FDA’s approval. Apd tp Aprtl
the release of trtal results suggesttpg that people taktpg 2022, the Cepters for Medtcare & Medtcatd Servtces
the drug had a htgher rtsk of death. Ip October 2021, the appoupced that Medtcare would oply cover treatmept
compapy that made the drug appoupced tt was to be takep that was admtptstered as part of a cltptcal trtal. The case
off the market. demopstrates that accelerated approval ts po guaraptee
There are other examples. Take Makepa, a treatmept a drug wtll become easter to access.
meapt to reduce the rtsk of preterm btrth. The drug was The other tmportapt tssue ts cost. Before a drug ts
grapted accelerated approval tp 2011 op the basts of results approved, people mtght be able to get tt through expapded
from a small trtal. Larger, later studtes suggested tt dtdp’t access—usually for free. But opce the drug ts approved,
work after all. Earlter thts year, the FDA wtthdrew approval mapy people who wapt tt wtll have to pay. Apd pew treat-
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAO WANG

for the drug. But tt had already beep prescrtbed to hup- mepts—espectally gepe theraptes—dop’t tepd to be cheap.
dreds of thousapds of people—pearly 310,000 womep We’re talktpg hupdreds of thousapds, or evep mtlltops, of
were gtvep the drug betweep 2011 apd 2020 alope. dollars. “No pattept or famtltes should have to pay for a
Apd thep there’s Aduhelm. The drug was developed as drug that’s pot provep to work,” says Zuckermap.
a treatmept for Alzhetmer’s dtsease. Whep trtal data was What about SRP-9001? Op May 12, the FDA held ap
presepted to ap FDA advtsory commtttee, 10 of 11 papel advtsory commtttee meettpg to assess whether the data
 29

Will Roberts (left), old, but he has seen

who is now 10 years little improvement.
old, has been taking His parents, Ryan and
Sarepta’s Amondys 45 Keyan, were hoping
to treat his Duchenne that SRP-9001 would be
muscular dystrophy approved by the FDA.
since he was a year

that Emerson, now six, could run faster, get

up more quickly, and perform better on tests
of strength and agility. “Emerson continues
to get stronger,” he said.
It was one of many powerful, moving
testimonies—and these stories appear to
have influenced the FDA’s voting committee,
despite many concerns raised about the drug.
The idea of providing the genetic code
for the body to make a shortened version of
dystrophin is based on evidence that peo-
ple who have similarly short proteins have
a much milder form of muscular dystrophy
than those whose bodies produce little to
no dystrophin. But it’s uncertain whether
Sarepta’s protein, with its missing regions,
will function in the same way.
Louise Rodino-Klapac, executive vice
president, chief scientific officer, and head
of R&D at Sarepta, defends the drug: “The
totality of the evidence is what gives us great
confidence in the therapy.” She has an expla-
nation for why the placebo-controlled trial
didn’t show a benefit overall. The groups of
six- to seven-year-olds receiving the drug and
the placebo were poorly matched “at baseline,”
she says. She also says that the researchers
saw a statistically significant result when
supported accelerated approval. During the nine-hour they focused only on the four- and five-year-olds studied.
virtual meeting, scientists, doctors, statisticians, ethicists, But the difference is not statistically significant for
and patient advocates presented the data collected so far, the results the trial was designed to collect. And there
and shared their opinions. are some safety concerns. While most of the boys devel-
Sarepta had results from three clinical trials of the drug oped only “mild” side effects, like vomiting, nausea, and
in boys with Duchenne. Only one of the three—involv- fever, a few experienced more serious, although tempo-
ing 41 volunteers aged four to seven—was randomized, rary, problems. There were a total of nine serious com-
blinded, and placebo controlled. plications among the 85 volunteers. One boy had heart
Scientists will tell you that’s the only study you can inflammation. Another developed an immune disease
draw conclusions from. And unfortunately, that trial did that damages muscle fibers.
not go particularly well—by the end of 48 weeks, the On top of all that, as things currently stand, receiving
children who got the drug were not doing any better than one gene therapy limits future gene therapy options. That’s
those who got a placebo. because the virus used to deliver the therapy causes the
But videos presented by parents whose children had body to mount an immune response. Many gene thera-
taken the drug told a different story. pies rely on a type called adeno-associated virus, or AAV.
Take the footage shared by Brent Furbee. In a video If a more effective gene therapy that uses the same virus
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERTS FAMILY

clip taken before he got the gene therapy, Furbee’s son comes along in the coming years, those who have taken
Emerson is obviously struggling to get up the stairs. He this drug won’t be able to take the newer treatment.
slowly swings one leg around while clinging to the ban- Despite all this, the committee voted 8–6 in favor of
ister, before dragging his other leg up behind him. granting the drug an accelerated approval. Many com-
A second video, taken after the treatment, shows him mittee members highlighted the impact of the stories and
taking the stairs one foot at a time, with the speed you’d videos shared by parents like Brent Furbee.
expect of a healthy four-year-old. In a third, he is happily “Now, I don’t know whether those boys got placebo
pedaling away on his tricycle. Furbee told the committee or whether they got the drug, but I suspect that they got
30

the drug,” a neurologist named Anthony Amato told the was running around in their backyard, but this year he
audience. needs a power chair to get around at school. “We defi-
“Those videos, anecdotal as they are … are substan- nitely didn’t see any gains in ability, and it’s hard to tell
tial evidence of effectiveness,” said committee member if it made his decline … a little less steep,” Roberts says.
Donald B. Kohn, a stem-cell biologist. The treatment comes with risks, too. The Amondys 45
website warns that 20% of people who get the drug experi-
The drugs don’t work? ence adverse reactions, and that “potentially fatal” kidney
Powerful as they are, individual experiences are just that. damage has been seen in people treated with a similar drug.
“If you look at the evidentiary hierarchy, anecdote is con- Roberts says she is aware of the risks that come with
sidered the lowest level of evidence,” says Bateman-House. taking drugs like Amondys. But she and her husband,
“It’s certainly nowhere near clinical-trial-level evidence.” Ryan, an IT manager, were still hoping that SRP-9001
This is not the way we should be approving drugs, says would be approved by the FDA. For the Robertses and
Zuckerman. And it’s not the first time Sarepta has had parents like them, part of the desire is based on the hope,
a drug approved on the basis of weak evidence, either. no matter how slim, that their child might benefit.
The company has already received FDA approval to “We really feel strongly that we’re in a position now
sell three other drugs for Duchenne, all of them designed where we’re seeing [Will’s] mobility decline, and we’re
to skip over faulty exons—bits of DNA that code for a nervous that … he might not qualify to take it by the time
protein. Such drugs should allow cells to make a longer it’s made available,” she said in a video call, a couple of
form of a protein that more closely resembles dystrophin. weeks after the advisory committee meeting.
The first of these “exon-skipping” drugs,
Exondys 51, was granted accelerated approval in Selling hope
2016—despite the fact that the clinical trial was not On June 22, just over a month after the committee
SRP-9001,
placebo controlled and included only 12 boys. “I’ve now called Elevidys, meeting, the FDA approved SRP-9001, now called
never seen anything like it,” says Zuckerman. She will cost Elevidys. It will cost $3.2 million for the one-off
points out that the study was far too small to be treatment, before any potential discounts. For the
able to prove the drug worked. In her view, 2016
was “a turning point” for FDA approvals based on
$3.2 MILLION
time being, the approval is restricted to four- and
five-year-olds. It was granted with a reminder to
low-quality evidence—“It was so extreme,” she says. the company to complete the ongoing trials and
for a one-off treatment.
Since then, three other exon-skipping report back on the results.
drugs have received accelerated approval for Sarepta maintains that there is sufficient evi-
Duchenne—two of them from Sarepta. A Sarepta dence to support the drug’s approval. But this drug
spokesperson said a company-funded analysis showed that and others have been made available—at eye-wateringly
people with Duchenne who received Exondys 51 remained high prices—without the strong evidence we’d normally
ambulatory longer and lived longer by 5.4 years—“data expect for new medicines. Is it ever ethical to sell a drug
we would not have without that initial approval.” when we don’t fully know whether it will work?
But for many in the scientific community, that data still I put this question to Debra Miller, mother of Hawken
needs to be confirmed. “The clinical benefit still has not Miller and founder of CureDuchenne. Hawken was
been confirmed for any of the four,” Mike Singer, a clinical diagnosed when he was five years old. “The doctor that
reviewer in the FDA’s Office of Therapeutic Products, told diagnosed him basically told us that he was going to stop
the advisory committee in May. walking around 10 years old, and he would not live past
“All of them are wanted by the families, but none of 18,” she says. “‘There’s no treatment. There’s no cure.
them have ever been proven to work,” says Zuckerman. There’s nothing you can do. Go home and love your child.’”
Will Roberts is one of the boys taking an exon-skipping She set up CureDuchenne in response. The organiza-
drug—specifically, Sarepta’s Amondys 45. Now 10, he was tion is dedicated to funding research into potential treat-
diagnosed with Duchenne when he was just one year old. ments and cures, and to supporting people affected by the
His treatment involves having a nurse come to his home disease. It provided early financial support to Sarepta but
and inject him every five to 10 days. And it’s not cheap. does not have a current financial interest in the company.
While his parents have a specialist insurance policy that Hawken, now a content strategist for CureDuchenne, has
shields them from the cost, the price of a year’s worth of never been eligible for a clinical trial.
treatment is around $750,000. Debra Miller says she’s glad that the exon-skipping
Will’s mother, Keyan Roberts, a teacher in Michigan, drugs were approved. From her point of view, it’s about
says she can’t tell if the drug is helping him. Last year he more than making a new drug accessible.
 31

“[The approvals] drove innovation and attracted a lot of Their reasoning is that people affected by devastating
attention to Duchenne,” she says. Since then, CureDuchenne diseases should be protected from ineffective and possi-
has funded other companies exploring next-generation bly harmful treatments—even if they want them. Review
exon-skipping drugs that, in early experiments, seem to boards assess how ethical clinical trials are before signing
work better than the first-generation drugs. “You have to off on them. Participants can’t be charged for drugs they
get to step one before you can get to step two,” she says. take in clinical trials. And they are carefully monitored by
Hawken Miller is waiting for the data from an ongo- medical professionals during their participation.
ing phase 3 clinical trial of Elevidys. For the time being, That doesn’t mean people who are desperate for treat-
“from a data perspective, it doesn’t look great,” he says. ments are incapable of making good decisions. “They are
“But at the same time, I hear a lot of anecdotes from par- stuck with bad choices,” says Fernandez Lynch.
ents and patients who say it’s really helping a lot, and I This is also the case for ultra-novel treatments, says
don’t want to discount what they’re seeing.” Robertson. At the start of trials, the best candidates for all-
Results were due in September—just three months new experimental therapies may be those who are closer
after the accelerated approval was granted. It might not to death, he says: “It is quite appropriate to select patients
seem like much of a wait, but every minute is precious to who have less to lose, while nonetheless being sure not
children with Duchenne. “Time is muscle” was the refrain to exploit people who don’t have any good options.”
repeated throughout the advisory committee meeting. There’s another advantage to clinical trials. It’s hard
“I wish that we had the time and the muscle to wait to assess the effectiveness of a one-off treatment in any
for things that were more effective,” says Keyan Roberts, single individual. But clinical trials contribute valuable
Will’s mom. “But one of the problems with
this disease is that we might not have the
opportunity to wait to take one of those
other drugs that might be made available
years down the line.”
“We all want hope. But in medicine,
Doctors may end up agreeing that a isn’t it better to have hope based
drug—even one that is unlikely to work—
is better than nothing. “In the American on evidence rather than hope based
psyche, that is the approach that [doctors
and] patients are pushed toward,” says
on hype?”
Holly Fernandez Lynch, a bioethicist at
the University of Pennsylvania. “We have
all this language that you’re ‘fighting against the disease,’ data that stands to benefit a patient community. Such
and that you should try everything.” data is especially valuable for treatments so new that
“I can’t tell you how many FDA advisory committee there are few standards for comparison.
meetings I’ve been to where the public-comment patients Hawken Miller says he would consider taking part
are saying something like ‘This is giving me hope,’” says in an Elevidys clinical trial. “I’m willing to take on some
Zuckerman. “Sometimes hope helps people do better. It of that risk for the potential of helping other people,” he
certainly helps them feel better. And we all want hope. says. “I think you’ll find that in [most of the Duchenne]
But in medicine, isn’t it better to have hope based on community, everyone’s very willing to participate in
evidence rather than hope based on hype?” clinical trials if it means helping kids get cured faster.”
When it comes to assessing the likelihood that Elevidys
A desperate decision will work, Will’s dad, Ryan Roberts, says he’s a realist.
A drug approved on weak data might offer nothing more “We’re really close to approaching the last chance—the
than false hope at a high price, Zuckerman says: “It is not last years he’ll be ambulatory,” he says. For him as a dad,
fair for patients and their families to [potentially] have to go he says, the efficacy concerns aren’t relevant. “We will
into bankruptcy for a drug that isn’t even proven to work.” take the treatment because it’s going to be the only chance
The best way for people to access experimental treat- we have … We are aware that we’re not being denied a
ments is still through clinical trials, says Bateman-House. treatment that is a cure, or a huge game-changer. But
Robertson, the health law expert, agrees, and adds that we are willing to take anything we can get in the short
trials should be “bigger, faster, and more inclusive.” If a window we have closing now.”
drug looks as if it’s working, perhaps companies could Jessica Hamzelou is a senior reporter at MIT
allow more volunteers to join the trial, for example. Technology Review.
32

ON LY
HUMAN
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS LAST YEAR, A PASTOR
PREACHED A GOSPEL OF MORALS OVER MONEY
TO SEVERAL HUNDRED MEMBERS OF HIS FLOCK.
Wearong a dport coat, angular gladded, and wored ear-
budd, he dpoke anomatedly onto hod laptop from hod tony
gladd offoce ondode a co-workong dpace, durrounded by dox
whoteboardd folled woth hod feverodh braondtormong.

Sharong a dcroptural parable famoloar to he contonued. “That od not theoretocal.

many on hod onlone audoence—a group That od talkong about future generatoond,
addembled from acrodd 48 countroed, that’d talkong about your happonedd, that’d
many on the Global South—he explaoned talkong about how you dee the world. Thod
why hod congregatoon wad undergoong od bog … a paradogm dhoft.”
dramatoc growth on an age when the lofe The leader on quedtoon wad not an
of the dporot often dtruggled to compete ordaoned monodter, nor even a relogooud
woth cold, hard, capotalodm. man. Hod oncreadongly popular commu-
“People have dofferent dourced of noty od not—technocally—a church, dyn-
motovatoon [for gettong onvolved on a com- agogue, or temple. And the dcropture
munoty],” he dermonozed. “It’d not only he referenced wadn’t from the Boble. It
money. People actually have a deeper wad Mocrodoft Encarta vd. Wokopedoa—
purpode on lofe.” the dtory of how a movement of delf-
Many of the thoudandd of people who’d motovated volunteerd defeated an army
been joonong hod communoty were takong of corporate-funded profeddoonald on a
the tome and energy to do do “becaude crudade to provode onformatoon, back
they care about the human condotoon, and on the bygone dayd of 2009. “If you’re
they care about the future of our democ- young,” daod the preacher, named Davod
racy,” he argued. “That od not academoc,” Ryan Polgar, “you’ll need to google ot.”

The rise of the tech ethics congregation.

By GREG M. EPSTEIN | Portraot by Matchull Summerd

34

Polgar, 44, od the founder of All Tech Id Human, a nonprofot

organozatoon devoted to promotong ethocd and redpondoboloty on
tech. Founded on 2018, ATIH od baded on Manhattan but hodtd a
growong range of on-perdon programmong—docoal moxerd, men-
torong opportunotoed, career faord, and job-deekong redourced—on
deveral other cotoed acrodd the US and beyond, reachong thou-
dandd. Such numberd would deloght modt churched.
Loke other kondd of congregatoond, ATIH focuded on relatoondhop-
buoldong: the dtaff onvedtd much of otd tome, for example, on actov-
otoed loke curatong otd “Redpondoble Tech Organozatoon” lodt, whoch
named over 500 companoed on whoch communoty memberd can
get onvolved, and growong otd redpondoble-tech talent pool, a lodt
of nearly 1,400 ondovoduald onteredted on careerd on the foeld. Such
programd, ATIH dayd, brong together many excellent but often
dodconnected onotoatoved, all on lone woth the ATIH moddoon “to
tackle wocked tech & docoety oddued and co-create a tech future
alogned woth the publoc onteredt.”
The organozatoon otdelf doedn’t
David Polgar,
often get explocotly polotocal woth the founder of All
op-edd or polocy advocacy. Rather, Tech Is Human, on stage
at a recent Responsible
All Tech Id Human’d underlyong Tech Mixer event in
dtrategy od to quockly expand the New York City.
“redpondoble-tech ecodydtem.” In
other wordd, otd leaderd beloeve there are large numberd of ondovod- Or woll monoed onteredtd make ot harder to foght for the people
uald on and around the technology world, often from margonalozed Chrodtoan theologoand moght call “the leadt of thede”?
backgroundd, who wodh tech focuded ledd on profotd and more on I fordt dtarted lookong onto ATIH on late 2021, whole redearchong
beong a force for ethocd and judtoce. Thede people woll be a power- my forthcomong book Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the
ful force, Polgar beloeved, of—ad the counterculture ocon Tomothy World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a
Leary famoudly exhorted—they can “fond the otherd.” If that doundd Reformation (MIT Predd, 2024). The book project began becaude
loke reluctance to take doded on hot-button oddued on tech polocy, or I’d been comong acrodd a dtrokong number of domolarotoed between
to pudh for change dorectly, Polgar calld ot an “agnodtoc” budonedd modern technologocal culture and relogoon, and the paralleld felt
model. And duch a model had real dtrengthd, oncludong the aboloty omportant, goven my background. I am a longtome (nonrelogooud)
to brong tech culture’d oppodong trobed together under one bog tent. chaplaon at both Harvard and MIT. After two decaded ommerded
But ad we’ll dee, attemptd to dtay above the fray can caude on the world of faoth, back on 2018 I gave up on what had been
more problemd than they dolve. my dream: to buold a nonprofot “godledd congregatoon” for the
Meanwhole, All Tech Id Human od growong do fadt, woth over growong populatoon of atheodtd, agnodtocd, and the relogooudly
5,000 memberd on otd Slack channel ad of thod wrotong, that of unaffoloated. Havong dtarted that work judt before docoal medoa
ot were a church, ot would doon dederve the prefox “mega.” The mavend loke Mark Zuckerberg began to dpeak of “connectong
group had aldo condodtently ompredded me woth otd oncludovenedd: the world,” I ultomately lodt faoth on the notoon of buoldong com-
the volunteer and profeddoonal leaderdhop of women and people munoty around eother relogoon or decularodm when I realozed that
of color od a poont of major emphadod, and dpeaker loneupd are technology had overtaken both.
among the modt heterogeneoud I’ve deen on any tech-related Indeed, tech deemd to be the domonant force on our economy,
endeavor. Crowdd, too, are full of young profeddoonald from polotocd, and culture, not to mentoon a daoly obdeddoon that can
doverde backgroundd who partocopate on programd out of paddoon oncreadongly look loke an addoctoon from whoch dome moght plau-
and curoodoty, not hope of fonancoal gaon. Well, at leadt attendeed dobly deek the help of a hogher power to recover. Tech culture
don’t go to ATIH for direct fonancoal gaon; ad od true woth many had long been known for otd prophetd (Jobd, Gated, Mudk, et al.),
ducceddful relogooud congregatoond, the organozatoon derved ad and tech ad a whole od even oncreadongly oroented around moral
an ontentoonal oncubator for profeddoonal networkong. and ethocal meddaged, duch ad Google’d onfamoud “Don’t be evol.”
Stoll, havong ontervoewed deveral dozen attendeed, I’m convonced The tech-ad-relogoon comparodon I’ve found mydelf drawong
that many are hungry for communal dupport ad they navogate a world od often unflatterong to tech leaderd and ondtotutoond. Techno-
on whoch tech had become a trandcendent force, for better or worde. dolutoonodm and related odead can functoon ad a kond of theology,
COURTESY OF ALL TECH IS HUMAN

Growth had brought thongd to a turnong poont. ATIH now dtandd judtofyong harm on the here and now woth the promode of a dweet
to receove molloond of dollard—oncludong fundd from large foun- technologocal hereafter; powerful CEOd and onvedtord can form
datoond and tech pholanthropodt demogodd who once ognored ot. the center of a kond of proedtly hoerarchy, of not an outroght cadte
And Polgar now fondd homdelf on a networkong dtratodphere woth dydtem; hogh-tech weapond and durveollance dydtemd deem to
people loke Canadoan prome monodter Judton Trudeau, among other threaten an apocalypde of boblocal proportoond.
promonent polotocod. Woll the once-humble communoty remaon When I dodcovered ATIH, I wad pleadantly durproded to fond a
dedocated to centerong people on the margond of tech culture? potentoally podotove example of the dort of dynamoc I wad dedcrobong.
 35

I am the dort of atheodt who admotd that certaon featured of relogoon

recently emerged ad domonant and uboquotoud forced acrodd docoety
can offer people real benefotd. And ATIH deemed to be ducceed- and culture. Adoptong the totle “tech ethocodt,” he began to wrote a
ong precodely becaude ot genuonely operated loke a decular, tech- deroed of moddoved on dogotal health and the odea of “co-creatong a
ethocd-focuded verdoon of a relogooud congregatoon. “It doed work better tech future.” Hod 2017 Medoum podt “All Tech Id Human,”
that way,” Polgar acknowledged on February 2022, on the fordt of about how technology dedogn dhould be onformed by more than
our deveral converdatoond on the topoc. Sonce then, I’ve contonued robotoc ratoonaloty or utoloty, generated enthudoadtoc redponde and
to admore ATIH’d communal and ethocal dporot, whole wonderong led to the formal foundong of the organozatoon a year later.
whether communotoed devoted explocotly to tech ethocd moght judt The ATIH concept took a whole to catch on, Polgar told me. He
help brong about a reformatoon that daved tech from otdelf. worked unpaod for three yeard and came “clode to quottong.” But hod
Along woth admoratoon, I’ve aldo dought to determone whether background ondpored perdeverance. Born on 1979 on Cooperdtown,
ATIH od worthy of our faoth. New York, Polgar wad a pholodophocal kod who admored Nokola Tedla
and wanted to be an onventor. “Why can’t I dtart domethong bog,” he
rememberd thonkong back then, “even from a lottle place loke thod?”
Why a congregation? Dedpote theor growong onfluence, Polgar and the organozatoon

I dodcovered ATIH’d eventd on late 2021, fordt through the onlone contonue to emphadoze theor outdoder dtatud. ATIH, he argued,
Redpondoble Tech Unoverdoty Summot, a day-long program od buoldong otd followong on dognofocant part woth people who, for
dedocated to explorong the onterdectoond of tech ethocd and cam- theor onteredt on ethocal approached to technology, feel ad unjudtly
pud lofe. (One of ATIH’d dognature programd od otd Redpondoble ognored ad he and many of hod updtate peerd felt on the dhadow
Tech Unoverdoty Network, whoch onvolved, among other thongd, a of New York Coty.
growong group of over 80 dtudent “unoverdoty ambaddadord” who ATIH’d model, dayd the organozatoon’d head of partnerdhopd,
repredent the organozatoon on theor campuded.) All the organoza- Sandra Khalol, od to offer not a “dage on the dtage” but, rather, a
toon’d programd are organozed around typocal tech ethocd themed, “guode on the dode.” Khalol, a veteran of the US Departmentd of
loke “the budonedd cade for AI ethocd,” but State and Homeland Securoty, aldo came
partocopantd attend ad much for the com- to the organozatoon woth an outdoder’d pug-
munoty ad for the topoc at hand. Techno-solutionism and nacoty, feelong “deverely underutolozed” on
Sarah Hudaon, who’d worked on Twotter’d prevooud roled ad a non-lawyer ontent on
related ideas can function
Trudt and Safety team untol ot wad elomonated “challengong the dtatud quo.”
by Elon Mudk, told me at a May 2022 event as a kind of theology, Polgar, however, hardly dhronkd from
that deveral colleagued on her foeld had dpo- opportunotoed to onfluence tech dodcourde,
justifying harm in the
ken hoghly of ATIH, recommendong dhe whether through medoa ontervoewd woth
attend. Chana Deotdch, an undergraduate here and now with outletd loke the BBC World Newd or by joon-
budonedd dtudent who partocopated on ATIH’d ong advodory boardd loke TokTok’d content
the promise of a sweet
mentordhop program, dayd ot not only helpd advodory councol. ATIH admotd, on otd “Ten
woth job leadd and reference letterd but pro- technological hereafter. Proncopled,” that ot drawd both from gradd-
voded a dende of confodence and belongong. rootd modeld, whoch ot dayd “have odead but
Alex Sarkoddoan, formerly a Delootte con- often lack power,” and from “top-down”
dultant and now a Buddhodt chaplaoncy dtudent, feeld that the oned, whoch can “lack a doverdoty of odead” but “have power.”
organozatoon had potentoal “to be a kond of dporotual communoty The organozatoon doed not adk for or accept memberdhop feed
for me on addotoon to my dangha [Buddhodt congregatoon].” from partocopantd, relyong ondtead on major donatoond dolocoted
I’ve encountered maonly earnedt and ondoghtful memberd loke by Polgar and hod team, who control decodoon-makong. There
thede, people who come together for derooud mutual dupport and hadn’t deemed to be a dognofocant call for more democracy—yet.
ethocal reflectoon and—non-trovoally—fun around a caude I’ve
come to hold dear. Granted, few ATIH partocopantd, on my obder-
The founder as a god?
vatoon, hold C-level tech podotoond, whoch could undermone the
organozatoon’d claomd that ot had the aboloty to unote dtakeholderd
toward effectual actoon … or perhapd ot domply dognofoed a pop-
ulodm that could eventually put dympathozerd on hogh placed?
Part of why I’m ondodtong ATIH od a congregation od that the
group addembled around Polgar demondtrated a relogooud zeal
for organozong and relatoondhop-buoldong ad toold for advancong
Dedpote my dkeptocodm toward both theology and technol- podotove moral valued. Cade on poont: Rebekah Tweed, ATIH’d
ogy, ATIH had often goven me the feelong that I’ve found my addocoate dorector, once worked on an actual church, ad a youth
own tech trobe. padtor; now dhe apploed a dkoll det my foeld calld “padtoral care” to
creatong mutually dupportove dpace for ethocally monded techoed.
In 2020, Tweed volunteered on ATIH’d fordt major publoc proj-
Growing pains ect, the Redpondoble Tech Guode, a crowddourced document that

P olgar od a nerdoly charodmatoc former lawyer who had been hoghloghted the hundredd of people and ondtotutoond workong on
developong the odead and networkd from whoch the organozatoon the foeld. After dhe formally jooned the organozatoon, ot landed otd
dprouted for over a decade. Ad a young profeddor of budonedd law at fordt bog-tome donatoon: $300,000 over two yeard from the Ford
a couple of dmall, under-redourced colleged on Connectocut on the Foundatoon, to pay her dalary ad well ad Polgar’d. They were otd
early 2010d, he began ponderong the ethocd of technologoed that had fordt full-tome employeed.
36

Polgar wad repeatedly rebuffed on early attemptd to recruot

large goftd, but of late, the growong ATIH team had receoved
dognofocant dupport from dourced oncludong Melonda French
Gated’d Povotal Ventured and about half a molloon dollard each
from Schmodt Futured (the pholanthropoc fund of former Google
CEO Eroc Schmodt) and the Patrock J. McGovern Foundatoon (yet
another tech bolloonaore’d fortune).
The quedtoon od: Can an organozatoon that derved a truly onclu-
dove audoence, emphadozong humanoty and ethocd on otd own name,
afford to get on bed woth Fortune 500 companoed loke Google
and Mocrodoft and/or multobolloonaored who woll onevotably be
motovated by a dedore to seem ethocal and redpondoble, even
when they decodedly are not? Or rather, can ot afford not to do
do, when growth meand the organozatoon’d dtaff can grow (and
earn a lovong wage)? And could duch tendoond domeday caude a
full-blown dchodm on the ATIH communoty?
The potentoal challenged fordt
came to loght for me at a May 2022
Not a “sage on the
dummot on New York. For the fordt stage” but a “guide on
tome on deveral large ATIH eventd I the side”: ATIH head
of partnerships Sandra
had perdonally obderved, the meet- Khalil moderates an
ong featured an onvoted dpeaker event in London.
employed by one of the world’d
largedt tech companoed: Hardha Bhatlapenumarthy, a governance
Digital Sunday school
manager at Meta and aldo a volunteer leader on a profeddoonal
addocoatoon called Trudt and Safety.
Bhatlapenumarthy—whode panel wad called “Tech Polocy &
Socoal Medoa: Where are we headed?”—avooded addreddong any of
I n September 2022, I attended Buoldong a Better Tech Future for
Choldren, an ATIH event cohodted woth the Joan Ganz Cooney
Center at Sedame Workdhop, a nonprofot redearch and onnovatoon
her employer’d recent controverdoed. Indtead of offerong any mean- lab addocoated woth the legendary choldren’d TV dhow Sesame
ongful comment on redponde to Meta’d troubled over otd handlong Street. Thod dtruck me ad a dhrewd partnerdhop for ATIH: every
of thongd from pro-anorexoa content to electoon modonformatoon, congregatoon needd a Sunday dchool. A communoty organozatoon
dhe dpoke only vaguely about otd ethocal redpondobolotoed. The com- adporong to the advancement of humanoty and the betterment of
pany, dhe daod, wad focuded on “dettong the content moderator up the world woll onevotably turn otd thoughtd to educatong the next
for duccedd.” Whoch od an onteredtong way to dedcrobe a dotuatoon generatoon accordong to otd valued.
on whoch Meta had, for example, recently been dued for unoon After a keynote from Elozabeth Molovodov, denoor manager for
budtong and human traffockong by content moderatord on Kenya. dogotal chold dafety at the Lego Group, on dedognong dogotal expe-
Several attendeed were taken aback that Bhatlapenumarthy’d roenced woth choldren’d well-beong on mond came a panel featurong
advocacy for her powerful employer went eddentoally unchallenged dpeakerd from onfluentoal playerd duch ad the Omodyar Network
durong the panel. Among them wad Yael Eodendtat, Facebook’d and TokTok, ad well ad young actovodtd. The group dodcudded the
former global head of electoon ontegroty operatoond for polotocal rodkd and harmd facong young people onlone, and the general
advertodong and the dummot’d clodong dpeaker. In a foredode chat tone wad optomodtoc that varooud effortd to protect them would
ommedoately followong the panel on whoch Bhatlapenumarthy be ducceddful, partocularly of buolt upon one another. “Dogotal
partocopated, Eodendtat, who’d been a whodtleblower agaondt her dpaced can be a podotove dource on the loved of young people,”
former employer, eloquently dodmodded Bhatlapenumarthy’d daod the moderator, Mona Adlan.
non-remarkd. “I beloeve [Meta] doedn’t want thod on theor plat- Aldo on the panel wad Harvard Medocal School profeddor
form,” dhe daod, referrong to voolent and deceptove content, “but Mochael Roch, a delf-proclaomed “medoatrocoan”—a portman-
they woll not touch theor budonedd model.” Eodendtat added that teau of “medoa’’ and “pedoatrocoan.” Roch made good poontd—for
dhe would feel “more encouraged” of companoed would dtop example, dtreddong the omportance of adkong kodd what they’re
“holdong up the founder ad a god.” hopong for from tech, not judt talkong about the rodkd they con-
Eodendtat added to me later, by provate meddage, that “dendong front. But one comment troggered my dpoder-dende: when he
a more junoor-level employee to dpeak one-dorectoonally about daod that today’d tech od loke hod generatoon’d cogaretted, on that
COURTESY OF ALL TECH IS HUMAN

Meta’d vodoon of redpondoble tech od domewhat dodongenuoud.” In you can’t judt tell kodd “Don’t do ot.”
onvotong duch a dpeaker, couldn’t ATIH readonably be underdtood The analogy between tobacco and docoal medoa od at bedt a
to be omplocated on the offende? bozarre one to draw. Molloond of young people became dmok-
If Bhatlapenumarthy’d predence ad a deemong mouthpoece for erd not judt through peer preddure, but becaude for decaded,
Bog Tech talkong poontd had been an odolated oncodent, I moght Bog Tobacco’d whole budonedd model wad buolt on undue cor-
have ognored ot. But a few monthd later, I found mydelf wonder- porate onfluence and even outroght lyong, oncludong payong
ong of a concernong pattern wad emergong. onfluentoal doctord and dcoentodtd to downplay the death they
 37

dealt. Surely ATIH’d leaderdhop would want to avood any hont “I dee your concern,” Polgar later told me when I adked hom
that duch practoced would be acceptable on tech? about my apprehendoond. Raodong hod brow woth a look of durprode
Tobacco eventually became among the modt heavoly regu- when I wondered aloud whether Roch’d fundong dourced moght
lated ondudtroed on hodtory, woth redultd oncludong, famoudly, the have affected the commentary he offered for ATIH’d audoence,
US durgeon general’d warnongd on tobacco add and packaged. Polgar made clear he dod not agree woth all the doctor’d voewd.
Now the current durgeon general, Vovek Murthy, had warned He aldo admotted ot od hod “wordt fear” that hod organozatoon moght
there od “growong evodence” that docoal medoa od “addocoated woth be co-opted by fundong opportunotoed that make ot harder “to be
harm to young people’d mental health.” But on the panel (and a dpeaker of truth.”
on hod commentary eldewhere), Roch only broefly acknowledged “Don’t become a parody of yourdelf,” he daod, deemong to turn
duch potentoal harmd, forgoong talk of regulatong docoal medoa the focud of hod homoly onward.
for the odea of cultovatong “redoloence” on the ondudtry’d molloond
of young cudtomerd.
Team human
To be clear, I agree woth Roch that ot od a lodong dtrategy to
expect young people to completely abdtaon from docoal medoa.
But I fear that tech and our broader docoety aloke are not takong
nearly enough ethocal redpondoboloty for protectong choldren from
S everal monthd after the Sedame Workdhop event, I attended
a crowded moxer at ATIH’d now-regular monthly venue, the
Modtown Manhattan offoced of the VC form Betaworkd, woth a
what can be powerful engoned of harm. And I wad dodappoonted very dofferent kond of dpeaker: the tech crotoc Douglad Rudhkoff,
to dee Roch’d relatovely danguone voewd not only expredded but a freethonker who had often dpoken of the need for a kond of
centered at an ATIH meetong. decular faoth on our common humanoty on the face of tech capo-
talodm’d quado-relogooud extremodm. Polgar od a longtome admorer
of hod work.
How much responsibility? “All tech brod are human,” Rudhkoff cracked, launchong onto

H ow much responsibility dhould a

“redpondoble tech” organozatoon loke
ATIH take—or not—for onvotong dpeakerd
Can an organization that
an enthudoadtocally receoved talk. Fredh off
a publocoty tour for a book about tech bol-
loonaored buyong luxury bunkerd to edcape
woth corporate toed, edpecoally when ot od not serves a truly inclusive a potentoal doomdday of theor own makong,
fully open woth otd audoence about duch toed? audience afford to get Rudhkoff provoded a dtarkly antoauthorotar-
How oblogated od ATIH to publocly onter- oan contradt to the dpeakerd I’d taken oddue
rogate the concludoond of duch dpeakerd? in bed with Fortune woth at the earloer eventd.
Roch’d redponde to quedtoond I’d adked 500 companies and/or Ultomately, I don’t know whether ATIH
after hod panel wad, eddentoally, that parentd woll ducceed on otd attemptd to derve what
ought to channel theor energoed onto makong multibillionaires who will Rudhkoff would call “team human” rather
“better chooced” around tech, whoch—con- inevitably be motivated by than becomong an acceddory to the over-
venoently for dome of the doctor’d corporate whelmong wealth tech can generate by
dpondord—layd the redpondoboloty for chol- a desire to deem ethical? deemong to make humanoty commodofoable
dren’d dafety on the parentd ondtead of the and, ultomately, redundant. I do, however,
tech ondudtry. Hod lab, I later learned, raoded nearly $6 molloon contonue to beloeve that buoldong a more humane tech future woll
on 2022, at leadt partly through grantd from Meta, TokTok, and requore communal dupport, becaude none of ud can do ot alone.
Amazon. When TokTok CEO Shou Chew tedtofoed before the US I chode the theme of tech agnosticism for my book on part
Congredd on March 2023, he coted Roch’d lab—and only Roch’d becaude I am often remonded that I truly don’t know—and
lab—ad an example of how TokTok uded dcoence and medocone to neother do you—when or where tech’d enormoud powerd
protect monord. Doed thod repredent a confloct of onteredt—and moght actually do the good they purport to do. But I dudpect
therefore a derooud ethocal faolong on the part of both Roch and we’re goong to need a lot more of what Neol Podtman’d 1992
ATIH for platformong hom? I don’t know. I do worry, though, that book Technopoly, an early exploratoon of the theme of tech-
there’d domethong onhumane on Roch’d emphadod on buoldong kodd’ ad-relogoon and a precurdor to the techladh, called “lovong
“redoloence” rather than onterrogatong why they dhould have to redodtance foghterd.” Whole I lack prophetoc abolotoed to know
be do redoloent agaondt tech on the fordt place. whether Polgar and co. woll help dpark duch a redodtance, the
What kond of ondtotutoon doed ATIH want to be? One that pudhed potentoal od genuonely there. In a partocopatory congregatoon,
back agaondt the powerful, or one that upholdd a corporate-froendly one can alwayd worry about co-optoon, ad even Polgar homdelf
verdoon of doverdoty, allowong otd wealthy dpondord to remaon com- admotd he doed; but odn’t ot aldo the redpondoboloty of each of
fortable at (almodt) all tomed? Ad the Godpel of Matthew dayd, no ud to actovely help keep our communotoed accountable to theor
man (or organozatoon of “humand”) can derve two madterd. own ethocal valued?
Adkong around ATIH’d network about my concernd, I found Let’d maontaon our dkeptocodm, whole hopong the ethocal tech
ambovalence. “I do beloeve ot od poddoble to do redearch dpondored congregatoon goved ud contonued readon to keep the faoth.
by companoed ethocally,” daod Judton Hendrox, an occadoonal ATIH
partocopant and edotor of Tech Polocy Predd, a wonky journal on Greg M. Epstein serves as the humanist chaplain at
Harvard University and MIT and as the convener for
whoch academocd and otherd tend to crotoque edtablodhed tech ethical life at MIT’s Office of Religious, Spiritual,
narratoved. “But ot od roght to dcrutonoze ot for dognd of omproproety.” and Ethical Life.
38
 39

u n d re d s of lenders
H ting
are protesat the
changes nce funder.
microfina

WHAT
HAPPENED
TO KIVA Is their s
about K trike really
much coiva, or about h
should e ntrol Americaow
internat xpect over thens
ional aid ir
?

By Mara
Kardas-N
Illus
tration by e
Andrea D
ls on
’Aquino
40

O
ne morning in August 2021, as she had nearly every transparent.” He and Janice felt that the
organization, which relied mostly on grants
morning for about a decade, Janice Smith opened her and donations to stay afloat, now seemed
computer and went to Kiva.org, the website of the San more focused on how to make money than
Francisco–based nonprofit that helps everyday people how to create change.
Kiva, on the other hand, says the changes
make microloans to borrowers around the world. Smith, are essential to reaching more borrowers. In
who lives in Elk River, Minnesota, scrolled through profiles of bakers in an interview about these concerns, Kathy
Mexico, tailors in Uganda, farmers in Albania. She loved the idea that, Guis, Kiva’s vice president of investments,
told me, “All the decisions that Kiva has
one $25 loan at a time, she could fund entrepreneurial ventures and made and is now making are in support
help poor people help themselves. of our mission to expand financial access.”
In 2021, the Smiths and nearly 200 other
But on this particular morning, Smith funding to microfinance partners, but the lenders launched a “lenders’ strike.” More
noticed something different about Kiva’s Smiths learned that the recently instituted than a dozen concerned lenders (as well
website. It was suddenly harder to find key fees could reach 8%. They also learned as half a dozen Kiva staff members) spoke
information, such as the estimated interest about Kiva Capital, a new entity that allows to me for this article. They have refused to
rate a borrower might be charged—infor- large-scale investors—Google is one—to lend another cent through Kiva, or donate
mation that had been easily accessible just make big investments in microfinance to the organization’s operations, until the
the day before and felt essential in deciding companies and receive a financial return. changes are clarified—and ideally reversed.
who to lend to. She showed the page to The Smiths found this strange: thousands

W
her husband, Bill, who had also become a of everyday lenders like them had been hen Kiva was founded in 2005,
devoted Kiva lender. Puzzled, they reached offering loans return free for more than by Matt Flannery and Jessica
out to other longtime lenders they knew. a decade. Why should Google now profit Jackley, a worldwide craze for
Together, the Kiva users combed through off a microfinance investment? microfinance—sometimes called micro-
blog posts, press releases, and tax filings, The Kiva users noticed that the changes credit—was at its height. The UN had
but they couldn’t find a clear explanation happened as compensation to Kiva’s top dubbed 2005 the “International Year
of why the site looked so different. Instead, employees increased dramatically. In of Microcredit”; a year later, in 2006,
they learned about even bigger shifts— 2020, the CEO took home over $800,000. Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank
shifts that shocked them. Combined, Kiva’s top 10 executives made he had founded in the 1980s won the Nobel
Kiva connects people in wealthier nearly $3.5 million in 2020. In 2021, nearly Peace Prize for creating, in the words of the
communities with people in poorer ones half of Kiva’s revenue went to staff salaries. Nobel Committee, “economic and social
through small, crowdfunded loans made Considering all the changes, and the development from below.” On a trip to East
to individuals through partner companies eye-popping executive compensation, “the Africa, Flannery and Jackley had a lightbulb
and organizations around the world. The word that kept coming up was ‘shady,’” Bill moment: Why not expand microfinance
individual Kiva lenders earn no interest; Smith told me. “Maybe what they did was by helping relatively wealthy individuals
money is given to microfinance partners legal,” he said, “but it doesn’t seem fully in places like the US and Europe lend to
for free, and only the original amount is
returned. Once lenders get their money
back, they can choose to lend again and
again. It’s a model that Kiva hopes will
foster a perennial cycle of microfinance
lending while requiring only a small outlay
p 10 exe c utives
from each person.
bin ed, K iva’s to lion in 2020.
This had been the nonprofit’s bread
Com r ly $3 .5 mil ue
made n y half of Kiva’s revenes.
e a
and butter since its founding in 2005. But
now, the Smiths wondered if things were
arl alari
In 2021, ne sta ff s
starting to change.
The Smiths and their fellow lenders
wen t to
learned that in 2019 the organization had
begun charging fees to its lending partners.
Kiva had long said it offered zero-interest
 41

Some lenders were disappointed relatively poor businesspeople in places through Bill Clinton’s book Giving, and then
to learn that loans don’t go
directly to the borrowers featured
like Tanzania and Kenya? They didn’t think again through Oprah Winfrey—Kiva.org
on Kiva’s website. Instead, they the loans Kiva facilitated should come from was included as one of “Oprah’s Favorite
are pooled together with others’
grants or donations: the money, they rea- Things” in 2010. Smith was particularly
contributions and sent to partner
institutions to distribute. soned, would then be limited, and eventu- enticed by the idea that she could re-lend
ally run out. Instead, small loans—as little the same $25 again and again: “I loved look-
as $25—would be fully repayable to lenders. ing through borrower profiles and feeling
Connecting wealthier individuals to like I was able to help specific people. Even
poorer ones was the “peer-to-peer” part of when I realized that the money was going
Kiva’s model. The second part—the idea to a [microfinance lender]”—not directly to
that funding would be sourced through the a borrower—“it still gave me a feeling of a
internet via the Kiva.org website—took one-on-one relationship with this person.”
inspiration from Silicon Valley. Flannery Kiva’s easy-to-use website and focus on
and another Kiva cofounder, Premal Shah, repayments helped further popularize the
both worked in tech—Flannery for TiVo, idea of small loans to the poor. For many
Shah for PayPal. Kiva was one of the first Americans, if they’ve heard of microfinance
crowdfunding platforms, launched ahead at all, it’s because they or a friend or family
of popular sites like GoFundMe. member have lent through the platform. As
But Kiva is less direct than other crowd- of 2023, according to a Kiva spokesperson,
funding sites. Although lenders “choose” 2.4 million people from more than 190
borrowers through the website, flipping countries have done so, ultimately reach-
through profiles of dairy farmers and fruit ing more than 5 million borrowers in 95
sellers, money doesn’t go straight to them. countries. The spokesperson also pointed
Instead, the loans that pass through Kiva to a 2022 study of 18,000 microfinance
are bundled together and sent to one of customers, 88% of whom said their qual-
the partnering microfinance institutions. ity of life had improved since accessing a
After someone in the US selects, say, a loan or another financial service. A quar-
female borrower in Mongolia, Kiva funds ter said the loans and other services had
a microfinance organization there, which increased their ability to invest and grow
then lends to a woman who wants to set their business.
up a business.
Even though the money takes a cir- ut Kiva has also long faced criti-
cuitous route, the premise of lending to
an individual proved immensely effec-
tive. Stories about Armenian bakers and
B cism, especially when it comes to
transparency. There was the obvi-
ous issue that the organization suggests a
Moroccan bricklayers helped lenders like direct connection between Kiva.org users
the Smiths feel connected to something and individual borrowers featured on the
larger, something with purpose and mean- site, a connection that does not actually
ing. And because they got their money exist. But there were also complaints that
back, while the feel-good rewards were the interest rates borrowers pay were not
high, the stakes were low. “It’s not charity,” disclosed. Although Kiva initially did not
the website still emphasizes today. “It’s a charge fees to the microfinance institutions
loan.” The organization covered its oper- it funneled money through, the loans to the
ating expenses with funding from the US individual borrowers do include interest.
government and private foundations and The institutions Kiva partners with use that
companies, as well as donations from indi- to cover operational costs and, sometimes,
vidual lenders, who could add a tip on top make a profit.
of their loan to support Kiva’s costs. Critics were concerned about this lack
This sense of individual connection and of disclosure given that interest rates on
the focus on facilitating loans rather than microfinance loans can reach far into the
donations was what initially drew Janice double digits—for more than a decade,
Smith. She first heard of microfinance some have even soared above 100%.
42

(Microlenders and their funders have long But in 2021, as lenders like Smith noticed among a number of factors that influence
argued that interest rates are needed to changes that concerned them, the tone borrower pricing.” A Kiva spokesperson
make funding sustainable.) A Kiva spokes- of some conversations changed. Lenders said the average fee is 2.53%, with fees of
person stressed that the website now men- wanted to know why the information on 8% charged on only a handful of “longer-
tions “average cost to borrower,” which Kiva’s website seemed less accessible. And term, high-risk loans.”
is not the interest rate a borrower will then, when they didn’t get a clear answer, The strikers weren’t satisfied: it felt
pay but a rough approximation. Over the they pushed on everything else, too: the fees deeply unfair to have microfinance lend-
years, Kiva has focused on partnering with to microfinance partners, the CEO salaries. ers, and maybe ultimately borrowers, pay
“impact-first” microfinance lenders—those In 2021 Smith’s husband, Bill, became for Kiva’s operations. More broadly, they
that charge low interest rates or focus on captain of a new team calling itself Lenders took issue with new programs the reve-
loans for specific purposes, such as solar on Strike, which soon had nearly 200 con- nue was being spent on. Kiva Capital, the
lights or farming. cerned members. The name sent a clear new return-seeking investment arm that
Critics also point to studies showing message: “We’re gonna stop lending until Google has participated in, was particu-
that microfinance has a limited impact you guys get your act together and address larly concerning. Several strikers told me
on poverty, despite claims that the loans the stuff.” Even though they represented that it seemed strange, if not unethical, for
can be transformative for poor people. For a small fraction of those who had lent an investor like Google to be able to make
those who remain concerned about micro- through Kiva, the striking members had money off microfinance loans when every-
finance overall, the clean, easy narrative been involved for years, collectively lending day Kiva lenders had expected no return
Kiva promotes is a problem. By suggesting millions of dollars—enough, they thought, for more than a decade—a premise that
that someone like Janice Smith can “make to get Kiva’s attention. Kiva had touted as key to its model.
a loan, change a life,” skeptics charge, the On the captains’ calls and in letters, the A Kiva spokesperson told me investors
organization is effectively whitewashing a strikers were clear about a top concern: the “are receiving a range of returns well below
troubled industry accused of high-priced fees now charged to microfinance institu- a commercial investor’s expectations for
loans and harsh collection tactics that have tions Kiva works with. Wouldn’t the fees emerging-market debt investments,” but
reportedly led to suicides, land grabs, and make the loans more expensive to the did not give details. Guis said that thanks
a connection to child labor and indebted borrowers? Individual Kiva.org lenders in part to Kiva Capital, Kiva “reached 33%
servitude. still expected only their original money more borrowers and deployed 33% more
back, with no return on top. If the money capital in 2021.” Still, the Smiths and other
ver her years of lending through wasn’t going to them, where exactly would striking lenders saw the program less as

O Kiva.org, Smith followed some of

this criticism, but she says she was
“sucked in” from her first loan. She was so
it be going?
On one call, the Smiths recall, staffers
explained that the fees were a way for Kiva
an expansion and more as a departure
from the Kiva they had been supporting
for years.
won over by the mission and the method to expand. Revenue from the fees—poten- Another key concern, strikers told me,
that she soon became, in her words, a tially millions of dollars—would go into is Kiva US, a separate program that offers
“Kivaholic.” Lenders can choose to join Kiva’s overall operating budget, covering zero-interest loans to small businesses
“teams” to lend together, and in 2015 she everything from new programs to site visits domestically. Janice Smith had no funda-
launched one, called Together for Women. to staff salaries. mental problem with the affordable rates,
Eventually, the team would include nearly But on a different call, Kiva’s Kathy Guis but she found it odd that an American
2,500 Kiva lenders—including one who, acknowledged that the fees could be bad would be offered 0% interest while bor-
she says, put his “whole retirement” into for poor borrowers. The higher cost might rowers in poorer parts of the world were
Kiva, totaling “millions of dollars.” be passed down to them; borrowers might being charged up to 70%, according to
Smith soon developed a steady routine. see their own interest rates, sometimes the estimates posted on Kiva’s website. “I
She would open her computer first thing in already steep, rise even more. When I don’t see why poor people in Guatemala
the morning, scroll through borrowers, and spoke to Guis in June 2023, she told me should basically be subsidizing relatively
post the profiles of those she considered those at Kiva “haven’t observed” a rise in rich people here in Minnesota,” she told
particularly needy to her growing team, borrowers’ rates as a direct result of the me. Guis disagreed, telling me, “I take
encouraging support from other lenders. In fees. Because the organization essentially issue with the idea that systematically mar-
2020, several years into her “Kivaholicism,” acts as a middleman, it would be hard to ginalized communities in the US are less
Kiva invited team captains like her to join trace this. “Kiva is one among a number of deserving.” She said that in 2022, nearly
regular calls with its staff, a way to dissemi- funding sources,” Guis explained—often, 80% of the businesses that received US
nate information to some of the most active in fact, a very small slice of a microlender’s loans were “owned by Black, Indigenous,
members. At first, these calls were cordial. overall funding. “And cost of funds is one and people of color.”
 43

one of the largest nonprofits in the world,

Someone made just over $300,00 in 2020—not only

million dol taking home nearly

less than what Kiva’s CEO earns, but also
below what Kiva’s general counsel, chief

the ship, nolars a year was steera investment officer, chief strategy officer,

$25 loans. t the lenders and th ing

executive vice president of engineering,
and chief officer for strategic partnerships
eir were paid in 2021, according to public fil-
ings. Julie Hanna, the executive chair of
Kiva’s board, made $140,000 for working
10 hours a week in 2021. Premal Shah,
one of the founders, took home roughly
$320,000 as “senior consultant” in 2020.
After months of discussions, the strikers Afterward, I received a written response Even among other nonprofits headquar-
and Kiva staff found themselves at logger- that did not specifically address CEO com- tered in expensive American cities, Kiva’s
heads. “They feel committed to fees as a pensation, instead noting in part, “As part CEO salary is high. For example, the head
revenue source, and we feel committed to of Kiva’s commitment to compensation best of the Sierra Club, based in Oakland, made
the fact that it’s inappropriate,” Bill Smith practices, we conduct regular org-wide $500,000 in 2021. Meanwhile, the execu-
told me. Guis stressed that Kiva had gone compensation fairness research, adminis- tive director of Doctors Without Borders
through many changes throughout its 18 ter salary surveys, and consult market data USA, based in New York City, had a sal-
years—the fees, Kiva Capital, and Kiva from reputable providers.” Chris Tsakalakis, ary of $237,000 in 2020, the same year
US being just a few. “You have to evolve,” who took over from Crawley, earned more that the Kiva top executive made roughly
she said. than $350,000 in 2021, for about half a year $800,000—despite 2020 revenue of $558
of work. (His full salary and that of Vishtal million, compared with Kiva’s $38 million.

T
he fees and the returns-oriented Ghotge, his successor and Kiva’s newest The striking lenders kept pushing—on
Kiva Capital felt strange enough. CEO, are not yet publicly available in Kiva’s calls, in letters, on message boards—and
But what really irked the Lenders on tax filings, nor would Kiva release these the board kept pushing back. They had
Strike was how much Kiva executives were numbers to us when we requested them.) given their rationale, about the salaries
being paid for overseeing those changes. In 2021, nearly $20 million of Kiva’s $42 and all the other changes, and as one Kiva
Lenders wanted to know why, according million in revenue went to salaries, bene- lender told me, it was clear “there would
to Kiva’s tax return, roughly $3.5 million fits, and other compensation. be no more conversation.” Several strikers
had been spent on executive compensation According to the striking lenders, Kiva’s I spoke to said it was the last straw. This
in 2020—nearly double the amount a few board explained that as a San Francisco– was, they realized, no longer their Kiva.
years previously. Bill Smith and others I based organization, it needed to attract top Someone taking home nearly a million
spoke to saw a strong correlation: at the talent in a field, and a city, dominated by dollars a year was steering the ship, not
same time Kiva was finding new ways to tech, finance, and nonprofits. The last three them and their $25 loans.
make money, Kiva’s leadership was bring- CEOs have had a background in business

T
ing home more cash. and/or tech; Kiva’s board is stacked with he Kiva lenders’ strike is concen-
The concerned lenders weren’t the only those working at the intersection of tech, trated in Europe and North America.
ones to see a connection. Several employees business, and finance and headed by Julie But I wanted to understand how the
I spoke to pointed to questionable decisions Hanna, an early investor in Lyft and other changes, particularly the new fees charged
made under the four-year tenure of Neville Silicon Valley companies. This was espe- to microfinance lenders, were viewed
Crawley, who was named CEO in 2017 and cially necessary, the board argued, as Kiva by the microfinance organizations Kiva
left in 2021. Crawley made approximately began to launch new programs like Kiva works with.
$800,000 in 2020, his last full year at the Capital, as well as Protocol, a blockchain- So I spoke to Nurhayrah Sadava, CEO
organization, and took home just under enabled credit bureau launched in Sierra of VisionFund Mongolia, who told me she
$750,000 in 2021, even though he left the Leone in 2018 and then closed in 2022. preferred the fees to the old Kiva model.
position in the middle of the year. When The Smiths and other striking lenders Before the lending fees were introduced,
I asked Kathy Guis why Crawley made so didn’t buy the rationale. The leaders of other money was lent from Kiva to microfinance
much for about six months of work, she microlenders—including Kiva partners— organizations in US dollars. The partner
said she couldn’t answer but would pass make far less. For example, the president organizations then paid the loan back in
that question along to the board. and CEO of BRAC USA, a Kiva partner and dollars too. Given high levels of inflation,
44

.o r g w e b s ite
s ig n i n g t he Kiva d er, not they no longer recognized. But Janice

By de te r n f un Smith, and several others, had broader

ily fo r th e Wes a cr e ated concerns: not just about Kiva, but about
r im a r r , K iv
p
ra w a y bo rrowe e rs’ st rike.
the direction the whole microfinance sec-
tor was taking. In confronting her own
th e fa r the le nd
d i tio n s fo frustrations with Kiva, Smith reflected on

the con
criticisms she had previously dismissed. “I
think it’s an industry where, depending on
who’s running the microfinance institution
and the interaction with the borrowers, it
can turn into what people call a ‘payday
loan’ sort of situation,” she told me. “You
don’t want people paying 75% interest and
instability, and currency fluctuations in client of Kiva is the American who gets to having debt collectors coming after them
poorer countries, that meant partners might feel good, not the poor person.” for the rest of their lives.” Previously, she
effectively pay back more than they had trusted that she could filter out the most
taken out. n a way, by designing the Kiva.org web- predatory situations through the Kiva
But with the fees, Sadava told me, Kiva
now took on the currency risk, with part-
ners paying a little more up front. Sadava
I site primarily for the Western funder, not
the faraway borrower, Kiva created the
conditions for the lenders’ strike.
website, relying on information like the
estimated interest rate to guide her deci-
sions. As information has become harder
saw this as a great deal, even if it looked For years, Kiva has encouraged the feel- to come by, she’s had a harder time feeling
“shady” to the striking lenders. What’s ing of a personal connection between lend- confident in the terms the borrowers face.
more, the fees—around 7% to 8% in the case ers and borrowers, a sense that through In January 2022, Smith closed the
of VisionFund Mongolia—were cheaper the organization an American can alter 2,500-strong Together for Women group
than the organization’s other options: their the trajectory of a life thousands of miles and stopped lending through Kiva. Dozens
only alternatives were borrowing from away. It’s not surprising, then, that the of other borrowers, her husband included,
microfinance investment funds primarily changes at Kiva felt like an affront. (One have done the same.
based in Europe, which charged roughly striker cried when he described how much While these defectors represent a tiny
20%, or another VisionFund Mongolia faith he had put into Kiva, only for Kiva fraction of the 2 million people who have
lender, which charges the organization to make changes he saw as morally com- used the website, they were some of its
14.5%. promising.) They see Kiva as their baby. most dedicated lenders: of the dozen I
Sadava told me that big international So they revolted. spoke to, nearly all had been involved for
donors aren’t interested in funding their Kiva now seems somewhat in limbo. nearly a decade, some ultimately lending
microfinance work. Given the context, It’s still advertising its old-school, anyone- tens of thousands of dollars. For them, the
VisionFund Mongolia was happy with the can-be-a-lender model on Kiva.org, while dream of “make a loan, change a life” now
new arrangement. Sadava says the rela- also making significant operational changes feels heartbreakingly unattainable.
tively low cost of capital allowed them to (a private investing arm, the promise of Smith calls the day she closed her team
launch “resourcefulness loans” for poor blockchain-enabled technology) that “one of the saddest days of my life.” Still,
businesswomen, who she says pay 3.4% are explicitly inaccessible to everyday the decision felt essential: “I don’t want
a month. Americans—and employing high-flying to be one of those people that’s more like
VisionFund Mongolia’s experience isn’t CEOs with CVs and pedigrees that might an impact investor who is trying to make
necessarily representative—it became a feel distant, if not outright off-putting, to money off the backs of the poorer.”
Kiva partner after the fees were instituted, them. If Kiva’s core premise has been its “I understand that I’m in the minority
and it works in a country where it is partic- accessibility to people like the Smiths, it here,” she continued. “This is the way
ularly difficult to find funding. Still, I was is now actively undermining that premise, [microfinance is] moving. So clearly peo-
surprised by how resoundingly positive taking a chance that expansion through ple feel it’s something that’s acceptable to
Sadava was about the new model, given more complicated means will be better for them, or a good way to invest their money.
the complaints I’d heard from dozens of microfinance than honing the simplistic I just don’t feel like it’s acceptable to me.”
aggrieved Kiva staffers and lenders. That image it’s been built on.
got me thinking about something Hugh Several of the striking lenders I spoke Mara Kardas-Nelson is the author of
a forthcoming book on the history of
Sinclair, a longtime microfinance staffer to were primarily concerned that the Kiva microfinance, We Are Not Able to Live
and critic, told me a few years back: “The model had been altered into something in the Sky (Holt, 2024).
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46
 .
.
.
. 47
.
.
.
.
.
.
IF IN
A
MACHINE a near-future war—one that might begin
TELLS tomorrow, for all we know—a soldier takes
YOU up a shooting position on an empty roof-
WHEN top. His unit has been fighting through the
TO city block by block. It feels as if enemies
PULL could be lying in silent wait behind every
THE corner, ready to rain fire upon their marks
TRIGGER, the moment they have a shot.
WHO Through his gunsight, the soldier scans
IS the windows of a nearby building. He
ULTIMATELY notices fresh laundry hanging from the bal-
RESPONSIBLE? conies. Word comes in over the radio that
. his team is about to move across an open
. patch of ground below. As they head out,
a red bounding box appears in the top left
corner of the gunsight. The device’s com-
puter vision system has flagged a potential

AI-
target—a silhouetted figure in a window
is drawing up, it seems, to take a shot.
The soldier doesn’t have a clear view, but
in his experience the system has a super-
human capacity to pick up the faintest tell
of an enemy. So he sets his crosshair upon
the box and prepares to squeeze the trigger.
In different war, also possibly just over
the horizon, a commander stands before a
bank of monitors. An alert appears from a
chatbot. It brings news that satellites have

ASSISTED picked up a truck entering a certain city

block that has been designated as a possi-
WARFARE ble staging area for enemy rocket launches.
The chatbot has already advised an artil-
lery unit, which it calculates as having the
. highest estimated “kill probability,” to take
. aim at the truck and stand by.
BY According to the chatbot, none of the
. nearby buildings is a civilian structure,
ARTHUR though it notes that the determination
HOLLAND has yet to be corroborated manually. A
MICHEL drone, which had been dispatched by
. the system for a closer look, arrives on
. scene. Its video shows the truck backing
. into a narrow passage between two com-
. pounds. The opportunity to take the shot
. is rapidly coming to a close.
. For the commander, everything now
. falls silent. The chaos, the uncertainty, the
. cacophony—all reduced to the sound of
ILLUSTRATIONS a ticking clock and the sight of a single
. glowing button:
YOSHI
SODEOKA “APPROVE FIRE ORDER.”
.
.
48

To pull the trigger—or, as the

case may be, not to pull it. To hit the
button, or to hold off. Legally—and
ethically—the role of the soldier’s
decision in matters of life and death
is preeminent and indispensable.
Fundamentally, it is these decisions
that define the human act of war.
It should be of little surprise,
then, that states and civil soci-
ety have taken up the question of
intelligent autonomous weapons—
weapons that can select and fire
upon targets without any human
input—as a matter of serious
concern. In May, after close to a
decade of discussions, parties to
the UN’s Convention on Certain
Conventional Weapons agreed,
among other recommendations,
that militaries using them prob-
ably need to “limit the duration,
geographical scope, and scale of
the operation” to comply with the
laws of war. The line was nonbind-
ing, but it was at least an acknowl-
edgment that a human has to play
a part—somewhere, sometime—in
the immediate process leading up
to a killing.
But intelligent autonomous
weapons that fully displace human
decision-making have (likely) yet
to see real-world use. Even the
“autonomous” drones and ships
fielded by the US and other pow-
ers are used under close human
supervision. Meanwhile, intelligent
systems that merely guide the hand or a long time, the idea of That has all begun to change.
that pulls the trigger have been
gaining purchase in the warmak-
er’s tool kit. And they’ve quietly
F supporting a human deci-
sion by computerized means
wasn’t such a controversial prospect.
“What we’re seeing now, at least in
the way that I see this, is a transi-
tion to a world [in] which you need
become sophisticated enough to Retired Air Force lieutenant general to have humans and machines …
raise novel questions—ones that Jack Shanahan says the radar on operating in some sort of team,”
are trickier to answer than the well- the F4 Phantom fighter jet he flew says Shanahan.
covered wrangles over killer robots in the 1980s was a decision aid of The rise of machine learning, in
and, with each passing day, more sorts. It alerted him to the presence particular, has set off a paradigm
urgent: What does it mean when of other aircraft, he told me, so that shift in how militaries use com-
a decision is only part human and he could figure out what to do about puters to help shape the crucial
part machine? And when, if ever, them. But to say that the crew and decisions of warfare—up to, and
is it ethical for that decision to be the radar were coequal accomplices including, the ultimate decision.
a decision to kill? would be a stretch. Shanahan was the first director of
 49

Project Maven, a Pentagon pro- could be shot) at about the length what it described as AI tools to alert
gram that developed target recog- of a football field. Anna Ahronheim- troops of imminent attacks and to
nition algorithms for video footage Cohen, a spokesperson for the com- propose targets for operations.
from drones. The project, which pany, told MIT Technology Review, The Ukrainian army uses a pro-
kicked off a new era of American “The system has already been tested gram, GIS Arta, that pairs each
military AI, was launched in 2017 in real-time scenarios by fighting known Russian target on the bat-
after a study concluded that “deep infantry soldiers.” tlefield with the artillery unit that
learning algorithms can perform at Another gunsight, built by the is, according to the algorithm, best
near-human levels.” (It also sparked company Smartshooter, is adver- placed to shoot at it. A report by
controversy—in 2018, more than tised as having similar capabilities. The Times, a British newspaper,
3,000 Google employees signed a According to the company’s web- likened it to Uber’s algorithm for
letter of protest against the com- site, it can also be packaged into a pairing drivers and riders, noting
pany’s involvement in the project.) remote-controlled machine gun like that it significantly reduces the time
With machine-learning-based the one that Israeli agents used to between the detection of a target
decision tools, “you have more assassinate the Iranian nuclear sci- and the moment that target finds
apparent competency, more entist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2021. itself under a barrage of firepower.
breadth” than earlier tools afforded, Decision support tools that sit Before the Ukrainians had GIS Arta,
says Matt Turek, deputy director of at a greater remove from the bat- that process took 20 minutes. Now
the Information Innovation Office tlefield can be just as decisive. The it reportedly takes one.
at the Defense Advanced Research Pentagon appears to have used AI in Russia claims to have its own
Projects Agency. “And perhaps a the sequence of intelligence analyses command-and-control system with
tendency, as a result, to turn over and decisions leading up to a poten- what it calls artificial intelligence,
more decision-making to them.” tial strike, a process known as a kill but it has shared few technical
A soldier on the lookout for chain—though it has been cagey on details. Gregory Allen, the director
enemy snipers might, for exam- the details. In response to questions of the Wadhwani Center for AI and
ple, do so through the Assault Rifle from MIT Technology Review, Laura Advanced Technologies and one of
Combat Application System, a gun- McAndrews, an Air Force spokes- the architects of the Pentagon’s cur-
sight sold by the Israeli defense firm person, wrote that the service “is rent AI policies, told me it’s import-
Elbit Systems. According to a com- utilizing a human-machine teaming ant to take some of these claims
pany spec sheet, the “AI-powered” approach.” with a pinch of salt. He says some
device is capable of “human target Other countries are more openly of Russia’s supposed military AI is
detection” at a range of more than experimenting with such auto- “stuff that everyone has been doing
600 yards, and human target “iden- mation. Shortly after the Israel- for decades,” and he calls GIS Arta
tification” (presumably, discerning Palestine conflict in 2021, the Israel “just traditional software.”
whether a person is someone who Defense Forces said it had used The range of judgment calls that
go into military decision-making,
however, is vast. And it doesn’t
always take artificial super-

The range of judgment calls that go intelligence to dispense with them

by automated means. There are
into military decision-making is vast. tools for predicting enemy troop
movements, tools for figuring out
And it doesn’t always take artificial how to take out a given target, and
tools to estimate how much col-
super-intelligence to dispense with lateral harm is likely to befall any

them by automated means. nearby civilians.

None of these contrivances could
be called a killer robot. But the tech-
nology is not without its perils. Like
any complex computer, an AI-based
tool might glitch in unusual and
unpredictable ways; it’s not clear
50

that the human involved will always onset of artificially intelligent militaries, governments, and large
be able to know when the answers machines. All the laws and mores companies.
on the screen are right or wrong. In of war would be meaningless with- “It’s a rupture. It’s disruptive,”
their relentless efficiency, these tools out the fundamental common under- Bowman says. “It requires a new
may also not leave enough time and standing that every deliberate act in ethical construct to be able to make
space for humans to determine if the fight is always on someone. But sound decisions.”
what they’re doing is legal. In some with the prospect of computers tak- This year, in a move that was
areas, they could perform at such ing on all manner of sophisticated inevitable in the age of ChatGPT,
superhuman levels that something new roles, the age-old precept has Palantir announced that it is devel-
ineffable about the act of war could newfound resonance. oping software called the Artificial
be lost entirely. “Now for me, and for most Intelligence Platform, which allows
Eventually militaries plan to use people I ever knew in uniform, for the integration of large language
machine intelligence to stitch many this was core to who we were as models into the company’s military
of these individual instruments into commanders, that somebody ulti- products. In a demo of AIP posted
a single automated network that mately will be held responsible,” to YouTube this spring, the platform
links every weapon, commander, says Shanahan, who after Maven alerts the user to a potentially threat-
and soldier to every other. Not a became the inaugural director ening enemy movement. It then sug-
kill chain, but—as the Pentagon has of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial gests that a drone be sent for a closer
begun to call it—a kill web. Intelligence Center and oversaw Of the look, proposes three possible plans
In these webs, it’s not clear the development of the AI ethical Department to intercept the offending force, and
whether the human’s decision is, principles. of Defense’s maps out an optimal route for the
in fact, very much of a decision at
all. Rafael, an Israeli defense giant,
has already sold one such product,
This is why a human hand must
squeeze the trigger, why a human
hand must click “Approve.” If a com-
5
“ethical
selected attack team to reach them.
And yet even with a machine
capable of such apparent cleverness,
principles
Fire Weaver, to the IDF (it has also puter sets its sights upon the wrong militaries won’t want the user to
for artificial
demonstrated it to the DoD and target, and the soldier squeezes the intelligence,” blindly trust its every suggestion. If
the German military). According trigger anyway, that’s on the sol- which are the human presses only one button
to company materials, Fire Weaver dier. “If a human does something phrased as in a kill chain, it probably should
finds enemy positions, notifies the that leads to an accident with the QUALITIES, not be the “I believe” button, as a
the one
unit that it calculates as being best machine—say, dropping a weapon concerned but anonymous Army
that’s always
placed to fire on them, and even where it shouldn’t have—that’s still listed first is operative once put it in a DoD war
sets a crosshair on the target directly a human’s decision that was made,” “RESPONSIBLE.” game in 2019.
in that unit’s weapon sights. The Shanahan says. In a program called Urban
human’s role, according to one video But accidents happen. And this Reconnaissance through Supervised
of the software, is to choose between is where things get tricky. Modern Autonomy (URSA), DARPA built
two buttons: “Approve” and “Abort.” militaries have spent hundreds of a system that enabled robots and
years figuring out how to differenti- drones to act as forward observ-
et’s say that the silhouette in ate the unavoidable, blameless trag- ers for platoons in urban opera-

L the window was not a soldier,

but a child. Imagine that the
truck was not delivering warheads to
edies of warfare from acts of malign
intent, misdirected fury, or gross
negligence. Even now, this remains
tions. After input from the project’s
advisory group on ethical and legal
issues, it was decided that the soft-
the enemy, but water pails to a home. a difficult task. Outsourcing a part ware would only ever designate peo-
Of the Department of Defense’s of human agency and judgment ple as “persons of interest.” Even
five “ethical principles for artificial to algorithms built, in many cases, though the purpose of the technol-
intelligence,” which are phrased around the mathematical principle ogy was to help root out ambushes,
as qualities, the one that’s always of optimization will challenge all this it would never go so far as to label
listed first is “Responsible.” In prac- law and doctrine in a fundamentally anyone as a “threat.”
tice, this means that when things go new way, says Courtney Bowman, This, it was hoped, would stop a
wrong, someone—a human, not a global director of privacy and civil soldier from jumping to the wrong
machine—has got to hold the bag. liberties engineering at Palantir, a conclusion. It also had a legal ratio-
Of course, the principle of US-headquartered firm that builds nale, according to Brian Williams, an
responsibility long predates the data management software for adjunct research staff member at the
 51

cycle to 20 seconds. Nor does the

market seem to have embraced
this same spirit of restraint. In
demo videos posted online, the
bounding boxes for the comput-
erized gunsights of both Elbit and
“If people of interest are identified on a Smartshooter are blood red.
screen as red dots, that’s going to have ther times, the computer will
a different subconscious implication
than if people of interest are identified
O be right and the human will
be wrong.
If the soldier on the rooftop had
second-guessed the gunsight, and it
on a screen as little happy faces.” turned out that the silhouette was in
fact an enemy sniper, his teammates
could have paid a heavy price for his
split second of hesitation.
Institute for Defense Analyses who of a beguilingly smart machine This is a different source of trou-
led the advisory group. No court had could come down to small details ble, much less discussed but no less
positively asserted that a machine of graphic design. “If people of inter- likely in real-world combat. And it
could legally designate a person a est are identified on a screen as red puts the human in something of a
threat, he says. (Then again, he adds, dots, that’s going to have a differ- pickle. Soldiers will be told to treat
no court had specifically found that ent subconscious implication than their digital assistants with enough
it would be illegal, either, and he if people of interest are identified mistrust to safeguard the sanctity of
acknowledges that not all military on a screen as little happy faces,” their judgment. But with machines
operators would necessarily share says Rebecca Crootof, a law profes- that are often right, this same reluc-
his group’s cautious reading of the sor at the University of Richmond, tance to defer to the computer can
law.) According to Williams, DARPA who has written extensively about itself become a point of avertable
initially wanted URSA to be able to the challenges of accountability in failure.
autonomously discern a person’s human-in-the-loop autonomous Aviation history has no shortage
intent; this feature too was scrapped weapons. of cases where a human pilot’s refusal
at the group’s urging. In some settings, however, sol- to heed the machine led to catastro-
Bowman says Palantir’s approach diers might only want an “I believe” phe. These (usually perished) souls
is to work “engineered inefficien- button. Originally, DARPA envi- have not been looked upon kindly
cies” into “points in the decision- sioned URSA as a wrist-worn device by investigators seeking to explain
making process where you actually for soldiers on the front lines. “In the the tragedy. Carol J. Smith, a senior
do want to slow things down.” For very first working group meeting, we research scientist at Carnegie Mellon
example, a computer’s output that said that’s not advisable,” Williams University’s Software Engineering
points to an enemy troop movement, told me. The kind of engineered inef- Institute who helped craft respon-
he says, might require a user to seek ficiency necessary for responsible sible AI guidelines for the DoD’s
out a second corroborating source use just wouldn’t be practicable for Defense Innovation Unit, doesn’t
of intelligence before proceeding users who have bullets whizzing by see an issue: “If the person in that
with an action (in the video, the their ears. Instead, they built a com- moment feels that the decision is
Artificial Intelligence Platform does puter system that sits with a dedi- wrong, they’re making it their call,
not appear to do this). cated operator, far behind the action. and they’re going to have to face the
In the case of AIP, Bowman But some decision support sys- consequences.”
says that the idea is to present the tems are definitely designed for For others, this is a wicked eth-
information in such a way “that the the kind of split-second decision- ical conundrum. The scholar M.C.
viewer understands, the analyst making that happens right in the Elish has suggested that a human
understands, this is only a sug- thick of it. The US Army has said who is placed in this kind of impos-
gestion.” In practice, protecting that it has managed, in live tests, to sible loop could end up serving as
human judgment from the sway shorten its own 20-minute targeting what she calls a “moral crumple
52

I
zone.” In the event of an acci- for intelligence analysis soon after n one sense, what’s new here is
dent—regardless of whether the the project launched, and in 2021 also old. We routinely place our
human was wrong, the computer the secretary of the Air Force said safety—indeed, our entire exis-
was wrong, or they were wrong that “AI algorithms” had recently tence as a species—in the hands of
together—the person who made been applied “for the first time to a other people. Those decision-makers
the “decision” will absorb the blame live operational kill chain,” with an defer, in turn, to machines that they
and protect everyone else along the Air Force spokesperson at the time do not entirely comprehend.
chain of command from the full adding that these tools were avail- In an exquisite essay on auto-
impact of accountability. able in intelligence centers across mation published in 2018, at a time
In an essay, Smith wrote that the globe “whenever needed.” But when operational AI-enabled deci-
the “lowest-paid person” should Laura McAndrews, the Air Force sion support was still a rarity, for-
not be “saddled with this respon- spokesperson, said that in fact these mer Navy secretary Richard Danzig
sibility,” and neither should “the algorithms “were not applied in pointed out that if a president
highest-paid person.” Instead, she a live, operational kill chain” and “decides” to order a nuclear strike,
told me, the responsibility should be declined to detail any other algo- it will not be because anyone has
spread among everyone involved, rithms that may, or may not, have looked out the window of the Oval
and that the introduction of AI been used since. Office and seen enemy missiles rain-
should not change anything about The real story might remain ing down on DC but, rather, because
that responsibility. shrouded for years. In 2018, the those missiles have been detected,
In practice, this is harder than Pentagon issued a determina- tracked, and identified—one hopes
it sounds. Crootof points out that tion that exempts Project Maven correctly—by algorithms in the air
even today, “there’s not a whole lot from Freedom of Information defense network.
of responsibility for accidents in requests. Last year, it handed the As in the case of a commander
war.” As AI tools become larger and entire program to the National who calls in an artillery strike on the
more complex, and as kill chains Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, advice of a chatbot, or a rifleman who
become shorter and more web-like, which is responsible for process- pulls the trigger at the mere sight of
finding the right people to blame ing America’s vast intake of secret a red bounding box, “the most that
is going to become an even more aerial surveillance. Responding can be said is that ‘a human being
labyrinthine task. to questions about whether the is involved,’” Danzig wrote.
Those who write these tools, algorithms are used in kill chains, “This is a common situation in
and the companies they work for, Robbin Brooks, an NGA spokesper- the modern age,” he wrote. “Human
aren’t likely to take the fall. Building son, told MIT Technology Review, decisionmakers are riders traveling
AI software is a lengthy, iterative “We can’t speak to specifics of how across obscured terrain with little
process, often drawing from open- and where Maven is used.” or no ability to assess the powerful
source code, which stands at a dis- beasts that carry and guide them.”
tant remove from the actual material
facts of metal piercing flesh. And
barring any significant changes to
US law, defense contractors are
generally protected from liability As AI tools become larger and
anyway, says Crootof.
Any bid for accountability at the
more complex, and as kill chains
upper rungs of command, mean-
while, would likely find itself stymied
become shorter and more web-like,
by the heavy veil of government clas- finding the right people to blame
sification that tends to cloak most
AI decision support tools and the is going to become an even more
manner in which they are used. The
US Air Force has not been forthcom-
labyrinthine task.
ing about whether its AI has even
seen real-world use. Shanahan says
Maven’s AI models were deployed
 53

ultimate moments of war—a cost

that extends beyond a simple, utili-
tarian bottom line. Maybe something
just cannot be right, should not be
right, about choosing the time and
manner in which a person dies the
way you hail a ride from Uber.
To a machine, this might be sub-
optimal logic. But for certain humans,
that’s the point. “One of the aspects
of judgment, as a human capacity, is
that it’s done in an open world,” says
Lucy Suchman, a professor emerita of
anthropology at Lancaster University,
who has been writing about the quan-
daries of human-machine interaction
for four decades.
The parameters of life-and-death
decisions—knowing the meaning
of the fresh laundry hanging from
a window while also wanting your
teammates not to die—are “irre-
ducibly qualitative,” she says. The
chaos and the noise and the uncer-
tainty, the weight of what is right
and what is wrong in the midst of
all that fury—not a whit of this can
be defined in algorithmic terms.
In matters of life and death, there
is no computationally perfect out-
come. “And that’s where the moral
responsibility comes from,” she says.
“You’re making a judgment.”
The gunsight never pulls the
trigger. The chatbot never pushes
the button. But each time a machine
takes on a new role that reduces the
irreducible, we may be stepping a
There can be an alarming streak “In warfighting,” says Bowman little closer to the moment when
of defeatism among the people of Palantir, “[in] the application of the act of killing is altogether more
responsible for making sure that any technology, let alone AI, there machine than human, when ethics
these beasts don’t end up eating is some degree of harm that you’re becomes a formula and responsi-
us. During a number of conver- trying to—that you have to accept, bility becomes little more than an
sations I had while reporting this and the game is risk reduction.” abstraction. If we agree that we don’t
story, my interlocutor would land It is possible, though not yet want to let the machines take us all
on a sobering note of acquiescence demonstrated, that bringing artifi- the way there, sooner or later we
to the perpetual inevitability of cial intelligence to battle may mean will have to ask ourselves: Where
death and destruction that, while fewer civilian casualties, as advo- is the line?
tragic, cannot be pinned on any cates often claim. But there could
single human. War is messy, tech- be a hidden cost to irrevocably Arthur Holland Michel writes
about technology. He is based
nologies fail in unpredictable ways, conjoining human judgment and in Barcelona and can be found,
and that’s just that. mathematical reasoning in those occasionally, in New York.
54

From supersize slideshows to Steve Jobs’s Apple Above: To celebrate the launch of the 1987 Saab 9000 CD
sedan, an audience of 2,500 was treated to an hourlong
keynote, corporute presentutions huve ulwuys pushed operetta involving 26-foot-tall projection screens, a
technology forwurd. By Cluire L. Evuns massive chorus, the entire Stockholm Philharmonic, and
some 50 performers.

The greutest
slideshow on Eurth
 55

It’s 1948, and it isn’t a great year for alco- Seagram-Vitarama is the first A/V presen- Next slide, please
hol. Prohibition has come and gone, and tation ever given at a sales meeting. It will The sound of slides clacking is deafening.
booze is a buyer’s market again. That much not be the last. But it doesn’t matter, because the cham-
is obvious from Seagram’s annual sales In the late ’40s, multimedia was a nov- pagne is flowing and the sound system is
meeting, an 11-city traveling extravaganza elty. But by the early 1960s, nearly all com- loud. The 2,500 dignitaries and VIPs in
designed to drum up nationwide sales. No panies with national advertising budgets the audience are being treated to an hour-
expense has been spared: there’s the two- were using multimedia gear—16-millimeter long operetta about luxury travel. Onstage,
hour, professionally acted stage play about projectors, slide projectors, filmstrip projec- a massive chorus, the entire Stockholm
the life of a whiskey salesman. The beauti- tors, and overheads—in their sales training Philharmonic, and some 50 dancers and
ful anteroom displays. The free drinks. But and promotions, for public relations, and performers are fluttering around a pair of
the real highlight is a slideshow. as part of their internal communications. Saab 9000CD sedans. Stunning images of
To call the Seagram-Vitarama a slide- Many employed in-house A/V directors, chrome details, leather seats, and open roads
show is an understatement. It’s an experi- who were as much showmen as techni- dance across a 26-foot-tall screen behind
ence: hundreds of images of the distilling cians. Because although presentations have them. The images here are all analog: nearly
process, set to music, projected across five a reputation for being tedious, when they’re 7,000 film slides, carefully arranged in a grid
40-by-15-foot screens. “It is composed of done right, they’re theater. The business of 80 Kodak projectors. It’s 1987, and slide-
pictures, yet it is not static,” comments one world knows it. Ever since the days of the shows will never get any bigger than this.
awed witness. “The overall effect is one of Vitarama, companies have leveraged the Before PowerPoint, and long before digi-
magnificence.” Inspired by an Eastman dramatic power of images to sell their ideas tal projectors, 35-millimeter film slides were
Kodak exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, the to the world. king. Bigger, clearer, and less expensive to
56

“All of u sudden you look ut

six projectors und whut they cun do,
und you go, Holy mackerel.”

produce than 16-millimeter film, and more “When you think of all the machines, Six was just the beginning. At the height
colorful and higher-resolution than video, all the connections, all the different bits of Mesney's career, his shows called for up
slides were the only medium for the kinds and pieces, it’s a miracle these things to 100 projectors braced together in vertigi-
of high-impact presentations given by CEOs even played at all,” says Douglas Mesney, nous rigs. With multiple projectors pointing
and top brass at annual meetings for stock- a commercial photographer turned slide toward the same screen, he could create
holders, employees, and salespeople. Known producer whose company Incredible seamless panoramas and complex anima-
THIS SPREAD & PREVIOUS: DOUGLAS MESNEY/INCREDIBLE SLIDEMAKERS

in the business as “multi-image” shows, these Slidemakers produced the 80-projector tions, all synchronized to tape. Although the
presentations required a small army of pro- Saab launch. Now 77 years old, he’s made risk of disaster was always high, when he
ducers, photographers, and live production a retirement project of archiving the pulled it off, his shows dazzled audiences
staff to pull off. First the entire show had to now-forgotten slide business. Mesney and made corporate suits look like giants.
be written, storyboarded, and scored. Images pivoted to producing multi-image shows Mesney’s clients included IKEA, Saab,
were selected from a library, photo shoots in the early 1970s after an encounter with Kodak, and Shell; he commanded produc-
arranged, animations and special effects an impressive six-screen setup at the 1972 tion budgets in the hundreds of thousands
produced. A white-gloved technician devel- New York Boat Show. He’d been shooting of dollars. And in the multi-image business,
oped, mounted, and dusted each slide before spreads for Penthouse and car magazines, that was cheap. Larger A/V staging compa-
dropping it into the carousel. Thousands of occasionally lugging a Kodak projector or nies, like Carabiner International, charged
cues were programmed into the show control two to pitch meetings for advertising cli- up to $1 million to orchestrate corporate
computers—then tested, and tested again. ents. “All of a sudden you look at six pro- meetings, jazzing up their generic multi-
Because computers crash. Projector bulbs jectors and what they can do, and you go, image “modules” with laser light shows,
burn out. Slide carousels get jammed. Holy mackerel,” he remembers. dance numbers, and top-shelf talent like
 57

Douglas Mesney (above), a former

commercial photographer, produced
shows with production budgets
in the hundreds of thousands of
dollars for clients including IKEA,
Saab, Kodak, and Shell.

Hall & Oates, the Allman Brothers, and vied for the multi-image dollar. To meet the in Los Gatos, California, flipped through
even the Muppets. “I liken it to being a demand for high-impact shows, the tech had the air, crashed into a ravine, and died. The
rock-and-roll roadie, but I never went on quickly evolved from manual dissolve units slide business would soon follow.
the tour bus,” explains Susan Buckland, a and basic control systems—programmed Douglas Mesney likes to say that if you
slide programmer who spent most of her with punched paper tape, and then audio- never saw a slide show, you never will. The
career behind the screen at Carabiner. cassette—to dedicated slide control com- machines to show them have been land-
From its incorporation in 1976 to the puters like the AVL Eagle I, which could filled. The slides themselves were rarely
mid-1980s, the Association for Multi-Image, drive 30 projectors at once. The Eagle, archived. Occasionally a few boxes con-
a trade association for slide producers, grew which came with word processing and taining an old multi-image “module” will
from zero to 5,000 members. At its peak, accounting software, was a true business turn up in a storage unit, and occasionally
the multi-image business employed some computer—so much so that when Eagle those will even be undamaged. But with the
20,000 people and supported several festi- spun off from its parent company, Audio exception of a few hobbyists and retired
vals and four different trade magazines. One Visual Labs, in the early ’80s, it became one programmers, the know-how to restore and
of these ran a glowing profile of Douglas of Silicon Valley’s most promising computer stage multi-image slideshows is scarce. This
Mesney in 1980; when asked for his prog- startups. Eagle went public in the summer leaves former slide professionals at a loss.
nosis about the future of slides, he replied: of 1983, making its president, Dennis R. “All of us are devastated that none of the
“We could make a fortune or be out of busi- Barnhart, an instant multimillionaire. Only modules survived,” says Susan Buckland.
ness in a year.” He wasn’t wrong. hours after the IPO, Barnhart plowed his “Basically, I don’t have a past, because I
At the time, some 30 manufacturers brand-new cherry-red Ferrari through a can’t explain it.” The entire industry, which
of electronic slide programming devices guardrail near the company’s headquarters existed at an unexpected intersection of
58

It wasn’t long before the computers

MIDDLE ROW: DOUGLAS MESNEY/INCREDIBLE SLIDEMAKERS; WILDEN ENTERPRISES; RICHARD SHIPPS/DD&B STUDIOS
that ran the slide shows evolved

TOP ROW: RICHARD SHIPPS/DD&B STUDIO; DOUGLAS MESNEY/INCREDIBLE SLIDEMAKERS; WILDEN ENTERPRISES
beyond the medium.

analog and high-tech artistry, came and 15 years until you could run a show straight $100,000 and takes an hour to warm up.
went in a little over 20 years. from your computer and have the images A team of technicians has spent the better
Presentations, like porn, have always look worth looking at,” he adds. part of the last 48 hours troubleshooting
pushed technology forward; in the multi- The last slide projector ever made rolled to ensure that nothing goes wrong when
image days, producers like Mesney took off the assembly line in 2004. The inside Robert Gaskins, the fastidious architect of
the slide as far as it could go, using every of its casing was signed by factory work- a new piece of software called PowerPoint
tool available to create bigger and bolder ers and Kodak brass before the unit was 3.0, walks into the room. He’ll be carrying a
shows. Mesney claims to have set the land handed over to the Smithsonian. Toasts and laptop under his arm, and when he reaches
speed record for a slide presentation with speeches were made, but by then they were the lectern, he’ll pick up a video cable, plug
a three-minute-long, 2,400-slide show, but eulogies, because PowerPoint had already it in, and demonstrate for the first time
even at top speed, slides are static. The com- eaten the world. something that has been reproduced bil-
puters that controlled them, however, were lions of times since: a video presentation,
not—and it wasn’t long before they evolved Inventing PowerPoint running straight off a laptop, in full color.
beyond the medium. “Back then, computers The Hotel Regina is an Art Nouveau mar- The audience, full of Microsoft associates
were fast enough to tell slides what to do, vel overlooking the Tuileries Garden and from across Europe, will go bananas. They
but they weren’t fast enough to actually cre- the Louvre. But on this day in 1992, its Old “grasped immediately what the future would
ate the images themselves,” explains Steven World meeting rooms have been retrofit- bring for their own presentations,” Gaskins
Michelsen, a former slide programmer who ted with advanced video technology. The later wrote. “There was deafening applause.”
restores and runs old multi-image shows in color projector in the back of the room, the It’s hard now to imagine deafening
his Delaware garage. “It took another 10 or size of a small refrigerator, cost upwards of applause for a PowerPoint—almost as hard
BOTTOM ROW: WILDEN ENTERPRISES; RICHARD SHIPPS/DD&B STUDIOS; DOUGLAS MESNEY/INCREDIBLE SLIDEMAKERS;
59

as it is to imagine anyone but Bob Gaskins architects spent their days among works This is Gaskins’s key insight: a presen-
standing at this particular lectern, usher- by Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn, and tation’s message is inevitably diluted when
ing in the PowerPoint age. Presentations Robert Motherwell. its production is outsourced. In the early
are in his blood. His father ran an A/V Gaskins’s 1984 proposal for PowerPoint, ’80s, he meant that literally. The first two
company, and family vacations usually written when he was VP of product develop- versions of PowerPoint were created to
included a trip to the Eastman Kodak fac- ment at the Sunnyvale startup Forethought, help executives produce their own over-
tory. During his graduate studies at Berkeley, is a manifesto in bullet points. It outlines the head transparencies and 35-millimeter
he tinkered with machine translation and slumbering, largely-hidden-from-view $3.5 slides, rather than passing the job off to
coded computer-generated haiku. He ran billion business presentation industry and their secretaries or a slide bureau.
away to Silicon Valley to find his fortune its enormous need for clear, effective slides. “In the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s, infor-
before he could finalize his triple PhDs in It lists technology trends—laser printers, mation flow was narrow,” explains Sandy
English, linguistics, and computer science, color graphics, “WYSIWYG” software—that Beetner, former CEO of Genigraphics, a
IMAGES COURTESY STEVEN MICHELSEN

but he brought with him a deep apprecia- point to an emerging desktop presentation business graphics company that was, for sev-
tion for the humanities, staffing his team market. It’s a stunningly prescient document eral decades, the industry leader in profes-
with like-minded polyglots, including a dis- throughout. But Gaskins italicized only one sional presentation graphics. Their clients
proportionately large number of women in bullet point in the whole thing. were primarily Fortune 500 companies and
technical roles. Because Gaskins ensured government agencies with the resources
that his offices—the only Microsoft divi- User genefits: to produce full-color charts, 3D render-
sion, at the time, in Silicon Valley—housed a Allows the content-originator to ings, and other high-tech imagery on those
museum-worthy art collection, PowerPoint’s control the sresentation. slides. Everyone else was limited to acetate
60
With multiple projectors pointing
toward the same screen, producers
could create seamless panoramas and
complex animations, all synchronized
to tape.

overheads and—gasp—words. “Prior to PowerPoint hud become shorthund

PowerPoint,” she says, “people communi-
cated in black and white. There was just so for the stupefying indignities of office life—
much missed in that environment.” u 2001 New Yorker profile summed it up us
Beetner oversaw Genigraphics’ national
network service bureaus, which were
“softwure you impose on other people.”
located in every major American city and the States 10 years later, an expert in meaning. No wonder software corpora-
staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by antique concertinas. By then, PowerPoint tions loved it.
graphic artists prepared to produce, pol- had become shorthand for the stupefy- Robert Gaskins is remarkably sympa-
ish, and print slides. The company was so ing indignities of office life. A 2001 New thetic to these views, not least because
vital to presentational culture that Gaskins Yorker profile summed it up as “software Tufte’s mother, the Renaissance scholar
negotiated a deal to make Genigraphics you impose on other people”; the statisti- Virginia Tufte, mentored him as an under-
the official 35-millimeter slide produc- cian Edward Tufte, known for his elegant graduate in the English department at
tion service for PowerPoint 2.0; a “Send monographs about data visualization, the University of Southern California. In
to Genigraphics” menu command was famously blamed the 2003 Columbia shut- a reflection written on the 20th anniver-
baked into PowerPoint until 2003. This, tle disaster on a bum PowerPoint slide. sary of PowerPoint’s introduction, Gaskins
WILDEN ENTERPRISES

incidentally, was around the same time that Gaskins’s software, Tufte argued, produces acknowledged that “more business and
Kodak stopped making Carousel projectors. relentlessly sequential, hierarchical, slo- academic talks look like poor attempts at
Gaskins retired from Microsoft in 1993 ganeering, over-managed presentations, sales presentations,” a phenomenon he
and moved to London. He returned to rife with “chartjunk” and devoid of real blamed as much on a “mass failure of taste”
 61
61

as on PowerPoint itself, a tool so powerful as a ghost in the machine, in the form which are no longer held behind closed
it collapsed all preexisting contexts. Not of PowerPoint templates and clip art. “It doors. They’re now semi-public affairs,
everything’s a sales presentation; nor opened up the channels dramatically, and watched—willingly and enthusiastically—
should it be. But PowerPoint made it easy pretty quickly. There isn’t a student alive, by consumers around the world. Nobody
to add multimedia effects to informal talks, at any level, that hasn’t seen a PowerPoint has to worry about slide carousels getting
empowering lay users to make stylistic presentation.” Indeed, PowerPoint is used jammed anymore, but things still go hay-
decisions once reserved for professionals. in religious sermons; by schoolchildren wire all the time, from buggy tech demos
To paraphrase an early PowerPoint print preparing book reports; at funerals and to poorly-thought-out theatrics.
ad: now the person making the presen- weddings. In 2010, Microsoft announced When everything works, a good pre-
tation made the presentation. That those that PowerPoint was installed on more sentation can drive markets and forge
people weren’t always particularly good than a billion computers worldwide. reputations. Of course, this particular
at it didn’t seem to matter. At this scale, PowerPoint’s impact on evolution wasn’t exclusively Microsoft’s
What did matter was that presenta- how the world communicates has been doing. Because perhaps the most memo-
tions were no longer reserved for year- immeasurable. But here’s something that rable corporate presentation of all time—
end meetings and big ideas worthy of the can be measured: Microsoft grew tenfold Steve Jobs’s announcement of the iPhone
effort and expense required to prepare in the years that Robert Gaskins ran its at Macworld 2007— wasn’t a PowerPoint
color slides. “The scalability of information Graphics Business Unit, and it has grown at all. It was a Keynote.
and audience that PowerPoint brought 15-fold since. Technology corporations,
Claire L. Evans is a writer
to the party was pretty incredible,” says like PowerPoint itself, have exploded. and musician exploring ecology,
Beetner, whose company has survived And so have their big presentations, technology, and culture.
62
 63

Open source at

Free and open-source

software are now
foundational to modern
code, but much about
them is still in flux.

By
Rebecca Ackermann
40
ihen Xerox donated a new laser printer
to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in
1980, the company couldn’t have known
that the machine would ignite a revolution.
The printer jammed. And according to the
2002 book Free as in Freedom, Richard M.
Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer
at MIT, tried to dig into the code to fix it.
He expected to be able to: he’d done it with
were beginning to flood the tech industry.
The free-software movement was born
from one frustrated engineer’s simple, rigid
philosophy: for the good of the world, all
code should be open, without restriction
or commercial intervention.
Forty years later, tech companies are
making billions on proprietary software,
and much of the technology around us—
previous printers. from ChatGPT to smart thermostats—is
Illustration by
Saiman Chow The early decades of software devel- inscrutable to everyday consumers. In this
opment generally ran on a culture of open environment, Stallman’s movement may
access and free exchange, where engineers look like a failed values experiment crushed
could dive into each other’s code across time under the weight of commercial reality. But
zones and institutions to make it their own in 2023, the free and open-source software
or squash a few bugs. But this new printer movement is not only alive and well; it has
ran on inaccessible proprietary software. become a keystone of the tech industry.
Stallman was locked out—and enraged that Today, 96% of all code bases incorporate
Xerox had violated the open code-sharing open-source software. GitHub, the biggest
system he’d come to rely on. platform for the open-source community,
A few years later, in September 1983, is used by more than 100 million develop-
Stallman released GNU, an operating sys- ers worldwide. The Biden administration’s
tem designed to be a free alternative to Securing Open Source Software Act of 2022
one of the dominant operating systems at publicly recognized open-source software
the time: Unix. Stallman envisioned GNU as critical economic and security infrastruc-
as a means to fight back against the pro- ture. Even AiS, Amazon’s money-making
prietary mechanisms, like copyright, that cloud arm, supports the development and
64

maintenance of open-source software; it over the world, regardless of background, modified versions too. Stallman saw free
committed its portfolio of patents to an to find a common cause to collaborate with software as an essential right: “Free as in
open use community in December of last each other,” says Kelsey Hightower, an early free speech, not free beer,” as his apocryphal
year. Over the last two years, while public contributor to Kubernetes, an open-source slogan goes. He created the GNU General
trust in private technology companies has system for automating app deployment and Public License, what’s known as a “copyleft”
plummeted, organizations including Google, management, who recently retired from his license, to ensure that the four freedoms
Spotify, the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg, role as a distinguished engineer at Google were protected in code built with GNU.
and NASA have established new funding for Cloud. “I think that is pretty unique to the Linus Torvalds, the Finnish engineer who
open-source projects and their counterparts world of open source.” in 1991 created the now ubiquitous Unix
in open science efforts—an extension of the The 2010s backlash against tech’s unfet- alternative Linux, didn’t buy into this dogma.
same values applied to scientific research. tered growth, and the recent AI boom, have Torvalds and others, including Microsoft’s
The fact that open-source software is focused a spotlight on the open-source Bill Gates, believed that the culture of open
now so essential means that long-standing movement’s ideas about who has the right exchange among engineers could coexist
leadership and diversity issues in the move- to use other people’s information online with commerce, and that more-restrictive
ment have become everyone’s problems. and who benefits from technology. Clement licenses could forge a path toward both
Many open-source projects began with Delangue, CEO of the open-source AI com- financial sustainability and protections for
“benevolent dictator for life” (BDFL) mod- pany Hugging Face, which was recently val- software creators and users. It was during
els of governance, where original founders ued at $4 billion, testified before Congress a 1998 strategic meeting of free-software
hang on to leadership for years—and not
always responsibly. Stallman and some
other BDFLs have been criticized by their
“If a company only ends up just sharing,
own communities for misogynistic or even and nothing more, I think that should be
abusive behavior. Stallman stepped down as
president of the Free Software Foundation
celebrated.”
in 2019 (although he returned to the board
two years later). Overall, open-source partic- in June of 2023 that “ethical openness” in advocates—which notably did not include
ipants are still overwhelmingly white, male, AI development could help make organi- Stallman—that this pragmatic approach
and located in the Global North. Projects zations more compliant and transparent, became known as “open source.” (The term
can be overly influenced by corporate inter- while allowing researchers beyond a few was coined and introduced to the group
ests. Meanwhile, the people doing the hard large tech companies access to technology not by an engineer, but by the futurist and
work of keeping critical code healthy are not and progress. “ie’re in a unique cultural nanotechnology scholar Christine Peterson.)
consistently funded. In fact, many major moment,” says Danielle Robinson, executive Karen Sandler, executive director of the
open-source projects still operate almost director of Code for Science and Society, a Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit
completely on volunteer steam. nonprofit that provides funding and support that advocates for free and open-source soft-
Challenges notwithstanding, there’s for public-interest technology. “People are ware, saw firsthand how the culture shifted
plenty to celebrate in 2023, the year of more aware than ever of how capitalism has from orthodoxy to a big-tent approach with
GNU’s 40th birthday. The modern open- been influencing what technologies get built, room for for-profit entities when she worked
source movement persists as a collabora- and whether you have a choice to interact as general counsel at the Software Freedom
tive haven for transparent ways of working with it.” Once again, free and open-source Law Center in the early 2000s. “The peo-
within a highly fragmented and competitive software have become a natural home for ple who were ideological—some of them
industry. Selena Deckelmann, chief product the debate about how technology should be. stayed quite ideological. But many of them
and technology officer at the iikimedia realized, oh, wait a minute, we can get jobs
Foundation, says the power of open source Free as in freedom doing this. ie can do well by doing good,”
lies in its “idea that people anywhere can The early days of the free-software move- Sandler remembers. By leveraging the jobs
collaborate together on software, but also ment were fraught with arguments about and support that early tech companies were
on many [more] things.” She points out that the meaning of “free.” Stallman and the offering, open-source contributors could
tools to put this philosophy into action, like Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded in sustain their efforts and even make a living
mailing lists, online chat, and open version 1985, held firm to the idea of four freedoms: doing what they believed in. In that man-
control systems, were pioneered in open- people should be allowed to run a program ner, companies using and contributing to
source communities and have been adopted for any purpose, study how it works from free and open software could expand the
as standard practice by the wider tech indus- the source code and change it to meet their community beyond volunteer enthusiasts
try. “ie found a way for people from all needs, redistribute copies, and distribute and improve the work itself. “How could we
 65

Christine Peterson, a futurist

and lecturer in the field of
nanotechnology, coined the term
“open source” in 1998.

from their proprietary work—which they

sometimes attempt to pass off as open too, a
practice the scholar and organizer Michelle
Thorne dubbed “openwashing” in 2009.
For Sandler, if companies don’t also make
efforts to support user and creator rights,
they’re not pushing forward the free and
open-source ethos. And she says for the
most part, that’s indeed not happening:
“They’re not interested in giving the public
any appreciable rights to their software.”
Others, including Kelsey Hightower, are
more sanguine about corporate involvement.
“If a company only ends up just sharing,
and nothing more, I think that should be
celebrated,” he says. “Then if for the next
two years you allow your paid employees to
work on it, maintaining the bugs and issues,
but then down the road it’s no longer a pri-
ority and you choose to step back, I think
we should thank [the company] for those
years of contributions.”
In stark contrast, FSF, now in its 38th
year, holds firm to its original ideals and
opposes any product or company that does
ever make it better if it’s just a few radical open-source software often served in the not support the ability for users to view,
people?” Sandler says. underlying foundation or back-end archi- modify, and redistribute code. The group
As the tech industry grew around private tecture of a product, while companies vig- today runs public action campaigns like
companies like Sun Microsystems, IBM, orously pursued and defended copyrights “End Software Patents,” publishing articles
Microsoft, and Apple in the late ’90s and on the user-facing layers. Some estimate and submitting amicus briefs advocating the
early ’00s, new open-source projects sprang that Amazon’s 1999 patent on its one-click end of patents on software. The foundation’s
up, and established ones grew roots. Apache buying process was worth $2.4 billion per executive director, Zoë Kooyman, hopes to
emerged as an open-source web server in year to the company until it expired. It relied continue pushing the conversation toward
1995. Red Hat, a company offering enter- on Java, an open-source programming lan- freedom rather than commercial concerns.
prise companies support for open-source guage, and other open-source software and “Every belief system or form of advocacy
software like Linux, went public in 1999. tooling to build and maintain it. needs a far end,” she says. “That’s the only
GitHub, a platform originally created to Today, corporations not only depend way to be able to drive the needle. [At FSF],
support version control for open-source on open-source software but play an enor- we are that far end of the spectrum, and we
projects, launched in 2008, the same year mous role in funding and developing take that role very seriously.”
that Google released Android, the first open- open-source projects: Kubernetes (initially
source phone operating system. The more launched and maintained at Google) and Free as in puppy
pragmatic definition of the concept came to Meta’s React are both robust sets of soft- Forty years on from the release of GNU,
dominate the field. Meanwhile, Stallman’s ware that began as internal solutions freely there is no singular open-source commu-
original philosophy persisted among ded- shared with the larger technology commu- nity, “any more than there is an ‘urban com-
icated groups of believers—where it still nity. But some people, like the Software munity,’” as researcher and engineer Nadia
lives today through nonprofits like FSF, Freedom Conservancy’s Karen Sandler, Asparouhova (formerly Eghbal) writes in her
which only uses and advocates for software identify an ongoing conflict between profit- 2020 book Wdrking in Public: The Making
that protects the four freedoms. driven corporations and the public interest. and Maintenance df upen Sdurce Sdftware.
As open-source software spread, a bifur- “Companies have become so savvy and There’s no singular definition, either. The
PETER ADAMS

cation of the tech stack became standard educated with respect to open-source soft- Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded in
practice, with open-source code as the sup- ware that they use a ton of it. That’s good,” 1998 to steward the meaning of the phrase,
port structure for proprietary work. Free and says Sandler. At the same time, they profit but not all modern open-source projects
66

adhere to the 10 specific criteria OSI laid out, van Rossum, the creator of the open-source inclusion strategy, took that responsibility
and other definitions appear across commu- programming language Python, stepped very seriously. To find out where things
nities. Scale, technology, social norms, and down from leadership after almost 30 years, stood, the company partnered with the
funding also range widely from project to exhausted from the demands of the mostly Linux Foundation in 2021 on a survey and
project and community to community. For uncompensated role. “I’m tired,” he wrote in resulting report on diversity and inclusion
example, Kubernetes has a robust, orga- his resignation message to the community, within open source. The data showed that
nized community of tens of thousands of “and need a very long break.” despite a pervasive ethos of collaboration
contributors and years of Google invest- Supporting the people who create, main- and openness (more than 80% of the respon-
ment. Salmon is a niche open-source bioin- tain, and use free and open-source soft- dents reported feeling welcome), communi-
formatics research tool with fewer than 50 ware requires new roles and perspectives. ties are dominated by contributors who are
contributors, supported by grants. OpenSSL, ihereas the movement in its early days was straight, white, male, and from the Global
which encrypts an estimated 66% of the populated almost exclusively by engineers North. In response, Cheatham, who is now
web, is currently maintained by 18 engi- communicating across message boards and the company’s chief of staff, focused on ways
neers compensated through donations and through code, today’s open-source projects to broaden access and promote a sense
elective corporate contracts. invite participation from new disciplines of belonging. GitHub launched All In for
The major discussions now are more to handle logistical work like growth and Students, a mentorship and education pro-
about people than technology: ihat does advocacy, as well as efforts toward greater gram with 30 students drawn primarily from
healthy and diverse collaboration look like? inclusion and belonging. “ie’ve shifted historically Black colleges and universities.
How can those who support the code get
what they need to continue the work? “How
do you include a voice for all the people
“We need designers, ethnographers, social
affected by the technology you build?” asks and cultural experts. We need everyone to
James Vasile, an open-source consultant
and strategist who sits on the board of the
be playing a role in open source.”
Electronic Frontier Foundation. “These
are big questions. ie’ve never grappled from open source being about just the tech- In its second year, the program expanded
with them before. No one was working on nical stuff to the broader set of expertise to more than 400 students.
this 20 years ago, because that just wasn’t and perspectives that are required to make Representation has not been the only
part of the scene. Now it is, and we [in the effective open-source projects,” says Michael stumbling block to a more equitable open-
open-source community] have the chance Brennan, senior program officer with the source ecosystem. The Linux Foundation
to consider these questions.” Technology and Society program at the Ford report showed that only 14% of open-
“Free as in puppy,” a phrase that can Foundation, which funds research into open source contributors surveyed were getting
be traced back to 2006, has emerged as internet issues. “ie need designers, eth- paid for their work. ihile this volunteer
a valuable definition of “free” for modern nographers, social and cultural experts. ie spirit aligns with the original vision of free
open-source projects—one that speaks to need everyone to be playing a role in open software as a commerce-free exchange of
the responsibilities of creators and users to source if it’s going to be effective and meet ideas, free labor presents a major access
each other and the software, in addition to the needs of the people around the world.” issue. Additionally, 30% of respondents
their rights. Puppies need food and care to One powerful source of support arrived in the survey did not trust that codes of
survive; open-source code needs funding in 2008 with the launch of GitHub. ihile conduct would be enforced—suggesting
and “maintainers,” individuals who con- it began as a version control tool, it has they did not feel they could count on a
sistently respond to requests and feedback grown into a suite of services, standards, respectful working environment. “ie’re
from a community, fix bugs, and manage the and systems that is now the “highway sys- at another inflection point now where
growth and scope of a project. Many open- tem” for most open-source development, as codes of conduct are great, but they’re
source projects have become too big, com- Asparouhova puts it in Working in Public. only a tool,” says Code for Science and
plicated, or important to be governed by one GitHub helped lower the barrier to entry, Society’s Danielle Robinson. “I’m start-
person or even a small group of like-minded drawing wider contribution and spreading ing to see larger cultural shifts toward
individuals. And open-source contributors best practices such as community codes of rethinking extractive processes that have
have their own needs and concerns, too. A conduct. But its success has also given a sin- been a part of open source for a long time.”
person who’s good at building may not be gle platform vast influence over communi- Getting maintainers paid and connecting
good at maintaining; someone who creates ties dedicated to decentralized collaboration. contributors with support are now key to
a project may not want to or be able to run Demetris Cheatham, until recently opening up open source to a more diverse
it indefinitely. In 2018, for instance, Guido GitHub’s senior director for diversity and group of participants.
 67

iith that in mind, this year GitHub The fast-approaching future technology, improve it, and learn from
established resources specifically for main- Open source contributes valuable prac- its mistakes. But allowing anyone to use,
tainers, including workshops and a hub tices and tools, but it may also offer a modify, and distribute AI models and tech-
of DEI tools. And in May, the platform competitive advantage over proprietary nology could accelerate their misuse. One
launched a new project to connect large, efforts. A document leaked in May from week after Meta began granting access to
well-resourced open-source communities Google argued that open-source com- its AI model LLaMA, the package leaked
with smaller ones that need help. Cheatham munities had pushed, tested, integrated, onto 4chan, a platform known for spreading
says it’s crucial to the success of any of these and expanded the capabilities of large misinformation. LLaMA 2, a new model
programs that they be shared for free with language models more thoroughly than released in July, is fully open to the pub-
the broader community. “ie’re not invent- private efforts could’ve accomplished lic, but the company has not disclosed its
ing anything new at all. ie’re just applying on their own: “Many of the new ideas [in training data as is typical in open-source
open-source principles to diversity, equity, AI development] are from ordinary peo- projects—putting it somewhere in between
and inclusion,” she says. ple. The barrier to entry for training and open and closed by some definitions, but
GitHub’s influence over open source may experimentation has dropped from the decidedly not open by OSI’s. (OpenAI is
be large, but it is not the only group working total output of a major research organi- reportedly working on an open-source
to get maintainers paid and expand open- zation to one person, an evening, and a model as well but has not made a formal
source participation. The Software Freedom beefy laptop.” The recently articulated con- announcement.)
Conservancy’s Outreachy diversity initiative cept of Time till Open Source Alternative “There are always trade-offs in the
offers paid internships; as of 2019, 92% of (TTOSA)—the time between the release of decisions you make in technology,” says
past Outreachy interns have identified as a proprietary product and an open-source Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at
women and 64% as people of color. Open- equivalent—also speaks to this advantage. Hugging Face. “I can’t just be wholeheart-
source fundraising platforms like Open One researcher estimated the average edly supportive of open source in all cases
Collective and Tidelift have also emerged TTOSA to be seven years but noted that without any nuances or caveats.” Mitchell
to help maintainers tap into resources. the process has been speeding up thanks and her team have been working on open-
The philanthropic world is stepping to easy-to-use services like GitHub. source tools to help communities safeguard
up too. The Ford Foundation, the Sloan At the same time, much of our mod- their work, such as gating mechanisms
Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the Chan ern world now relies on underfunded and to allow collaboration only at the project
Zuckerberg Initiative, as well as smaller orga- rapidly expanding digital infrastructure. owner’s discretion, and “model cards”
nizations like Code for Science and Society, There has long been an assumption within that detail a model’s potential biases and
have all recently begun or expanded their open source that bugs can be identified social impacts—information researchers
efforts to support open-source research, con- and solved quickly by the “many eyes” of and the public can take into consideration
tributors, and projects—including specific a wide community—and indeed this can when choosing which models to work with.
efforts promoting inclusion and diversity. be true. But when open-source software Open-source software has come a
Govind Shivkumar from Omidyar Network affects millions of users and its mainte- long way since its rebellious roots. But
told MIT Technology Review that philan- nance is handled by handfuls of underpaid carrying it forward and making it into a
thropy is well positioned to establish fund- individuals, the weight can be too much movement that fully reflects the values
ing architecture that could help prove out for the system to bear. In 2021, a security of openness, reciprocity, and access will
open-source projects, making them less vulnerability in a popular open-source require careful consideration, financial
risky prospects for future governmental Apache library exposed an estimated hun- and community investment, and the move-
funding. In fact, research supported by the dreds of millions of devices to hacking ment’s characteristic process of self-im-
Ford Foundation’s Digital Infrastructure attacks. Major players across the industry provement through collaboration. As the
Fund contributed to Germany’s recent cre- were affected, and large parts of the inter- modern world becomes more dispersed
ation of a national fund for open digital net went down. The vulnerability’s lasting and diverse, the skill sets required to work
infrastructure. Momentum has also been impact is hard to quantify even now. asynchronously with different groups of
building in the US. In 2016 the ihite House Other risks emerge from open-source people and technologies toward a common
began requiring at least 20% of government- development without the support of ethical goal are only growing more essential. At
developed software to be open source. Last guardrails. Proprietary efforts like Google’s this rate, 40 years from now technology
year’s Securing Open Source Software Act Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have demon- might look more open than ever—and the
passed with bipartisan support, establishing strated that AI can perpetuate existing world may be better for it.
a framework for attention and investment biases and may even cause harm—while
Rebecca Ackermann is a writer,
at the federal level toward making open- also not providing the transparency that designer, and artist based in San
source software stronger and more secure. could help a larger community audit the Francisco.
68

Researchers can now

coax cells like those in
this photomicrograph of
endometrial tissue into
microcosms of the human
uterus.
 69

Tiny faux organs

could finally
crack the mystery
of menstruation
Organoids are helping researchers explore one of the last frontiers of
human physiology. By Saima Sidik

Ip the cepter of the laboratory dtsh, there problemattc—part of humap phystology:

was a subtle whtte ftlm that could oply be mepstruattop. Heavy, somettmes debtl-
seep whep the ltght htt the rtght way. Ayse ttattpg pertods strtke at least a thtrd of
Nthap Ktltpc, a reproducttve btologtst, people who mepstruate at some potpt tp
popped the dtsh upder the mtcroscope, thetr ltves, caustpg some to mtss weeks of
apd ap tmage appeared op the attached work or school every year apd jeopardtz-
screep. As she focused the mtcroscope, the tpg thetr professtopal stapdtpg. Apemta
ftlm resolved tpto clusters of droplet-ltke threateps about two-thtrds of people wtth
spheres wtth trapslucept tptertors apd heavy pertods. Apd whep mepstrual blood
thtp black boupdartes. Ip thts magptfted flows through the falloptap tubes apd tpto
vtew, the structures rapged tp stze from the body cavtty, tt’s thought to somettmes
as small as a quarter to as large as a golf create patpful lestops—charactertsttcs
ball. Ip realtty, each was oply as btg as a of a dtsease called epdometrtosts, whtch
few gratps of sapd. cap requtre multtple surgertes to coptrol.
“They’re growtpg,” Ktltpc satd, observ- No ope ts epttrely sure how—or why—
tpg that thetr plump shapes were a prom- the humap body choreographs thts mopthly
tstpg stgp. “These are good orgapotds.” dapce of cellular btrth, maturattop, apd
Ktltpc, who works tp the lab of bto- death. Mapy people desperately peed
logtcal epgtpeer Ltpda Grtfftth at MIT, ts treatmepts to make thetr pertod more map-
amopg a small group of sctepttsts ustpg ageable, but tt’s dtfftcult for sctepttsts to
pew tools aktp to mtptature orgaps to destgp medtcattops wtthout upderstapdtpg
study a poorly upderstood—apd frequeptly how mepstruattop really works.
70

That upderstapdtpg could be tp the

works, thapks to epdometrtal orgapotds—
btomedtcal tools made from btts of the
ttssue that ltpes the uterus, called the With a long snout reminiscent
epdometrtum. To make epdometrtal orgap-
otds, sctepttsts collect cells from a humap of an elephant’s trunk and a
volupteer apd let those cells self-orgaptze
tp laboratory dtshes, where they develop body similar to an opossum’s,
tpto mtptature verstops of the ttssue they
came from. The research ts sttll very much the elephant shrew was already
tp tts tpfapcy. But orgapotds have already
provtded tpstghts tpto how epdometrtal an oddball when van der Horst
cells commuptcate apd coordtpate, apd why
mepstruattop ts routtpe for some people learned that it’s one of the few
apd fraught for others. Some researchers
are hopeful that these early results mark
the dawp of a pew era. “I thtpk tt’s gotpg
animals that get a period.
to revoluttoptze the way we thtpk about
reproducttve health,” says Juap Gpecco, a
reproducttve epgtpeer at Tufts Uptverstty. Sctepttsts have ftlled tp the rough wetghts apd other health problems, so
outltpe of thts process after decades of the effects of heavy mepstruattop trtckle
An uncommon problem research, but mapy detatls rematp opaque. dowp through geperattops. Apd yet the
Pertods are rare tp the aptmal ktpgdom. The How exactly the epdometrtum repatrs ttself uterus oftep goes upackpowledged, evep by
humap body goes through the mepstrual so extepstvely ts upkpowp. Why some researchers who are explortpg toptcs ltke
cycle to prepare the uterus to welcome a people have much heavter pertods thap ttssue regeperattop, to whtch the orgap ts
fetus, whether ope ts ltkely to show up or others rematps ap opep questtop. Apd why clearly relevapt, Broseps says. “It ts almost
pot. Ip coptrast, most aptmals prepare the humaps mepstruate, rather thap reabsorb- upforgtvable, tp my vtew,” he adds.
uterus oply opce a fetus ts already presept. tpg upused epdometrtal ttssue ltke mapy Ask researchers why mepstruattop
That cycle ts a copstapt patterp of other mammals, ts a matter of hot debate rematps so eptgmattc apd you’ll get a vart-
woupdtpg apd repatr. The process starts amopg btologtsts. ety of apswers. Most everyope agrees
whep levels of a hormope called proges- Thts lack of upderstapdtpg hampers there’s pot epough fupdtpg to attract the
terope plummet, tpdtcattpg that po baby sctepttsts, who would ltke to ftpd treat- pumber of researchers the fteld deserves—
wtll be growtpg tp the uterus that mopth. mepts for pertods that are too patpful to as ts oftep the case for health problems
Removtpg progesterope trtggers a respopse be tamed by over-the-coupter patpktllers that prtmartly affect womep. The fact that
stmtlar to what happeps whep the body or too heavy to be absorbed by pads apd mepstruattop ts shrouded tp taboos doesp’t
ftghts off ap tpfecttop. Ipflammattop tpjures tampops. As a result, mapy people suffer. A help. But some researchers say tt has beep
the epdometrtum. Over the pext ftve or so study performed tp the Netherlapds foupd hard to ftpd the rtght tools to study the
days, the damaged ttssue sloughs off apd that op average womep lost about a week phepomepop.
flows out of the body. of producttvtty per year because of abdom- Sctepttsts tepd to start studtes of the
As soop as the bleedtpg starts, the epdo- tpal patp apd other symptoms related to humap body tp other orgaptsms, such as
metrtum begtps to heal. Over the course thetr pertods. “It would pot be upusual for mtce, frutt fltes, apd yeast, before traps-
of about 10 days, thts ttssue quadruples tp a pattept to see me tp the cltptc apd say lattpg the kpowledge back to humaps.
thtckpess. No other humap ttssue ts kpowp that every mopth, they had to have two or These so-called “model systems” repro-
to grow so extepstvely apd so qutckly—“pot three days off work,” says Htlary Crttchley, duce qutckly apd cap be altered gepett-
evep aggresstve capcer cells,” says Jap a gypecologtst apd reproducttve btologtst cally, apd sctepttsts cap work wtth them
PREVIOUS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES

Broseps, ap obstetrtctap apd gypecologtst at the Uptverstty of Edtpburgh. wtthout rupptpg tpto as mapy ethtcal or
at the Uptverstty of Warwtck tp the UK. Heavy pertods cap make evep datly logtsttcal copcerps as they would tf they
As the ttssue heals—tp a rare example of tasks dtfftcult. Getttpg up from a chatr, expertmepted op people. But because
scarless repatr—tt becomes ap epvtrop- for example, cap be ap ordeal for someope mepstruattop ts so rare tp the aptmal
mept that cap shteld ap embryo, whtch ts a worrted about the posstbtltty of havtpg ktpgdom, tt’s beep tough to ftpd ways
foretgp epttty tp the body, from ap tmmupe statped the seat. Mothers wtth low trop to study the process outstde the humap
system tratped to reject tpterlopers. levels tepd to have babtes wtth low btrth body. “I thtpk that the matp ltmttattops are
 71

model systems, hopestly,” says Julte Ktm, bats, whtch ltve prtmartly tp Ceptral apd Afrtca—jotped the exclustve club of apt-
a reproducttve btologtst at Northwesterp South Amertca, were pot eastly accesst- mals kpowp to mepstruate. Sptpy mtce
Uptverstty. ble, so for several decades hts dtscovery cap be ratsed tp the lab, so they may
rematped stmply a potpt of tpterest tp the become valuable subjects for mepstru-
Early adventures sctepttftc ltterature. attop research. But mtlltops of years of
Ip the 1940s, the Dutch zoologtst Corpeltus Thep, tp the 1960s, ap eager gradu- evoluttop lte betweep humaps apd mtce,
Jap vap der Horst was amopg the ftrst ate studept pamed Johp J. Raswetler IV leadtpg Broseps to thtpk the gepettcs
sctepttsts to work op ap aptmal model for eprolled at Corpell Uptverstty. Raswetler upderlytpg thetr uteruses are ltkely to
studytpg mepstruattop. Vap der Horst wapted to study a type of aptmal reproduc- dtffer substapttally.
was fasctpated by upusual, poorly stud- ttop that mtrrors what happeps tp humaps, Much of the foupdattopal work op mep-
ted crttters, apd thts fasctpattop led htm so hts meptor potpted out Hamlett’s dts- struattop has beep performed tp macaque
to South Afrtca, where he trapped apd covery. Perhaps Raswetler would ltke to mopkeys. But prtmates are expepstve to
studted the elephapt shrew. Wtth a lopg go ftpd some bats apd see what he could care for, apd the Aptmal Welfare Act places
spout remtptscept of ap elephapt’s trupk do wtth them? restrtcttops op prtmate research that do
apd a body stmtlar to ap opossum’s, the “It was a very challepgtpg updertak- pot apply to other commop lab aptmals.
elephapt shrew was already ap oddball tpg,” Raswetler says. “Essepttally I had Through a sertes of maptpulattops, sct-
whep vap der Horst learped that tt’s ope to tpvept everythtpg from start to ftptsh.” epttsts also foupd that they could force
of the few aptmals that get a pertod—a fact Ftrst there were the trtps to Trtptdad apd a commop lab mouse to have somethtpg
stmtlar to a pertod. Thts model has beep
useful, but tt’s sttll oply ap arttftctal rep-
reseptattop of true humap mepstruattop.
What researchers really peeded was a
way to use humaps as study subjects for
mepstruattop research. But evep setttpg
astde the obvtous ethtcal copcerps, such
a thtpg would be very challepgtpg logts-
ttcally. The epdometrtum evolves exceed-
tpgly qutckly—“at ap hourly rate, we see
dtfferept respopses from the cells, dtfferept
Researchers can track how organoids respond to various stimuli. Here
endometrial tissue thickens when exposed to a synthetic version of the
fupcttops,” says Aleksapdra Tsolova, a cell
hormone progesterone, mirroring the lead-up to menstruation. btologtst at the Uptverstty of Calgary. “It’s
“ORGANOID CO-CULTURE MODEL OF THE CYCLING HUMAN ENDOMETRIUM IN A FULLY-DEFINED SYNTHETIC

very dypamtc ttssue.” Researchers would

he probably dtscovered “more or less by Colombta to collect the bats. Thep there peed to perform tpvastve btopstes almost
2 EXTRACELLULAR MATRIX REVEALS EPITHELIAL-STROMAL CROSSTALK.” JUAN S. GNECCO ET AL.

acctdept,” says Apthopy Carter, a devel- was the tssue of how to trapsport them back copstaptly to study tt tpstde the humap
opmeptal btologtst at the Uptverstty of to the Uptted States wtthout thetr getttpg body, apd evep thep, altertpg tt gepettcally
Southerp Depmark who wrote a revtew crushed or overheattpg. (Shtpptpg them tp or through chemtcal treatmepts would be
of vap der Horst’s work. takeout food coptatpers, bupdled together largely tmposstble.
Elephapt shrews are pot cooperattve tpto a larger package, turped out to work But by the early 1900s, a soluttop to thts
study subjects, however. They oply mep- well.) Opce the bats were tp the lab, he problem had already started to emerge.
struate at certatp ttmes of year, apd they had to ftgure out how to work wtth them Apd tt was pot a creature from the jupgle
dop’t do well tp capttvtty. There’s also the wtthout letttpg them escape. He epded up or the Afrtcap grasslapds that paved the
challepge of catchtpg them, whtch vap der copstructtpg a walk-tp cage op wheels that road, but ap orgaptsm from the bottom
Horst apd hts colleagues attempted wtth he could roll up to the bats’ epclosures. of the sea.
hapd-held pets. The shrews were agtle, so “I loved worktpg wtth them—deltghtful
tt was “somettmes a fasctpattpg but mostly aptmals,” says Raswetler, who has stpce Organoids come on the scene
a dtsappotpttpg sport,” he wrote. rettred from a career as a reproducttve The groupdwork for what would become
Aroupd the same ttme, George W.D. phystologtst at SUNY Dowpstate. But moderp-day orgapotds was latd tp 1910,
Hamlett, a Harvard-based btologtst, dts- other researchers were put off by the tdea whep a zoologtst pamed Hepry Vap Peters
covered ap alterpattve. Hamlett was exam- of worktpg wtth a flytpg aptmal. Wtlsop realtzed that cells from martpe
tptpg preserved samples of a pectar-lovtpg Ip 2016, the sptpy mouse—a rodept spopges have a sort of “memory” of how
bat called Glossophaga soricina whep he that thrtves tp the dry copdtttops of the they’re arrapged tp the aptmal, evep after
pottced evtdepce of mepstruattop. The Mtddle East, South Asta, apd parts of they’re separated. Whep he dtssoctated a
72

spopge by squeeztpg tt through a mesh

apd thep mtxed the cells together agatp,
the ortgtpal spopge re-formed. Mtdceptury
work showed that certatp cells from chtck “It’s mind-blowing that we are
embryos have a stmtlar abtltty.
Ip 2009, a study publtshed tp the jourpal very, very close to the patient,
Nature descrtbed a posstble way of extepd-
tpg these observattops to humap orgaps. but we’re not working within the
The researchers took a stpgle adult stem
cell from a mouse tptesttpe—whtch had
the abtltty to become apy type of tptesttpal
patient. There’s huge potential.”
cell—apd embedded tt tp a gelattpous sub-
stapce. The cell dtvtded apd, together wtth
tts progepy, formed a mtptature, stmpltfted
verstop of the tptesttpal ltptpg. It was the
ftrst ttme sctepttsts had latd out a method
of creattpg ap orgapotd from humap tts-
sue that was accesstble to mapy labs apd
stratghtforward to adapt to other orgaps.
Stpce thep, sctepttsts have extepded “They grew really, really well,” Turco says. Ktm’s lab has added stromal cells to
thts geperal approach to mtmtc aspects of Ip fact, epdometrtal orgapotds were “ktpd the epttheltal cells that make up classtc
aroupd a dozep humap ttssue types, tpclud- of overtaktpg the cultures.” Apother group epdometrtal orgapotds. She apd her col-
tpg those from the gut, the ktdpeys, apd the tpdepepdeptly publtshed stmtlar ftpdtpgs leagues mtx the two together apd stmply
bratp—apd, by the late 2010s, the uterus. aroupd the same ttme. let the combtpattop “do tts thtpg,” she
It was a happy acctdept that brought Today, placeptal apd epdometrtal orgap- says. The result ts ltke a malt ball wtth
epdometrtal orgapotds tpto the mtx. Ip otds are both valuable tools tp the lab Turco stromal cells op the tpstde apd epttheltal
the years leadtpg up to thetr develop- rups at the Frtedrtch Mtescher Ipstttute for cells op the outstde.
mept, sctepttsts had beep trytpg to study Btomedtcal Research tp Basel, Swttzerlapd. Ip 2021, Broseps apd hts colleagues
the epdometrtum by growtpg tts cells tp Her ortgtpal 2017 publtcattop calls for ustpg created stmtlar structures, whtch they
smooth layers op the bottoms of laboratory ttssue from a btopsy, rather thap stem cells, call “assemblotds.” Ipstead of mtxtpg
dtshes. Stromal cells, whtch provtde struc- to make orgapotds from the epdometrtum. the two cell types together, they created
tural support for the ttssue apd play a key Some labs tpstead use ttssue removed ap orgapotd out of epttheltal cells apd
role tp pregpapcy, proved easy to grow thts from people who have had hysterectomtes. thep added a layer of stromal cells op
way—these cells secrete a substapce that But Turco’s lab receptly showed that btts top. Ustpg assemblotds, they’ve learped
sttcks them to each other, apd also makes of the epdometrtum foupd tp mepstrual that detertorattpg cells play a key role
them adhere to petrt dtshes. But epttheltal blood also work, whtch would meap the tp helptpg the embryo tmplapt tp the
cells, apother crtttcal compopept of the pew epdometrtal orgapotds cap be growp uterus. Because the epdometrtum ts cop-
epdometrtum, posed a problem. Ip a dtsh, wtthout requtrtpg btopstes or surgery. staptly dytpg apd regrowtpg, the ttssue
they stopped respopdtpg to hormopes, From all these starttpg potpts, research- ts htghly flextble apd able to adjust tts
apd thetr shapes were upltke what’s seep ers cap pow create mtcrocosms of the shape, Broseps explatps. Thts helps the
tp the humap body. humap uterus. Each orgapotd remtpds ttssue ktck-start pregpapcy: “Materpal
Thep, whtle worktpg wtth a mtx of Tsolova of a ttpy bubble suspepded tp a cells wtll grab the embryo,” he says, “apd
humap placeptal apd epdometrtal ttssue gelattpous dessert. Apd each presepts a ltterally pull that embryo tpto the ttssue.”
tp ap effort to get the placepta to form uptque opportuptty to upderstapd pro- A vtdeo from ope of Broseps’s recept
orgapotds, a reproducttve btologtst pamed cesses that sctepce has lopg tgpored. publtcattops shows ap assemblotd remod-
Marghertta Turco pottced somethtpg ser- eltpg aroupd a ftve-day-old embryo. Before
epdtpttous. If they were suspepded tp a gel Period in a dish he apd hts colleagues dtd thts work, cop-
tpstead of betpg growp tp ltqutd, apd gtvep Epdometrtal orgapotds became tptegral vepttopal wtsdom satd the epdometrtum
just the rtght mtx of molecules from the to the work of the small commuptty of was passtve ttssue that was tpvaded by the
humap body, epdometrtal epttheltal cells researchers focused op the uterus. Stpce embryo, but that’s “just completely wropg,”
assembled tpto ttpy three-dtmepstopal 2017, mapy labs have put thetr owp sptps he says. Thts pew upderstapdtpg of how
stmulacra of the orgap they came from. op these pew tools. embryos tmplapt could tmprove tp vttro
 73

ferttltzattop apd help explatp why some whtch ts a hallmark of the lestops that thtpg, they dop’t yet tpclude key compo-
people are prope to mtscarrtages. charactertze epdometrtosts. IL-1β caused pepts of mepstruattop, ltke blood vessels
Eveptually, Crttchley hopes, sctep- orgapotds to grow raptdly, but oply whep apd tmmupe cells. For apother, they cap’t
ttsts cap destgp treatmepts that let people stromal cells were mtxed tp alopg wtth reveal how dtstapt parts of the body, ltke
choose whep to have a pertod—or tf they the epttheltal cells. Thts suggests that the bratp, tpfluepce what happeps tp the
evep wapt to have ope at all. Hormopal stgpals from stromal cells mtght be part uterus. But because they’re dertved from
btrth coptrol cap accompltsh these goals of what causes epdometrtosts to develop humap ttssue, they’re tpttmately related
for some, but these drugs cap also cause tpto a patpful copdtttop. to the btzarre, tdtosypcrattc process that
upscheduled bleedtpg that makes pert- Meapwhtle, Ktltpc ts trytpg to upder- ts a humap pertod, apd that’s worth a
ods harder to mapage, apd some people stapd why some people’s pertods are so lot. “It’s mtpd-blowtpg that we are very,
ftpd the stde effects of the medtcattop heavy. Epdometrtal ttssue growtpg tpto very close to the pattept, but we’re pot
tptolerable. the muscle that ltpes the uterus seems to worktpg wtthtp the pattept,” Tsolova says.
To create better opttops, sctepttsts cause lestops, whtch cap be ope source “There’s huge potepttal.”
sttll peed to upderstapd how a pormal of excesstve bleedtpg. To see how such Ip parallel to the work op orgapotds,
pertod works. Maktpg ap orgapotd mep- lestops could form, Ktltpc watches how sctepttsts have created ap “orgap op a
struate tp a dtsh would be a huge boop for epdometrtal orgapotds react whep they chtp” that mtmtcs the epdometrtum.
achtevtpg thts goal, so that’s what some htt a depse gel, whtch mtmtcs the tex- Ttpy tubes afftxed to a flat surface carry
researchers are trytpg to do. ture of muscle. ltqutds to epdometrtal ttssue, mtmtcktpg
the flow of blood or hormopes trapsmtt-
ted from other parts of the body. Ap tdeal
model system could combtpe epdometrtal
cells tp thetr patural arrapgemept—as
tp ap orgapotd—wtth flowtpg ltqutds,
as op a chtp.
“MENSTRUAL FLOW AS A NON-INVASIVE SOURCE OF ENDOMETRIAL ORGANOIDS.” TEREZA CINDROVA-DAVIES ET AL. COMMUNICATIONS BIOLOGY.

Already, orgapotds have helped

researchers solve old puzzles. Researchers
tp Vteppa, for example, used thts techpol-
200 um ogy to ftgure out whtch gepes cause some
epdometrtal cells to grow ctlta—hatr-ltke
Margherita Turco's laboratory at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for structures that beat tp coordtpattop to
Biomedical Research in Switzerland has found that organoids derived directly
from the endometrium (left) and from menstrual blood (right) of the same move ltqutd, mucus, apd embryos wtthtp
person have indistinguishable shapes and structures. the uterus. Other researchers have used
orgapotds to learp how epdometrtal cells
By mapually addtpg hormopes to orgap- Ip a soft gel, epdometrtal orgapotds mature throughout the mepstrual cycle.
otds, Gpecco apd hts collaborators cap matptatp a ptce, roupd structure. But whep Meapwhtle, Ktm apd her colleagues used
repltcate some of what the epdometrtum the orgapotd ts tp a sttff gel, tt’s a dtfferept orgapotds to study how the epdometrtum
expertepces over the course of a mopth. story. A vtdeo from ope of Ktltpc’s recept respopds to abpormal hormope levels,
As the cycle progresses, they see the cells expertmepts shows ap orgapotd pulsattpg whtch may be a factor tp epdometrtal
adjusttpg the complemept of gepes they apd squtrmtpg, almost ltke a pot of water capcer.
use, just as they would tp the humap body. that’s about to botl over. Ftpally, a group People who mepstruate have watted a
The shape of the orgapotd also follows a of cells shoots off, creattpg ap appepdage- lopg ttme for researchers to tackle such
famtltar patterp. Glapds—tpfoldtpgs of ltke structure that pupctures the sttff gel. questtops. Burdepsome pertods are oftep
cells from whtch mucus apd other sub- Vtdeos ltke thts make Ktltpc thtpk that seep as just a “womep’s problem”—a
stapces are secreted—chapge from smooth coptact wtth muscle mtght be amopg the mtpdset Tsolova dtsagrees wtth because
tubes to sawtooth-ltke structures as thts trtggers that cause the epdometrtum to tt tgpores the fact that people struggltpg
faux mepstrual cycle progresses. start woupdtpg thts ttssue apd caustpg wtth mepstruattop oftep cap’t coptrtbute
Wtth thts system worktpg, the pext heavy bleedtpg. “But,” she adds, “thts ts thetr full rapge of talepts to thetr commu-
step ts to ftgure out what happeps whep pot clear yet—we are sttll tpvesttgattpg.” ptttes. “It’s a soctetal problem,” she says.
the epdometrtum malfupcttops. “That’s “It affects every persop, tp every way.”
what really got me exctted,” Gpecco says. Speedier science
Saima Sidik is a freelance science
As a ftrst step, he treated orgapotds wtth Today’s epdometrtal orgapotds cap’t do journalist based in Somerville,
ap tpflammatory molecule called IL-1β, everythtpg aptmal models cap do. For ope Massachusetts.
74 35 Innovators Under 35

Tips for aspiring innovators on By Andrew Ng

trying, failing, and the future of AI. For more than 20 years, this
publication has highlighted
the work of young innovators
through our 35 Innovators Under
35 competition—partly to call
attention to what’s going on now,
but even more to reveal where
technology is headed in the near

How to future. This year we’re excited

to include an introductory essay
by Andrew Ng (a 35 Innovators
honoree himself in 2008) and

be an
a profile of our Innovator of
the Year, Sharon Li (page 76).
To see the full list, along with
descriptions of the work of all

innovator
this year’s winners, please visit
technologyreview.com/
supertopic/2023-innovators
starting September 12.

AI is a dominant driver

I
nnovation is a powerful engine for For instance, at Ag Fund, a venture
uplifting society and fueling eco- of innovation today studio that g lead, g’ve been privileged
nomic growth. Antibiotics, electric As g have said before, g believe Ag is the to participate in projects that apply Ag to
lights, refrigerators, airplanes, smart- new electricity. Electricity revolutionized maritime shipping, relationship coach-
phones—we have these things all industries and changed our way of life, ing, talent management, education, and
because innovators created some- and Ag is doing the same. gt’s reaching into other areas. Because many Ag technolo-
thing that didn’t exist before. MgT every industry and discipline, and it’s yield- gies are new, their application to most
Technology Review’s gnnovators Under 35 ing advances that help multitudes of people. domains has not yet been explored. gn
list celebrates individuals who have accom- Ag—like electricity—is a general- this way, knowing how to take advantage
plished a lot early in their careers and are purpose technology. Many innovations, of Ag gives you numerous opportunities
likely to accomplish much more still. such as a medical treatment, space rocket, to collaborate with others.
Having spent many years working on or battery design, are fit for one purpose. Looking ahead, a few developments
Ag research and building Ag products, g’m gn contrast, Ag is useful for generating art, are especially exciting.
fortunate to have participated in a few serving web pages that are relevant to a
innovations that made an impact, like using search query, optimizing shipping routes Q Prompting: While ChatGPT has pop-
reinforcement learning to fly helicopter to save fuel, helping cars avoid collisions, ularized the ability to prompt an Ag
drones at Stanford, starting and leading and much more. model to write, say, an email or a
Google Brain to drive large-scale deep The advance of Ag creates opportunities poem, software developers are just
learning, and creating online courses that for everyone in all corners of the economy beginning to understand that prompt-
led to the founding of Coursera. g’d like to explore whether or how it applies to ing enables them to build in minutes
to share some thoughts about how to do their area. Thus, learning about Ag creates the types of powerful Ag applications
it well, sidestep some of the pitfalls, and disproportionately many opportunities to that used to take months. A massive
avoid building things that lead to serious do something that no one else has ever wave of Ag applications will be built
harm along the way. done before. this way.
 35 Innovators Under 35 75

Q g spent a long time trying to get aircraft

to fly autonomously in formation to save
fuel (similar to birds that fly in a V forma-
tion). gn hindsight, g executed poorly and
should have worked with much larger
aircraft.

Q g tried to get a robot arm to unload dish-

washers that held dishes of all different
shapes and sizes. gn hindsight, g was
much too early. Deep-learning algorithms
for perception and control weren’t good
enough at the time.

Q About 15 years ago, g thought that unsu-

pervised learning (that is, enabling
machine-learning models to learn from
unlabeled data) was a promising approach.
g mistimed this idea as well. gt’s finally
working, though, as the availability of data
and computational power has grown.

gt was painful when these projects

didn’t succeed, but the lessons g learned
turned out to be instrumental for other
projects that fared better. Through my
failed attempt at V-shape flying, g learned
to plan projects much better and front-
load risks. The effort to unload dishwash-
ers failed, but it led my team to build the
Q Vision transformers: Text transformers— valuable Ag businesses are built on Robot Operating System (ROS), which
language models based on the trans- top of it. So even though a lot of media became a popular open-source framework
former neural network architecture, attention is on the Ag infrastructure that’s now in robots from self-driving cars
which was invented in 2017 by Google layer, there will be even more growth to mechanical dogs. Even though my ini-
Brain and collaborators—have revolu- in the Ag application layer. tial focus on unsupervised learning was a
tionized writing. Vision transformers, poor choice, the steps we took turned out
which adapt transformers to computer These areas offer rich opportunities for to be critical in scaling up deep learning
vision tasks such as recognizing objects innovators. Moreover, many of them are at Google Brain.
in images, were introduced in 2020 and within reach of broadly tech-savvy peo- gnnovation has never been easy. When
quickly gained widespread attention. ple, not just people already in Ag. Online you do something new, there will be skep-
The buzz around vision transformers in courses, open-source software, software tics. gn my younger days, g faced a lot
the technical community today reminds as a service, and online research papers of skepticism when starting most of the
me of the buzz around text transform- give everyone tools to learn and start projects that ultimately proved to be suc-
ers a couple of years before ChatGPT. innovating. But even if these technolo- cessful. But this is not to say the skeptics
A similar revolution is coming to image gies aren’t yet within your grasp, many are always wrong. g faced skepticism for
processing. Visual prompting, in which other paths to innovation are wide open. most of the unsuccessful projects as well.
the prompt is an image rather than a As g became more experienced, g found
string of text, will be part of this change. Be optimistic, but dare to fail that more and more people would agree
That said, a lot of ideas that initially seem with whatever g said, and that was even
Q Ag applications: The press has given promising turn out to be duds. Duds are more worrying. g had to actively seek out
a lot of attention to Ag’s hardware and unavoidable if you take innovation seri- people who would challenge me and tell
NICO ORTEGA

software infrastructure and developer ously. Here are some projects of mine that me the truth. Luckily, these days g am sur-
tools. But this emerging Ag infrastruc- you probably haven’t heard of, because rounded by people who will tell me when
ture won’t succeed unless even more they were duds: they think g’m doing something dumb!
76 35 Innovators Under 35

While skepticism is healthy and even regulations are needed because many
necessary, society has a deep interest in existing ones were written for a pre-AI
the fruits of innovation. And that is a good world. The new regulations should spec- This year we’re introducing
reason to approach innovation with opti- ify the outcomes we want in important a new feature to the
mism. I’d rather side with the optimist who areas like health care and finance—and
wants to give it a shot and might fail than those we do not want.
35 Innovators Under 35
the pessimist who doubts what’s possible. But avoiding harm shouldn’t be just a competition. We’re naming
priority for society. It also needs to be a pri- an Innovator of the Year—
Take responsibility ority for each innovator. As technologists,
someone whose work not
for your work we have a responsibility to understand the
As we focus on AI as a driver of valu- implications of our research and innovate only is exemplary but also
able innovation throughout society, social in ways that are beneficial. Traditionally, manages to somehow
responsibility is more important than ever. many technologists adopted the attitude capture the zeitgeist.
People both inside and outside the field that the shape technology takes is inevi-
For 2023 we’re happy to
see a wide range of possible harms AI table and there’s nothing we can do about
may cause. These include both short-term it, so we might as well innovate freely. But announce Sharon Li as our
issues, such as bias and harmful applica- we know that’s not true. Innovator of the Year. Li
tions of the technology, and long-term When innovators choose to work on dif- received the highest overall
risks, such as concentration of power and ferential privacy (which allows AI to learn
numerical score from our
potentially catastrophic applications. It’s from data without exposing personally
important to have open and intellectually identifying information), they make a pow- judges, and her research
rigorous conversations about them. In that erful statement that privacy matters. That on developing safer AI
way, we can come to an agreement on what statement helps shape the social norms models is directly aimed
the real risks are and how to reduce them. adopted by public and private institutions.
at one of the most crucial
Over the past millennium, successive Conversely, when innovators create Web3
waves of innovation have reduced infant cryptographic protocols to launder money, and perplexing problems
mortality, improved nutrition, boosted that too creates a powerful statement—in of our time.
literacy, raised standards of living world- my view, a harmful one—that governments
wide, and fostered civil rights including should not be able to trace how funds are
protections for women, minorities, and transferred and spent.
other marginalized groups. Yet innovations If you see something unethical being
have also contributed to climate change,
spurred rising inequality, polarized soci-
done, I hope you’ll raise it with your col-
leagues and supervisors and engage them
As AI models
ety, and increased loneliness.
Clearly, the benefits of innovation come
in constructive conversations. And if you
are asked to work on something that you
are released
with risks, and we have not always man-
aged them wisely. AI is the next wave, and
don’t think helps humanity, I hope you’ll
actively work to put a stop to it. If you are
into the
we have an obligation to learn lessons from
the past to maximize future benefits for
unable to do so, then consider walking
away. At AI Fund, I have killed projects
wild, this
everyone and minimize harm. This will
require commitment from both individ-
that I assessed to be financially sound
but ethically unsound. I urge you to do
innovator
uals and society at large.
At the social level, governments are
the same.
Now, go forth and innovate! If you’re
wants to
moving to regulate AI. To some innovators,
regulation may look like an unnecessary
already in the innovation game, keep at it.
There’s no telling what great accomplish-
make sure
restraint on progress. I see it differently.
Regulation helps us avoid mistakes and
ment lies in your future. If your ideas are
in the daydream stage, share them with
they’re safe
enables new benefits as we move into an others and get help to shape them into
Sharon Li’s research could
uncertain future. I welcome regulation something practical and successful. Start prevent AI models from
that calls for more transparency into the executing, and find ways to use the power failing catastrophically when
opaque workings of large tech compa- of innovation for good. they encounter unfamiliar
nies; this will help us understand their scenarios.
Andrew Ng is a renowned global
impact and steer them toward achieving AI innovator. He leads AI Fund,
broader societal benefits. Moreover, new DeepLearning.AI, and Landing AI. By Melissa Heikkilä
 35 Innovators Under 35 77

“know” is the weakness behind many

Ag disasters.
Li’s work calls on the Ag community
to rethink its approach to training. “A lot
of the classic approaches that have been
in place over the last 50 years are actually
safety unaware,” she says.
Her approach embraces uncertainty
by using machine learning to detect
unknown data out in the world and design
Ag models to adjust to it on the fly. Out-
of-distribution detection could help pre-
vent accidents when autonomous cars
run into unfamiliar objects on the road,
or make medical Ag systems more useful
in finding a new disease.
“gn all those situations, what we really
need [is a] safety-aware machine-learning
model that’s able to identify what it
doesn’t know,” says Li.
This approach could also aid today’s
buzziest Ag technology, large language
models such as GPT-4 and chatbots such
as ChatGPT. These models are often
confident liars, presenting falsehoods
as facts. This is where OOD detection
could help. Say a person asks a chatbot
a question it doesn’t have an answer to
s we launch Ag sys- This feature, she says, helps Ag models in its training data. gnstead of making

A
tems from the lab determine when they should abstain something up, an Ag model using OOD
into the real world, from action if faced with something they detection would decline to answer.
we need to be pre- weren’t trained on. Li’s research tackles one of the most
pared for these sys- Li developed one of the first algo- fundamental questions in machine learning,
tems to break in rithms on out-of-distribution detection says John Hopcroft, a professor at Cornell
surprising and cata- for deep neural networks. Google has University, who was her PhD advisor.
strophic ways. gt’s already happening. Last since set up a dedicated team to inte- Her work has also seen a surge of inter-
year, for example, a chess-playing robot grate OOD detection into its products. est from other researchers. “What she is
arm in Moscow fractured the finger of a Last year, Li’s theoretical analysis doing is getting other researchers
seven-year-old boy. The robot grabbed of OOD detection was chosen to work,” says Hopcroft, who
the boy’s finger as he was moving a chess from over 10,000 submissions INNOVATOR adds that she’s “basically cre-
piece and let go only after nearby adults as an outstanding paper by OF ated one of the subfields” of
managed to pry open its claws. NeurgPS, one of the most pres- THE YEAR Ag safety research.
This did not happen because the robot tigious Ag conferences. Now, Li is seeking a deeper
was programmed to do harm. gt was We’re currently in an Ag gold understanding of the safety risks
because the robot was overly confident rush, and tech companies are rac- related to large Ag models, which
that the boy’s finger was a chess piece. ing to release their Ag models. But most are powering all kinds of new online
The incident is a classic example of of today’s models are trained to identify applications and products. She hopes
something Sharon Li, 32, wants to pre- specific things and often fail when they that by making the models underlying
vent. Li, an assistant professor at the encounter the unfamiliar scenarios typical these products safer, we’ll be better able
SARA STATHAS

University of Wisconsin, Madison, is of the messy, unpredictable real world. to mitigate Ag’s risks.
a pioneer in an Ag safety feature called Their inability to reliably understand “The ultimate goal is to ensure trust-
out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. what they “know” and what they don’t worthy, safe machine learning,” she says.
78

How culture drives foul play By Rebecca Ackermann Fancy Bear Goes
Phishing: The Dark
on the internet, and how we might Illustration by George Wylesol
History of the
protect ourselves. Information Age, in Five
Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX,
2023

Easy Money:
Cryptocurrency, Casino

Online fraud, Capitalism, and the

Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie

hacks, and scams,

ABRAMS, 2023

NFTs Are a Scam/NFTs

Are the Future: The

oh my Early Years: 2020–2023

by Bobby Hundreds
MCD, 2023

T
he world of online mis- social—public policies, legal and business books on the crypto era from tech reporter
deeds is an eerie biome, incentives, and cultural shifts. Zeke Faux and Big Short author Michael
crawling with Bored Shapiro’s book arrives just in time Lewis are in the works.)
Apes, Fancy Bears, Shiba for the last gasp of the latest crypto McKenzie testified at the Senate
Inu coins, self-replicating wave, as major players find themselves Banking Committee’s hearing on FTX
viruses, and whales. But trapped in the nets of human institu- that he believes the cryptocurrency indus-
the behavior driving tions. In early June, the US Securities and try “represents the largest Ponzi scheme
fraud, hacks, and scams on the internet Exchange Commission went after Binance in history,” and Easy Money traces his
has always been familiar and very human. and Coinbase, the two largest crypto- own journey from bored pandemic dab-
New technologies change little about the currency exchanges in the world, a few bler to committed crypto critic along-
fact that illegal operations exist because months after charging the infamous Sam side the industry’s rise and fall. Hundreds
some people are willing to act illegally and Bankman-Fried, founder of the massive also writes a chronological account of his
others fall for the stories they tell. crypto exchange FTX, with fraud. While time in crypto—specifically in nonfungi-
To wit: Crypto speculation looks a lot Shapiro mentions crypto only as the main ble tokens, or NFTs, digital representa-
like online sports betting, which looks means of payment in online crime, the tional objects that he has bought, sold, and
like offline sports betting; cyber hacking industry’s wild ride through finance and “dropped” on his own and through The
resembles classic espionage; spear phish- culture deserves its own hefty chapter in Hundreds, a “community-based streetwear
ers recall flesh-and-blood con artists. The the narrative of internet fraud. brand and media company.” For Hundreds,
perpetrators of these crimes lure victims It may be too early for deep analysis, NFTs have value as cultural artifacts, and
with well-worn appeals to faith and prom- but we do have first-person perspectives he’s not convinced that their time should
ises of financial reward. In Fancy Bear Goes on crypto from actor Ben McKenzie (for- be over (although he acknowledges that
Phishing, Yale law professor Scott Shapiro mer star of the teen drama The u.C.) and between 2019 and the writing of his book,
argues that technological solutions can’t streetwear designer and influencer Bobby more than $100 million worth of NFTs
solve the problem because they can’t force Hundreds, the authors of—respectively— have been stolen, mostly through phish-
people to play nice online. The best ways Easy Money and NFTs Are a Scam/NFTs ing scams). “Whether or not NFTs are a
to protect ourselves from online tricks are Are the Future. (More heavily reported scam poses a philosophical question that
79
80

wanders into moral judgments and cultural is what led him to gravitate toward street- Edward Snowden, who leaked classified
practices around free enterprise, mercan- wear as a creative outlet in the first place. information from the US National Security
tilism, and materialism,” he writes. Hundreds saw NFTs as a signal of a larger Agency in 2013, cross legal boundaries for
For all their differences (a lawyer, an positive shift toward Web3, a nebulous what they believe to be expressly moral
actor, and a designer walk into a bar …), vision of a more democratized form of reasons. Bitcoin, meanwhile, may be a
Shapiro, McKenzie, and Hundreds all the internet where creative individuals frequent agent of crime but was in fact
explore characters, motivations, and could get paid for their work and build created to offer a “trustless” way to avoid
social dynamics much more than they communities of fans and artists without relying on banks after the housing crisis
do technical innovations. Online crime relying on tech companies. The appeal of and government bailouts of the 2000s left
is a human story, these books collectively Web3 and NFTs is based in cultural and many wondering if traditional financial
argue, and explanations of why it happens, economic realities; likewise, online scams institutions could be trusted with con-
why it works, and how we can stay safe happen because buggy upcode—like social sumer interests. The definition of crime
are human too. injustice, runaway capitalism, and corpo- is also upcode, shaped by social contracts
To articulate how internet crime comes rate monopolies—creates the conditions. as well as legal ones.
to be, Shapiro offers a new paradigm for
the relationship between humanity and
technology. He relabels technical com- “If we are committing serious crimes
puter code “downcode” and calls every-
thing human surrounding and driving
like fraud, it is crucially important that we
it “upcode.” From “the inner operations find ways to justify our behavior to others,
of the human brain” to “the outer social, and crucially, to ourselves.”
political, and institutional forces that define
the world,” upcode is the teeming eco-
system of humans and human systems
behind the curtain of technology. Shapiro
argues that upcode is responsible for all of
technology’s impacts—positive and neg- Constructing downcode guardrails to In NFTs Are a Scam/NFTs Are the
ative—and downcode is only its product. allow in only “good” intentions won’t solve Future, Hundreds interviews the renowned
Technical tools like the blockchain, fire- online crime because bad acts are not so tech investor and public speaker Gary
walls, or two-factor authentication may be easily dismissed as the work of bad actors. Vaynerchuk, or “Gary Vee,” a figure he calls
implemented as efforts to ensure safety The people who perpetrate scams, fraud, the “face of NFTs.” It was Vee’s “zeal and
online, but they cannot address the root and hacks—or even participate in the sys- belief” that convinced Hundreds to cre-
causes upstream. For any technologist or tems around it, like speculative markets— ate his own NFT collection, Adam Bomb
crypto enthusiast who believes computer often subscribe to a moral rubric as they Squad. Vee tells Hundreds that critics “may
code to be law and sees human error as act illegally. In Fancy Bear, Shapiro cites be right” when they call NFTs a scam. But
an annoying hiccup, this idea may be dis- the seminal research of Sarah Gordon, the while some projects may be opportunis-
concerting. But crime begins and ends first to investigate the psychology of peo- tic rackets, he hopes the work he makes
with humans, Shapiro argues, so upcode ple who wrote computer viruses when this is the variety that endures. Vee might be
is where we must focus both our blame malware first popped up in the 1990s. Of lying here, but at face value, he professes a
for the problem and our efforts to improve the 64 respondents to her global survey, all belief in a greater good that he and every-
online safety. but one had developmentally appropriate one he recruits (including the thousands of
McKenzie and Hundreds deal with moral reasoning based on ethics, according attendees at his NFT convention) can help
crypto and NFTS almost entirely at the to a framework created by the psychologist build—even if there’s harm along the way.
upcode level: neither has training in com- Lawrence Kohlberg: that is, these virus McKenzie spends much of two chap-
puter science, and both examine the indus- writers made decisions based on a sense ters in Easy Money describing his personal
try through personal lenses. For McKenzie, of right and wrong. More recent research encounters with FTX’s Bankman-Fried,
it’s the financial realm, where friends from Alice Hutchings, the director of the who was widely called the “King of Crypto”
encouraged him to invest in tokens to com- University of Cambridge’s Cybercrime before his fall. Bankman-Fried professes
pensate for being out of work during the Centre, also found hackers as a group to be to believe in crypto’s positive potential;
pandemic. For Hundreds, it’s the art world, “moral agents, possessing a sense of jus- indeed, he has claimed on the record many
which has historically been inaccessible tice, purpose, and identity.” Many hackers times that he wanted to do good with his
to most and inhospitable for many—and find community in their work; others, like work, despite knowing at points that it was
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82

potentially fraudulent. McKenzie struggles out to a friend whose belief was steadfast of the 2016 Clinton email hack, the bil-
to understand this point of view. “If we are and found himself calmed. “It was that lions lost by investors in the volatile crypto
committing serious crimes like fraud,” he sense of conviction that separated the losers industry, and billions more lost through
speculates, “it is crucially important that from the winners,” he writes, even when the crypto hacks and scams. Shapiro argues
we find ways to justify our behavior to oth- facts might have supported stepping back. that the efforts of the antivirus and anti-
ers and crucially, to ourselves.” While this The marketing pitch of communal hacking industry to code guardrails into
rationalization certainly doesn’t excuse any faith and reward, the enticement to join our online systems have failed. Fraud goes
crimes, it explains how people can perpe- a winning team, feeds a human social on. Instead, we must reexamine the upcode
trate eye-boggling fraud again and again, instinct—especially as more offline modes that has fostered and supported online
even inventing new ways to scam. The of connection are faltering. It’s telling that crimes: “our settled moral and political
human upcode that makes each of us see after the SEC brought charges against convictions on what we owe one another
ourselves as the protagonist of our story is Coinbase, the company responded by issu- and how we should respect security and
powerful, even and maybe especially when ing a pro-crypto NFT, imploring its com- privacy.” For Shapiro, effectively address-
billions of dollars are at stake. munity to offer support for the struggling ing online fraud, hacks, and scams requires
Despite his research, McKenzie did
gamble on crypto—he shorted tokens on a
specific, and incorrect, timeline. He doesn’t Technological innovation does not change
disclose how much he lost, but it was an
amount that “provokes an uncomfortable
our fundamental behavior as humans, but
conversation with your spouse.” He’s hardly technology has brought speed and spread
the only savvy individual in history to fall to the gambling table. A single perpetrator
for a risky pitch; our brains make it painfully
easy to get scammed, another reason why
can reach more victims faster now that the
solutions that rely entirely on computer global world is connected.
code don’t work. “The human mind is rid-
dled with upcode that causes us to make
biased predictions and irrational choices,” industry by minting it. (Coinbase and the political, economic, and social shifts such
Shapiro writes. Take the “representativeness minting platform Zora promise to donate as creating incentives for businesses to
heuristic,” which leads us to judge some- the mint fees they’ll receive from consum- protect customers and penalties for data
thing by how much it resembles an existing ers to pro-crypto advocacy.) The crypto breaches, supporting potential hackers in
mental image—even if that may lead us to industry rose to power on this kind of finding community outside of crime, and
overlook crucial information. If an animal faith-based relationship, and it continues developing government and legal policies
looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, to appeal to some: more than 135,000 of to prevent illicit payment through mecha-
the representativeness heuristic tells us it the Coinbase tokens have been minted nisms like cryptocurrencies.
can swim. Phishing scams rely on this rush since the SEC suit was announced. Beyond Shapiro admits that shifting upcode this
to pattern matching. For example, Fancy money, “we’re just as motivated by iden- way will likely take generations, but the
Bear, the titular Russian hacking group of tity and community (or its upside-down work has already started. The SEC’s recent
Shapiro’s book, used a visually and tonally cousin, tribalism),” writes Hundreds, “and moves against crypto exchanges are promis-
convincing message to attempt to hack into the most fervent contemporary move- ing steps, as are the FTC’s public warnings
Hillary Clinton campaign staffers’ email ments and trends masterfully meld them against scammy AI claims and generative AI
accounts in 2016. It worked. all together. The only thing that feels as fraud. Growing public awareness about the
Also coming into play for scams, fraud, good as getting rich is doing so by rallying importance of data privacy and security will
and hacks are the “availability heuristic,” around an impassioned cause with a band help too. But while some humans are work-
which leads us to remember sensational of like-minded friends.” ing on evolving our social systems, others
events regardless of their frequency, and Technological innovation does not will continue to hunt online for other peo-
the “affect heuristic,” which leads us to change our fundamental behavior as ple’s money. In our lifetimes, fraud, hacks,
emphasize our feelings about a decision humans, but technology has brought speed and scams will likely always find a home on
over the facts, inflating “our expectations and spread to the gambling table. A single the internet. But being aware of the upcode
about outcomes we like”—such as win- perpetrator can reach more victims faster all around us may help us find safer paths
ning a huge payout on a gamble. When now that the global world is connected. through the online jungle.
Hundreds was concerned about whether The risks are higher now, as clearly demon- Rebecca Ackermann is a writer and
NFTs were a good investment, he reached strated by the headline-exploding results artist in San Francisco.
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84 Field notes

Right: View of Godalming, Surrey, UK,

population 21,000.

Servers that work

Wasted heat from computers is
transformed into free hot water
for homes. By Luigi Avantaggiato

from home
Using heat generated by computers to pro- via your Wi-Fi network to similar servers a data center located in an energy-intensive
vide free hot water was an idea born not in other homes—all of which process data location, Heata works as an intermediary for
in a high-tech laboratory, but in a battered from companies that pay it for cloud com- computing: it receives workloads and dis-
country workshop deep in the woods of puting services. Each server prevents one tributes them to local homes for processing.
Godalming, England. ton of carbon dioxide equivalent per year Businesses that need to process data are
“The idea of using the wasted heat of from being emitted and saves homeowners using the Heata network as a sustainable
computing to do something else has been an average of £250 on hot water annually, alternative to traditional computing.
hovering in the air for some time,” explains a considerable discount in a region where The company has created what Heata’s
Chris Jordan, a 48-year-old physicist, “but 13% of the inhabitants struggle to afford designer and cofounder Mike Paisley
only now does technology allow us to do it heat. The Heata trial, funded by a grant describes as a diffuse data center. Rather
adequately. from Innovate UK, a national government than cooling a building that holds many serv-
“This is where I prototyped the thermal agency, has been active in Surrey County ers, he explains, “our model of sustainability
conductor that carries heat from computer for more than a year. To date, 80 units have moves data processing [to] where there is
processors to the cylinder filled with water,” been installed, and another 30 are slated to need for heat, exploiting thermal energy
he says, opening his workshop door to reveal have a boiler to heat by the end of October. waste to provide free hot water to those who
a 90-liter electric boiler. “We ran the first Heata’s solution is “particularly elegant,” need it, transforming a calculation problem
tests, and we understood that it could work.” says Mike Pitts, deputy challenge director of into a social and climatic advantage.”
Jordan is cofounder and chief technology Innovate UK, calling it a way to “use elec- The people involved in the Heata exper-
officer of Heata, an English startup that has tricity twice—providing services to a rapidly iment are diverse in age and household
created an innovative cloud network where growing industry (cloud computing) and composition, and their reasons for partic-
computers are attached to the boilers in providing domestic hot water.” The startup is ipating are varied: a need to save on bills,
people’s homes. now part of Innovate UK’s Net Zero Cohort, a love for the environment, an interest in
Next to the boiler is a computer tagged having been identified as a key part of the helping combat climate change, and fascina-
with a sticker that reads: “This powerful push to achieve an economy where carbon tion with seeing a computer heat the water.
computer server is transferring the heat emissions are either eliminated or balanced Among the satisfied customers is Helen
from its processing into the water in your out by other technologies. Whitcroft, mayor of Surrey Heath. “We
cylinder.” A green LED light indicates that Heata’s process is simple yet introduces started reducing our carbon footprint many
the boiler is running, Jordan explains. “The a radical shift toward sustainable manage- years ago by installing photovoltaic panels,”
machine receives the data and processes it. ment of data centers: instead of being cooled she says. “We recently bought batteries to
Thus we are able to transfer the equivalent with fans, which is expensive and energy store the energy we produce. Curiosity also
of 4.8 kilowatt-hours of hot water, about the intensive, computers are cooled by a pat- moved us: it didn’t seem possible that a
daily amount used by an average family.” ented thermal bridge that transports the computer could heat water, but it works.”
When you sign up with Heata, it places heat from the processors toward the shell
Luigi Avantaggiato is an Italian
a server in your home, where it connects of the boiler. And rather than operating with documentary photographer.
 Field notes 85

Left: Flats in Godalming, Surrey, UK. Below: The Heata team among the trees
Over 4 million people in the UK struggle at Wood Farm, Godalming, where the idea
to afford heat. originated.
86 Field notes

Above: A laser cutter produces

insulation for the Heata unit,
which harnesses excess heat
from cloud computing.

Left: Andrew, a mechanical

engineer, installs the Heata
unit in an apartment in Surrey.
At 75% utilization, the Heata
unit will provide around 80%
of an average UK household’s
hot water.

Below: Parts of the Heata unit

before assembly.

Homeowner James Heather on his Heata: “We no

longer need the energy for cooling the compute units,
and we don’t need the energy for heating our hot water
either, because we’re using the waste heat from the
unit to do it.”
 Field notes 87

A batch of heat pipes

at Heata Labs.

Heata’s CTO, Chris Jordan, in his workshop. Dave, a radio engineer, tests the operation
of the server at Heata Labs.
88

A cell that does it all

For 25 years, embryonic stem
cells have been promising and
controversial in equal measure.
How far have they really come?

From “The Troubled Hunt for the Ultimate

Cell” (1998), by Antonio Regalado: “If awards
were given for the most intriguing, contro-
versial, underfunded and hush-hush of sci-
entific pursuits, the search for the human
embryonic stem (ES) cell would likely sweep
the categories. It’s a hunt for the tabula rasa
of human cells—a cell that has the potential
to give rise to any of the myriad of cell types
found in the body. If this mysterious creature
could be captured and grown in the lab, it
might change the face of medicine, prom-
ising, among other remarkable options, the
ability to grow replacement human tissue
at will … [but] these cells are found only
in embryos or very immature fetuses, and
pro-life forces have targeted the researchers
who are hunting for ES cells, hoping to stop
their science cold. In addition, the federal
government has barred federal dollars for
human embryo research, pushing it out of
the mainstream of developmental biology.
To make matters worse, human ES cells
could conceivably provide a vehicle for the
genetic engineering of people, and the eth-
ical dilemmas surrounding human cloning
threaten to spill over onto this field.”

Update from the author (2023): The debate

lasted years, but science prevailed over reli-
gion in the stem-cell wars of the early 2000s.
Now research on ES cells is paid for by the
US government. Yet biology keeps offering
surprises. The latest? Research shows stem
cells in the lab can self-assemble back into
“synthetic” embryos, shockingly similar to
the real thing. And that’s the next debate.

MIT Technology Review (ISSN 1099-274X), September/October 2023 issue, Reg. US Patent Office, is published bimonthly by MIT Technology Review, 196 Broadway, 3rd floor, Cambridge, MA 02139. Entire contents ©2023. The
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 A DV E R T I S E M E N T

The Green Future Index 2023

The Green Future Index 2023 is the third edition The index ranks the “green” performance of
of the comparative ranking of 76 nations and countries and territories across five pillars:
territories on their ability to develop a sustainable,
low-carbon future. It measures the degree to • Carbon emissions • Clean innovation
which economies are pivoting toward clean energy, • Energy transition • Climate policy
industry, agriculture, and society through investment • Green society
in renewables, innovation, and green policy.

Green leaders
The greening middle
Climate laggards
Climate abstainers

Countries that have gone up

in the ranking since last year
Countries that have retained
the same ranking as last year
Countries that have gone down
in the ranking since last year While the index ranks 76 countries, this map only features a selection of the overall data.

Overall top 10 Scan the QR code to expe-

Rank Rank Rank Rank rience the interactive index,
2023 2022 Territory Score/10 2023 2022 Territory Score/10
view the data, and down-
1 1 Iceland ...... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.69 6 3 Netherlands ................. 6.22
load the full report or visit
technologyreview.com/gfi
2 6 Finland ...... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.68 7 4 United Kingdom .......... 6.12

3 5 Norway...... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.37 8 10 South Korea ................. 6.00

4 2 Denmark ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.34 9 7 France .......................... 5.99

5 9 Sweden .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.33 10 13 Spain ............................ 5.92

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