An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The proportion of workers who expect to switch employers in the next 12 months is higher than that from the "Great Resignation" period of 2022, a PwC survey of the global workforce found. Around 28% of more than 56,000 workers surveyed by PwC said they were "very or extremely likely" to move from their current companies, compared to 19% in 2022, and 26% in 2023. PwC's 2024 "Hopes and Fears" survey also showed workers are embracing emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and prioritizing upskilling amid rising workloads and heightened workplace uncertainty. Pete Brown, global workforce leader at PwC UK, said employees are placing an "increased premium" on organizations that invest in their skills growth, and so, businesses must prioritize upskilling and employee experience. About 45% of the workers surveyed said they have experienced rising workloads and an accelerating pace of workplace change in the last 12 months, with 62% saying they have seen more change at work in the past year than the previous 12 months. Among employees who use GenAI daily, 82% said they expect it to increase their efficiency in the next 12 months. Reflecting confidence that GenAI opportunities would support their career growth, nearly half of those surveyed by PwC expected GenAI to generate higher salaries, with almost two-thirds hoping these emerging tools will improve the quality of their work. Carol Stubbings, global markets and tax and legal services leader at PwC UK, said: "The findings suggest that job satisfaction is no longer enough." In order to retain talent and mitigate pressures, Stubbings said employers must invest in staff and tech platforms.

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Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit from General Motors, named Amazon and Microsoft executive Marc Whitten as its new CEO, replacing former CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt. CNBC reports: Whitten was a founding engineer at Microsoft's Xbox before leaving the company after more than 17 years to become chief product officer of audio company Sonos in 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile. He then worked at Amazon as vice president of entertainment devices and services before his most recent role as chief product and technology officer for software development company Unity's Create. His appointment comes at a crucial time for Cruise, which is testing and relaunching its autonomous vehicles on public roadways. It ceased operations weeks after an Oct. 2 accident in which a pedestrian in San Francisco was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise robotaxi. A third-party probe into the October incident ordered by GM and Cruise found that culture issues, ineptitude and poor leadership fueled regulatory oversights that led to the accident. The probe also investigated allegations of a cover-up by Cruise leadership, but investigators did not find evidence to support those claims. During that time, San Francisco-based Cruise was attempting to expand its operations into a revenue-generating business for GM, which has been a majority owner of the company since acquiring it in 2016. Other investors now include Honda Motor, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price, and Walmart. As of this month, Cruise has resumed supervised driving in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas, in addition to its ongoing testing in Dubai. It has not relaunched in San Francisco, where it remains under investigation related to the accident.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Slack announced a significant change to its platform, saying it will "begin deleting messages and files more than one year old from free workspaces on a rolling basis." Slack's prior policy involved keeping messages and files for the lifetime of a free workspace, although accessing that full history required switching to a paid account. Under the new policy, Slack reserves the right to delete content from free workspaces after one year.

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Federal regulators have given Amazon key permission that will allow it to expand its drone delivery program, the company announced Thursday. From a report: In a blog post published on its website, Seattle-based Amazon said that the Federal Aviation Administration has given its Prime Air delivery service the OK to operate drones "beyond visual line of sight," removing a barrier that has prevented its drones from traveling longer distances. With the approval, Amazon pilots can now operate drones remotely without seeing it with their own eyes. An FAA spokesperson said the approval applies to College Station, Texas, where the company launched drone deliveries in late 2022. Amazon said its planning to immediately scale its operations in that city in an effort to reach customers in more densely populated areas. It says the approval from regulators also "lays the foundation" to scale its operations to more locations around the country. Businesses have wanted simpler rules that could open neighborhood skies to new commercial applications of drones, but privacy advocates and some airplane and balloon pilots remain wary.

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Boozt, an online Nordic department store, has banned thousands of customers for returning an excessive number of purchased items. From a report: The retailer has blocked about 60,000 of a total 3.5 million customers, in a bid to reduce the significant costs associated with "serial returners," the company said in a statement. "Their behavior is too expensive for both the company and the environment," it added. Returns are costly for retailers both in lost revenue and in the cost of trying to turn around an item to be sold again. In some instances items returned aren't fit to be sold again, leading to waste.

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Etienne Boulter walked into his lab at the Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, one morning with a Lego Technic excavator set tucked under his arm. His plan was simple yet ambitious: to use the pieces of the set to build a mechanical cell stretcher. 

Boulter is one of many researchers turning to Lego components to build inexpensive yet extremely effective lab equipment. The bricks themselves are durable and manufactured with tight tolerances. Lego’s offerings include sensors that can detect various colors, perceive rotational motion, and measure the distance to an object. These DIY tools are a creative and affordable solution for working scientists who are trying to keep costs down. 

Take, for example, the Lego chromatographer designed by Cassandra Quave and her husband, Marco Caputo, both at Emory University. Quave is an ethnobotanist who leads a research group dedicated to documenting traditional medicines. Her team travels deep into forests and jungles around the world, collecting samples of leaves, berries, and seeds that they evaluate for their potential pharmaceutical value. To isolate chemical compounds from the plant samples, Quave makes use of a meticulous process called chromatography, in which liquid distilled from the plant is passed over a tube filled with a material such as a silica gel. 

Timing in chromatography needs to be very exact, with small amounts of liquid being added at precise moments. Waiting for these moments is not the best use of a graduate student’s time. This is exactly what Quave thought when she walked into the lab one day and saw her PhD student Huaqiao Tang holding a test tube and watching the clock. “This is crazy!” Quave said, laughing. “We can come up with a better solution!” 

When Quave told Caputo of her problem, he brought in Legos culled from their four children’s massive collection and had his students see what they could do with them. They came up with a robotic arm that could make repeated precise movements, gradually adding small fractions of liquid to test tubes in order to isolate compounds within the plant tissue. The device was so accurate in its movements, Quave says, that spontaneous crystals formed, something that occurs only in very pure substances. 

Ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave distills molecules from plants using a Lego chromatographer that she designed with her husband, researcher Marco Caputo.

At Cardiff University in Wales, Christopher Thomas, Oliver Castell, and Sion Coulman had similar success building an instrument capable of printing cells. The researchers study skin diseases, lipids (fatty compounds) in the body, and wound healing. Ethically obtained samples are hard to find, so they created a 3D bioprinter out of Lego pieces that is capable of “printing” a human skin analogue, laying down layers of bio-ink that contains living cells. These printers normally cost over a quarter of a million dollars, but they built their version for a mere $550. At first, their colleagues were skeptical that components typically treated as toys could be used in such a professional setting, but after seeing the printer at work, they were quickly convinced. The team made national news, and other groups replicated the model in their own labs. 

Some scientists are devising tools to take into the classroom. Timo Betz of the University of Göttingen in Germany came up with the idea of building a Lego microscope one day while watching his son, Emil, then eight, play. Betz was scheduled to speak about science at a local school that afternoon but was reluctant to take his own lab-grade microscope into the classroom. His son was immediately on board. “Let’s do this!” he told his dad. Together with Bart Vos, a colleague at the university, they built a microscope that consisted entirely of Lego pieces, with the exception of two optical lenses. Their plans, which they’ve made available to the public, can be used by students as young as 12 to learn the basic concepts of optics.

Many of these scientists make their models open source, providing them to interested groups or publishing the plans on GitHub or in papers or so that other labs can make their own versions. This is great for researchers the world over, especially those with limited funding—whether they’re new faculty members, scientists at smaller universities, or people working in low-income countries. It’s how a small plastic brick is making science more accessible to all. 

Elizabeth Fernandez is a freelance science writer.

OpenAI has purchased Multi (previously Remotion), "a five-person startup based in New York City that focuses on screenshare and collaboration technologies for workers using Mac computers," reports VentureBeat. The latest acquisition comes just days after the AI company announced it had acquired enterprise analytics startup Rockset. No details were provided on the terms of the deal. From the report: Multi's co-founder and CEO Alexander Embiricos posted on his X account today stating specifically that he (and presumably the entire Multi team) has joined OpenAI's "ChatGPT desktop team," the unit at the company responsible for building the ChatGPT for Mac desktop app that was unveiled back in May 2024. Multi broke the news first to its users and followers in a blog post, writing: "Recently, we've been increasingly asking ourselves how we should work with computers. Not on or using computers, but truly with computers. With AI. We believe it's one of the most important product questions of our time. And so, we're beyond excited to share that Multi is joining OpenAI!" The news has users on X speculating that OpenAI will use Multi to allow its AI models such as GPT-4o to "take over" a user's computer and perform actions on their behalf based on text or voice prompts. So you could say something like "ChatGPT, create a spreadsheet of my latest hours and send it to my manager" and it would try to do this. Based on what I've learned about Multi (see final section of this article below) and zero insider knowledge, I think it is at least as likely that OpenAI will seek to use the acquisition as a means of souping up and adding features to its ChatGPT Team and Enterprise subscription plans, as those are already more focused on providing tech for teams to help all the individuals on them work better together. However, Multi also broke the news that it is "sunsetting" the current version of its software and will end support for it in one month: on July 24, 2024, as well as delete all user data. Egads! Multi states in a short FAQ in its blog post that users should go ahead and export their data before that time, using the "Export Session Notes" setting under the URL: https://app.multi.app/account. It is also opening the door to users asking for extensions to the deletion date of July 24, 2024 for their individual or company accounts, if they email Embiricos himself directly at alexander@multi.app. Multi also says its team members can help recommend alternatives through the same email address.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber has begun locking New York City drivers out of its app during periods of low demand in an attempt to fight a minimum wage rule, and Lyft is threatening to do the same. As a result, some drivers say their wages have fallen by as much as 50%. At the heart of the move, say the two companies, is a six-year-old pay rule in New York that, among other things, requires firms like Uber and Lyft to pay drivers for the idle time they rack up between rides. The lockouts, which began last month, are aimed at limiting how much non-passenger time drivers are able to log and be paid for. Drivers, meanwhile, say they need to work longer hours to earn the same amount as before.

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JD.com founder Richard Liu warned employees against prioritizing work-life balance during a recent video conference, stating those who "put life first and work second" were not welcome at the company. This stance reflects a broader trend in China's tech sector as executives face slowing growth and increased competition. Major tech firms, including Alibaba and Tencent, have cut tens of thousands of jobs since 2021. Companies are now seeking younger, cheaper workers and demanding longer hours from existing staff. Pinduoduo, an e-commerce group known for its high productivity and grueling work culture, is seen as a model by some in the industry. In 2021, two Pinduoduo employees died in incidents linked to overwork by colleagues. Older tech professionals, typically over 35, face the greatest risk of redundancy and struggle to find new positions. Employers often view them as expensive and less flexible due to family responsibilities. A 2023 survey of 2,200 professionals in China's largest cities revealed widespread anxiety about career prospects and work-life balance. Many in the industry report experiencing depression and high stress levels.

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Two prominent unions are teaming up to challenge Amazon, reports the New York Times — "after years of organizing Amazon workers and pressuring the company to bargain over wages and working conditions." Members of the Amazon Labor Union "overwhelmingly chose to affiliate with the 1.3-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters" in a vote last Monday. While the Amazon Labor Union (or ALU) is the only union formally representing Amazon warehouse workers anywhere in America after an election in 2022, "it has yet to begin bargaining with Amazon, which continues to contest the election outcome." Leaders of both unions said the affiliation agreement would put them in a better position to challenge Amazon and would provide the Amazon Labor Union with more money and staff support... The Teamsters are ramping up their efforts to organize Amazon workers nationwide. The union voted to create an Amazon division in 2021, and O'Brien was elected that year partly on a platform of making inroads at the company. The Teamsters told the ALU that they had allocated $8 million to support organizing at Amazon, according to ALU President Christian Smalls, and that the larger union was prepared to tap its more than $300 million strike and defense fund to aid in the effort... The Teamsters also recently reached an affiliation agreement with workers organizing at Amazon's largest airplane hub in the United States, a Kentucky facility known as KCVG. Experts have said unionizing KCVG could give workers substantial leverage because Amazon relies heavily on the hub to meet its one- and two-day shipping goals. Their agreement with the Teamsters says the Amazon Labor Union will also "lend its expertise to assist in organizing other Amazon facilities" across America, according to the article.

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Humanity has long sought to tame wood into something more predictable. Sawmills manufacture lumber from trees selected for consistency. Wood is then sawed into standard sizes and dried in kilns to prevent twisting, cupping, or cracking. Generations of craftsmen have employed sophisticated techniques like dovetail joinery, breadboard ends, and pocket flooring to keep wood from distorting in their finished pieces. 

But wood is inherently imprecise. Its grain reverses and swirls. Trauma and disease manifest in scars and knots. 

Instead of viewing these natural tendencies as liabilities, Achim Menges, an architect and professor at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, sees them as wood’s greatest assets. Menges and his team at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction are uncovering new ways to build with the material by using computational design—which relies on algorithms and data to simulate and predict how wood will behave within a structure long before it is built. He hopes this work will enable architects to create more sustainable and affordable timber buildings by reducing the amount of wood required. 

Menges’s recent work has focused on creating “self-shaping” timber structures like the HygroShell, which debuted at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2023. Constructed from prefabricated panels of a common building material known as cross-laminated timber, HygroShell morphed over a span of five days, unfurling into a series of interlaced sheets clad with wooden scale-like shingles that stretched to cover the structure as it expanded. Its final form, designed as a proof of concept, is a delicately arched canopy that rises to nearly 33 feet (10 meters) but is only an inch thick. In a time-lapse video, the evolving structure resembles a bird stretching its wings. 

HygroShell takes its name from hygroscopicity, a property of wood that causes it to absorb or lose moisture with humidity changes. As the material dries, it contracts and tends to twist and curve. Traditionally, lumber manufacturers have sought to minimize these movements. But through computational design, Menges’s team can predict the changes and structure the material to guide it into the shape they want. 

“From the start, I was motivated to understand computation not as something that divides the physical and the digital world but, instead, that deeply connects them.”

Achim Menges, architect and professor, University of Stuttgart in Germany

The result is a predictable and repeatable process that creates tighter curves with less material than what can be attained through traditional construction techniques. Existing curved structures made from cross-laminated timber (also known as mass timber) are limited to custom applications and carry premium prices, Menges says. Self-shaping, in contrast, could offer industrial-scale production of curved mass timber structures for far less cost. 

To build HygroShell, the team created digital profiles of hundreds of freshly sawed boards using data about moisture content, grain orientation, and more. Those parameters were fed into modeling software that predicted how the boards were likely to distort as they dried and simulated how to arrange them to achieve the desired structure. Then the team used robotic milling machines to create the joints that held the panels together as the piece unfolded. 

“What we’re trying to do is develop design methods that are so sophisticated they meet or match the sophistication of the material we deal with,” Menges says. 

Menges views “self-shaping,” as he calls his technique, as a low-energy way of creating complex curved architectures that would otherwise be too difficult to build on most construction sites. Typically, making curves requires extensive machining and a lot more materials, at considerable cost. By letting the wood’s natural properties do the heavy lifting, and using robotic machinery to prefabricate the structures, Menges’s process allows for thin-walled timber construction that saves material and money.

The shape, structure, and construction process of Menges’s HygroShell pavilion are all based on data that shows how different materials change over time.

If they were self-shaped, curved elements could halve the material requirements for certain structural features in a multistory timber building, Menges says. “You would save a lot of material simply because curvature adds stiffness. That’s why we see everything is curved in nature.”

Menges began his career in the late 1990s, at a time when architects had just begun to use powerful new software to design buildings. This shift opened new possibilities, but often those digital designs ran afoul of the material’s physical constraints, he says. It was the tension between the physical and the digital that inspired Menges to pursue computational design.

“From the start, I was motivated to understand computation not as something that divides the physical and the digital world but, instead, that deeply connects them,” he says. 

His interest in self-shaping structures was inspired by pinecones, which—long after falling from trees—retain the biological programming to open and expose their seeds as temperatures rise. “That’s a plant motion that does not require any motors, nor does it require any muscles,” Menges says. “It is programmed into the material.” 

Pinecones made him realize that just as robots are programmed to perform certain actions, materials like wood can be manipulated to carry out specific behaviors that are hard-coded in their DNA as a response to a stimulus.

Apart from the HygroShell, Menges has used self-shaping techniques to create proof-of-concept projects like the Urbach Tower, a 45-foot spiraling wood structure overlooking the fields of the Rems Valley near Urbach, Germany. Instead of using energy-intensive mechanical processes that require heavy machinery, the team prefabricated a dozen curved, self-shaped wood panels and assembled them on site, reducing the time it would otherwise take to build such a structure. 

And in 2023, his team worked with researchers from Germany’s University of Freiburg to create the livMatS Biomimetic Shell, a structure made from 127 wooden cassettes, each resembling the shape of a honeycomb. Menges used self-shaping to design a system of 3D-printed wooden window blinds that opened and closed in response to changes in relative humidity. Embedded in the wood shell is a solar gate that closes in warm weather, shading the space, and opens during colder months to provide passive solar heating. Compared with a conventional timber building, this structure has half the environmental impact over its life cycle.

Menges’s work is coming at a time when the sustainability of mass timber buildings—those with structural components made from engineered wood instead of steel or concrete—is under scrutiny. Concerns range from where the timber is sourced to whether preserving forests sequesters more carbon than harvesting them for building material, even if building with wood reduces carbon emissions relative to producing concrete and steel. There are also worries about what happens to all the wood left behind during the logging process. Trees may be a renewable resource, but they require decades to mature and are already threatened by climate change. That’s what led Menges and others to advocate for more efficient building practices that don’t waste wood. 

Architects face a dilemma, however. Mass-timber buildings could be built using less wood, but the less material is used, the more susceptible the structure is to fire, says Michael Green, principal of Michael Green Architecture in Vancouver. 

“The way we protect wood is by overbuilding it to create a thickness that can resist a certain amount of time under fire,” Green says. The standards depend on the type of building and the variety of wood used, but Green generally adds around 3.6 centimeters (1.4 inches) of extra material to his structures for each hour of required burn time. The more people occupy a building, the longer it is required to resist fire and, in the case of mass-timber buildings, the thicker the wood structure. 

Green sees Menges’s work as important foundational research that may lead to breakthroughs influencing wood architecture in decades to come. But he doesn’t see self-shaped architecture being widely deployed outside the towers and pavilions Menges has already designed. 

The livMatS Biomimetic Shell features 3D-printed wooden window blinds that open and close in response to changes in relative humidity.

“It’s teaching us less about what we are actually going to build in the next five years and more about what we need to learn so we can develop other products that support that,” he says. 

Even without widespread adoption of self-shaping techniques, Menges believes, computational design will continue to unlock new ways of building with wood. He sees a future where the knots, crooks, and branches of trees are viewed not as defects but as construction tools, each with its own unique properties. 

“A tree does not have a defect,” he says. “It’s an anatomical feature. What we need to learn is what kind of building systems we develop that integrate these features, and not strive for the homogeneity that is simply not there.” 

Walmart "became the latest retailer to announce it's replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels," reports NPR. "The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds." "If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that's close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that's the good news," said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst... The ability to easily change prices wasn't mentioned in Walmart's announcement that 2,300 stores will have the digitized shelf labels by 2026. Daniela Boscan, who participated in Walmart's pilot of the labels in Texas, said the label's key benefits are "increased productivity and reduced walking time," plus quicker restocking of shelves... As higher wages make labor more expensive, retailers big and small can benefit from the increased productivity that digitized shelf labels enable, said Santiago Gallino, a professor specializing in retail management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "The bottom line, at least when I talk to retailers, is the calculation of the amount of labor that they're going to save by incorporating this. And in that sense, I don't think that this is something that only large corporations like Walmart or Target can benefit from," Gallino said. "I think that smaller chains can also see the potential benefit of it." Indeed, Walmart's announcement calls the tech "a win" for both customers and their workers, arguing that updating prices with a mobile app means "reducing the need to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand and giving us more time to support customers in the store." Professor Gallino tells NPR he doesn't think Walmart will suddenly change prices — though he does think Walmart will use it to keep their offline and online prices identical. The article also points out you can already find electronic shelf labels at other major grocers inlcuding Amazon Fresh stores and Whole Foods — and that digitized shelf labels "are even more common in stores across Europe." Another feature of electronic shelf labels is their product descriptions. [Grocery analyst] Lempert notes that barcodes on the new labels can provide useful details other than the price. "They can actually be used where you take your mobile device and you scan it and it can give you more information about the product — whether it's the sourcing of the product, whether it's gluten free, whether it's keto friendly. That's really the promise of what these shelf tags can do," Lempert said. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader loveandpeace for sharing the article.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cord Cutters News: Earlier this week, Chicken Soup For The Soul, the parent company behind Redbox, Crackel, and the streaming service by the same name, announced that the entire board of directors and board of managers of each subsidiary of the Company other than William J. Rouhana, Jr., have been fired. This comes as a holder of more than 75% of the voting power of the company used his stock holdings to lay off the Company's board of directors. Now, it has come out that the company missed a $4 million payment to NBCUniversal as a part of its settlement over unpaid royalties. Now it faces a possible order to pay all of $16.7 million it owes NBCUniversal as questions about the future of the company grows. This comes after NBCUniversal sued saying Redbox had not been paying royalties. It agreed to a payment plan but now has missed the first payment of the plan. Recently the company has been hit hard by the decline in ad revenue on its free streaming services and the drop in DVD rentals at its Redbox locations. This has led to the company seeing its revenues drop 75% in the 1st quarter of 2024 compared to the same period of 2023, according to a SEC filing first spotted by NextTV. Chicken Soup For The Soul is in a tough situation after acquiring Redbox in 2022 for $50 million in stock and an assumption of $325 million in debt. Add on top of that a shaky media environment with cratering ad revenue and quarterly losses, and the company's future is very much in the air. In August, CEO William J. Rouhana said that the company was holding a strategic review to evaluate its opportunities, which is business speak for putting itself up for sale. Chicken Soup for The Soul last year announced that it was in active discussions for a potential sale back in October of this year but so far nothing has come from these talks.

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In a bog post on Friday, OpenAI announced it has acquired Rockset, an enterprise analytics startup, to "power our retrieval infrastructure across products." The Verge reports: This acquisition is OpenAI's first where the company will integrate both a company's technology and its team, a spokesperson tells Bloomberg. The two companies didn't share the terms of the acquisition. Rockset has raised $105 million in funding to date. "Rockset's infrastructure empowers companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence," OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap says in a statement. "We're excited to bring these benefits to our customers by integrating Rockset's foundation into OpenAI products." "Rockset will become part of OpenAI and power the retrieval infrastructure backing OpenAI's product suite," Rockset CEO Venkat Venkataramani says in a Rockset blog post. "We'll be helping OpenAI solve the hard database problems that AI apps face at massive scale." Venkataramani says that current Rockset customers won't experience "immediate change" and that the company will gradually transition them off the platform. "Some" members of Rockset's team will move over to OpenAI, Bloomberg says.

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British startup Stability AI has appointed Prem Akkaraju as its new CEO. The 51-year-old Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, "is part of a group of investors including former Facebook President Sean Parker that has stepped in to save Stability with a cash infusion that could result in a lower valuation for the firm," reports the Information (paywalled). "The new funding will likely shrink the stakes of some existing investors, who have collectively contributed more than $100 million." In March, Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque stepped down from the role to pursue decentralized AI. "In a series of posts on X, Mostaque opined that one can't beat 'centralized AI' with more 'centralized AI,' referring to the ownership structure of top AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic," reported TechCrunch at the time. The move followed a report in April that claimed the company ran out of cash to pay its bills for its rented cloud GPUs. Last year, the company raised millions at a $1 billion valuation.

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Twenty years ago, FedEx established its own police force. Now it's working with local police to build out an AI car surveillance network. From a report: Forbes has learned the shipping and business services company is using AI tools made by Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance startup, to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the United States. As part of the deal, FedEx is providing its Flock video surveillance feeds to law enforcement, an arrangement that Flock has with at least five multi-billion dollar private companies. But publicly available documents reveal that some local police departments are also sharing their Flock feeds with FedEx -- a rare instance of a private company availing itself of a police surveillance apparatus. To civil rights activists, such close collaboration has the potential to dramatically expand Flock's car surveillance network, which already spans 4,000 cities across over 40 states and some 40,000 cameras that track vehicles by license plate, make, model, color and other identifying characteristics, like dents or bumper stickers. Lisa Femia, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said because private entities aren't subject to the same transparency laws as police, this sort of arrangement could "[leave] the public in the dark, while at the same time expanding a sort of mass surveillance network."

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Pneumatic tubes were touted as something that would revolutionize the world. In science fiction, they were envisioned as a fundamental part of the future—even in dystopias like George Orwell’s 1984, where the main character, Winston Smith, sits in a room peppered with pneumatic tubes that spit out orders for him to alter previously published news stories and historical records to fit the ruling party’s changing narrative.  

In real life, the tubes were expected to transform several industries in the late 19th century through the mid-20th. “The possibilities of compressed air are not fully realized in this country,” declared an 1890 article in the New York Tribune. “The pneumatic tube system of communication is, of course, in use in many of the downtown stores, in newspaper offices […] but there exists a great deal of ignorance about the use of compressed air, even among engineering experts.”

Pneumatic tube technology involves moving a cylindrical carrier or capsule through a series of tubes with the aid of a blower that pushes or pulls it into motion. For a while, the United States took up the systems with gusto. Retail stores and banks were especially interested in their potential to move money more efficiently: “Besides this saving of time to the customer the store is relieved of all the annoying bustle and confusion of boys running for cash on the various retail floors,” one 1882 article in the Boston Globe reported. The benefit to the owner, of course, was reduced labor costs, with tube manufacturers claiming that stores would see a return on their investment within a year.  

“The motto of the company is to substitute machines for men and for children as carriers, in every possible way,” a 1914 Boston Globe article said about Lamson Service, one of the largest proprietors of tubes at the time, adding, “[President] Emeritus Charles W. Eliot of Harvard says: ‘No man should be employed at a task which a machine can perform,’ and the Lamson Company supplements that statement by this: ‘Because it doesn’t pay.’”

By 1912, Lamson had over 60,000 customers globally in sectors including retail, banks, insurance offices, courtrooms, libraries, hotels, and industrial plants. The postal service in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York also used tubes to deliver the mail, with at least 45 miles of Lamson tubing in place by 1912.

On the transportation front, New York City’s first attempt at a subway system, in 1870, also ran on a pneumatic system, and the idea of using tubes to move people continues to beguile innovators to this day. (See Elon Musk’s largely abandoned Hyperloop concept of the 2010s.)

But by the mid to late 20th century, use of the technology had largely fallen by the wayside. It had become cheaper to transport mail by truck than by tube, and as transactions moved to credit cards, there was less demand to make change for cash payments. Electrical rail won out over compressed air, paper records and files disappeared in the wake of digitization, and tubes at bank drive-throughs started being replaced by ATMs, while only a fraction of pharmacies used them for their own such services. Pneumatic tube technology became virtually obsolete.

Except in hospitals. 

“A pneumatic tube system today for a new hospital that’s being built is ubiquitous. It’s like putting a washing machine or a central AC system in a new home. It just makes too much sense to not do it,” says Cory Kwarta, CEO of Swisslog Healthcare, a corporation that—under its TransLogic company—has provided pneumatic tube systems in health-care facilities for over 50 years. And while the sophistication of these systems has changed over time, the fundamental technology of using pneumatic force to move a capsule from one destination to another has remained the same. 

By the turn of the 20th century, health care had become a more scientific endeavor, and different spaces within a hospital were designated for new technologies (like x-rays) or specific procedures (like surgeries). “Instead of having patients in one place, with the doctors and the nurses and everything coming to them, and it’s all happening in the ward, [hospitals] became a bunch of different parts that each had a role,” explains Jeanne Kisacky, an architectural historian who wrote Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940. 

Designating different parts of a building for different medical specialties and services, like specimen analysis, also increased the physical footprint of health-care facilities. The result was that nurses and doctors had to spend much of their days moving from one department to another, which was an inefficient use of their time. Pneumatic tube technology provided a solution.

By the 1920s, more and more hospitals started installing tube systems. At first, the capsules primarily moved medical records, prescription orders, and items like money and receipts—similar cargo to what was moved around in banks and retail stores at the time. As early as 1927, however, the systems were also marketed to hospitals as a way to transfer specimens to a central laboratory for analysis. 

By the 1960s, pneumatic tubes were becoming standard in health care. As a hospital administrator explained in the January 1960 issue of Modern Hospital, “We are now getting eight hours’ worth of service per day from each nurse, where previously we had been getting about six hours of nursing plus two hours of errand running.”

As computers and credit cards started to become more prevalent in the 1980s, reducing paperwork significantly, the systems shifted to mostly carrying lab specimens, pharmaceuticals, and blood products. Today, lab specimens are roughly 60% of what hospital tube systems carry; pharmaceuticals account for 30%, and blood products for phlebotomy make up 5%.

The carriers or capsules, which can hold up to five pounds, move through piping six inches in diameter—just big enough to hold a 2,000-milliliter IV bag—at speeds of 18 to 24 feet per second, or roughly 12 to 16 miles per hour. The carriers are limited to those speeds to maintain specimen integrity. If blood samples move faster, for example, blood cells can be destroyed.

The pneumatic systems have also gone through major changes in structure in recent years, evolving from fixed routes to networked systems. “It’s like a train system, and you’re on one track and now you have to go to another track,” says Steve Dahl, an executive vice president at Pevco, a manufacturer of these systems.

Manufacturers try to get involved early in the hospital design process, says Swisslog’s Kwarta, so “we can talk to the clinical users and say, ‘Hey, what kind of contents do you anticipate sending through this pneumatic tube system, based on your bed count, based on your patient census, and from where and to where do these specimens or materials need to go?’”

Penn Medicine’s University City Medical District in Philadelphia opened up the state-of-the-art Pavilion in 2021. It has three pneumatic systems: the main one is for items directly related to health care, like specimens, and two separate ones handle linen and trash. The main system runs over 12 miles of pipe and completes more than 6,000 transactions on an average day. Sending a capsule between the two farthest points of the system—a distance of multiple city blocks—takes just under five minutes. Walking that distance would take around 20 minutes, not including getting to the floor where the item needs to go. 

Michigan Medicine has a system dedicated solely for use in nuclear medicine, which relies on radioactive materials for treatment. Getting the materials where they need to go is a five- to eight-minute walk—too long given their short shelf life. With the tubes, it gets there—in a lead-lined capsule—in less than a minute. 

Steven Fox, who leads the electrical engineering team for the pneumatic tubes at Michigan Medicine, describes the scale of the materials his system moves in terms of African elephants, which weigh about six tons. “We try to keep [a carrier’s] load to five pounds apiece,” he says. “So we could probably transport about 30,000 pounds per day. That’s two and a half African elephants that we transport from one side of the hospital to the other every day.”

The equipment to maintain these labyrinthian highways is vast. Michigan and Penn have between 150 and 200 stations where doctors, nurses, and technicians can pick up a capsule or send one off. Keeping those systems moving also requires around 30 blowers and over 150 transfer units to shift carriers to different tube lines as needed. At Michigan Medicine, moving an item from one end of the system to another requires 20 to 25 pieces of equipment.

Before the turn of the century, triggering the blower to move a capsule from point A to point B would be accomplished by someone turning or pressing an electronic or magnetic switch. In the 2000s, technicians managed the systems on DOS; these days, the latest systems run on programs that monitor every capsule in real time and allow adjustments based on the level of traffic, the priority level of a capsule, and the demand for additional carriers. The systems run 24 hours a day, every day. 

“We treat [the tube system] no different than electricity, steam, water, gas. It’s a utility,” says Frank Connelly, an assistant hospital director at Penn. “Without that, you can’t provide services to people that need it in a hospital.”

“You’re nervous—you just got blood taken,” he continues. “‘How long is it going to be before I get my results back?’ Imagine if they had to wait all that extra time because you’re not sending one person for every vial—they’re going to wait awhile until they get a basket full and then walk to the lab. Nowadays they fill up the tube and send it to the lab. And I think that helps patient care.” 

Vanessa Armstrong is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlas Obscura, Travel + Leisure, and elsewhere. 

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple's practice of leveraging ideas from its third-party developer community to become new iOS and Mac features and apps has a hefty price tag, a new report indicates. With the release of iOS 18 later this fall, Apple's changes may affect apps that today have an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded roughly 58 million times over the past year, according to an analysis by app intelligence firm Appfigures. Every June at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, the iPhone maker teases the upcoming releases of its software and operating systems, which often include features previously only available through third-party apps. The practice is so common now it's even been given a name: "sherlocking" -- a reference to a 1990s search app for Mac that borrowed features from a third-party app known as Watson. Now, when Apple launches a new feature that was before the domain of a third-party app, it's said to have "sherlocked" the app. In earlier years, sherlocking apps made some sense. After all, did the iPhone's flashlight really need to be a third-party offering, or would it be better as a built-in function? Plus, Apple has been able to launch features that made its software better adapted to consumers' wants and needs by looking at what's popular among the third-party developer community.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wells Fargo's co-branded credit card partnership with fintech startup Bilt Technologies is causing the bank to lose up as much as $10 million monthly, according to a WSJ report. The bank agreed to a co-branded program with the fintech startup that most other big banks -- including JPMorgan Chase -- passed on, incorrectly modeled key assumptions and sees no path to profitability. The card, which allows users to pay rent without fees while earning rewards, has attracted many young customers. From the report: There is a reason why credit cards hadn't gained traction in the rent sector until Bilt came along. Most landlords didn't accept them because they refuse to pay card fees that get pocketed by the banks issuing them and often run between 2% and 3%. Bilt structured the card so landlords won't incur the fees. Wells instead eats much of that. About six months after the credit card was launched, Wells began paying Bilt a fee of about 0.80% of each rent transaction, even though the bank isn't collecting interchange fees from landlords. It appears that the problem for Wells Fargo is that Bilt customers are savvy. They are making the rent payments, but not carrying balances or doing any other transactions through the card.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are finding widest use at big companies, but there is wide expectation that the impact will spread.

© Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

ASUS has suddenly agreed "to overhaul its customer support and warranty systems," writes the hardware review site Gamers Nexus — after a three-video series on its YouTube channel documented bad and "potentially illegal" handling of customer warranties for the channel's 2.2 million viewers. The Verge highlights ASUS's biggest change: If you've ever been denied a warranty repair or charged for a service that was unnecessary or should've been free, Asus wants to hear from you at a new email address. It claims those disputes will be processed by Asus' own staff rather than outsourced customer support agents.... The company is also apologizing today for previous experiences you might have had with repairs. "We're very sorry to anyone who has had a negative experience with our service team. We appreciate your feedback and giving us a chance to make amends." It started five weeks ago when Gamers Nexus requested service for a joystick problem, according to a May 10 video. First they'd received a response wrongly telling them their damage was out of warranty — which also meant Asus could add a $20 shipping charge for the requested repair. "Somehow that turned into ASUS saying the LCD needs to be replaced, even though the joystick is covered under their repair policies," the investigators say in the video. [They also note this response didn't even address their original joystick problem — "only that thing that they had decided to find" — and that ASUS later made an out-of-the-blue reference to "liquid damage."] The repair would ultimately cost $191.47, with ASUS mentioning that otherwise "the unit will be sent back un-repaired and may be disassembled." ASUS gave them four days to respond, with some legalese adding that an out-of-warranty repair fee is non-refundable, yet still "does not guarantee that repairs can be made." Even when ASUS later agreed to do a free "partial" repair (providing the requested in-warranty service), the video's investigators still received another email warning of "pending service cancellation" and return of the unit unless they spoke to "Invoice Quotation Support" immediately. The video-makers stood firm, and the in-warranty repair was later performed free — but they still concluded that "It felt like ASUS tried to scam us." ASUS's response was documented in a second video, with ASUS claiming it had merely been sending a list of "available" repairs (and promising that in the future ASUS would stop automatically including costs for the unrequested repair of "cosmetic imperfections" — and that they'd also change their automatic emails.) Gamers Nexus eventually created a fourth, hour-long video confronting various company officials at Computex — which finally led to them publishing a list of ASUS's promised improvements on Friday. Some highlights: ASUS promises it's "created a Task Force team to retroactively go back through a long history of customer surveys that were negative to try and fix the issues." (The third video from Gamers Nexus warned ASUS was already on the government's radar over its handling of warranty issues.) ASUS also announced their repairs centers were no longer allowed to claim "customer-induced damage" (which Gamers Nexus believes "will remove some of the financial incentive to fail devices" to speed up workloads). ASUS is creating a new U.S. support center allowing customers to choose either a refurbished board or a longer repair. Gamers Nexus says they already have devices at ASUS repair centers — under pseudonyms — and that they "plan to continue sampling them over the next 6-12 months so we can ensure these are permanent improvements." And there's one final improvement, according to Gamers Nexus. "After over a year of refusing to acknowledge the microSD card reader failures on the ROG Ally [handheld gaming console], ASUS will be posting a formal statement next week about the defect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul M. Nakasone, a retired U.S. Army general and former NSA director, is now OpenAI's newest board member. Nakasone will join the Safety and Security Committee and contribute to OpenAI's cybersecurity efforts. CNBC reports: The committee is spending 90 days evaluating the company's processes and safeguards before making recommendations to the board and, eventually, updating the public, OpenAI said. Nakasone joins current board members Adam D'Angelo, Larry Summers, Bret Taylor and Sam Altman, as well as some new board members the company announced in March: Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former executive vice president and global general counsel of Sony; and Fidji Simo, CEO and chair of Instacart. OpenAI on Monday announced the hiring of two top executives as well as a partnership with Apple that includes a ChatGPT-Siri integration. The company said Sarah Friar, previously CEO of Nextdoor and finance chief at Square, is joining as chief financial officer. Friar will "lead a finance team that supports our mission by providing continued investment in our core research capabilities, and ensuring that we can scale to meet the needs of our growing customer base and the complex and global environment in which we are operating," OpenAI wrote in a blog post. OpenAI also hired Kevin Weil, an ex-president at Planet Labs, as its new chief product officer. Weil was previously a senior vice president at Twitter and a vice president at Facebook and Instagram. Weil's product team will focus on "applying our research to products and services that benefit consumers, developers, and businesses," the company wrote. Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who leaked classified documents in 2013 that exposed the massive scope of government surveillance programs, is wary of the appointment. In a post on X, Snowden wrote: "They've gone full mask-off: Do not ever trust OpenAI or its products (ChatGPT etc). There is only one reason for appointing an NSA director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth. You have been warned."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Still, Elon Musk, who owns the platform, and his chief executive Linda Yaccarino, have work to do to grow the business, leaders told employees.

© Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Ampla, which lent money to smaller businesses that sold clothing, home furnishings and other items directly to consumers, is struggling financially and seeking a buyer.

© Kim Raff for The New York Times

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

Thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence, the world of chips is on the cusp of a huge tidal shift. There is heightened demand for chips that can train AI models faster and ping them from devices like smartphones and satellites, enabling us to use these models without disclosing private data. Governments, tech giants, and startups alike are racing to carve out their slices of the growing semiconductor pie. 

Here are four trends to look for in the year ahead that will define what the chips of the future will look like, who will make them, and which new technologies they’ll unlock.

CHIPS Acts around the world

On the outskirts of Phoenix, two of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, TSMC and Intel, are racing to construct campuses in the desert that they hope will become the seats of American chipmaking prowess. One thing the efforts have in common is their funding: in March, President Joe Biden announced $8.5 billion in direct federal funds and $11 billion in loans for Intel’s expansions around the country. Weeks later, another $6.6 billion was announced for TSMC. 

The awards are just a portion of the US subsidies pouring into the chips industry via the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act signed in 2022. The money means that any company with a foot in the semiconductor ecosystem is analyzing how to restructure its supply chains to benefit from the cash. While much of the money aims to boost American chip manufacturing, there’s room for other players to apply, from equipment makers to niche materials startups.

But the US is not the only country trying to onshore some of the chipmaking supply chain. Japan is spending $13 billion on its own equivalent to the CHIPS Act, Europe will be spending more than $47 billion, and earlier this year India announced a $15 billion effort to build local chip plants. The roots of this trend go all the way back to 2014, says Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University and author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. That’s when China started offering massive subsidies to its chipmakers. 

“This created a dynamic in which other governments concluded they had no choice but to offer incentives or see firms shift manufacturing to China,” he says. That threat, coupled with the surge in AI, has led Western governments to fund alternatives. In the next year, this might have a snowball effect, with even more countries starting their own programs for fear of being left behind.

The money is unlikely to lead to brand-new chip competitors or fundamentally restructure who the biggest chip players are, Miller says. Instead, it will mostly incentivize dominant players like TSMC to establish roots in multiple countries. But funding alone won’t be enough to do that quickly—TSMC’s effort to build plants in Arizona has been mired in missed deadlines and labor disputes, and Intel has similarly failed to meet its promised deadlines. And it’s unclear whether, whenever the plants do come online, their equipment and labor force will be capable of the same level of advanced chipmaking that the companies maintain abroad.

“The supply chain will only shift slowly, over years and decades,” Miller says. “But it is shifting.”

More AI on the edge

Currently, most of our interactions with AI models like ChatGPT are done via the cloud. That means that when you ask GPT to pick out an outfit (or to be your boyfriend), your request pings OpenAI’s servers, prompting the model housed there to process it and draw conclusions (known as “inference”) before a response is sent back to you. Relying on the cloud has some drawbacks: it requires internet access, for one, and it also means some of your data is shared with the model maker.  

That’s why there’s been a lot of interest and investment in edge computing for AI, where the process of pinging the AI model happens directly on your device, like a laptop or smartphone. With the industry increasingly working toward a future in which AI models know a lot about us (Sam Altman described his killer AI app to me as one that knows “absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had”), there’s a demand for faster “edge” chips that can run models without sharing private data. These chips face different constraints from the ones in data centers: they typically have to be smaller, cheaper, and more energy efficient. 

The US Department of Defense is funding a lot of research into fast, private edge computing. In March, its research wing, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced a partnership with chipmaker EnCharge AI to create an ultra-powerful edge computing chip used for AI inference. EnCharge AI is working to make a chip that enables enhanced privacy but can also operate on very little power. This will make it suitable for military applications like satellites and off-grid surveillance equipment. The company expects to ship the chips in 2025.

AI models will always rely on the cloud for some applications, but new investment and interest in improving edge computing could bring faster chips, and therefore more AI, to our everyday devices. If edge chips get small and cheap enough, we’re likely to see even more AI-driven “smart devices” in our homes and workplaces. Today, AI models are mostly constrained to data centers.

“A lot of the challenges that we see in the data center will be overcome,” says EnCharge AI cofounder Naveen Verma. “I expect to see a big focus on the edge. I think it’s going to be critical to getting AI at scale.”

Big Tech enters the chipmaking fray

In industries ranging from fast fashion to lawn care, companies are paying exorbitant amounts in computing costs to create and train AI models for their businesses. Examples include models that employees can use to scan and summarize documents, as well as externally facing technologies like virtual agents that can walk you through how to repair your broken fridge. That means demand for cloud computing to train those models is through the roof. 

The companies providing the bulk of that computing power are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. For years these tech giants have dreamed of increasing their profit margins by making chips for their data centers in-house rather than buying from companies like Nvidia, a giant with a near monopoly on the most advanced AI training chips and a value larger than the GDP of 183 countries. 

Amazon started its effort in 2015, acquiring startup Annapurna Labs. Google moved next in 2018 with its own chips called TPUs. Microsoft launched its first AI chips in November, and Meta unveiled a new version of its own AI training chips in April.

That trend could tilt the scales away from Nvidia. But Nvidia doesn’t only play the role of rival in the eyes of Big Tech: regardless of their own in-house efforts, cloud giants still need its chips for their data centers. That’s partly because their own chipmaking efforts can’t fulfill all their needs, but it’s also because their customers expect to be able to use top-of-the-line Nvidia chips.

“This is really about giving the customers the choice,” says Rani Borkar, who leads hardware efforts at Microsoft Azure. She says she can’t envision a future in which Microsoft supplies all chips for its cloud services: “We will continue our strong partnerships and deploy chips from all the silicon partners that we work with.”

As cloud computing giants attempt to poach a bit of market share away from chipmakers, Nvidia is also attempting the converse. Last year the company started its own cloud service so customers can bypass Amazon, Google, or Microsoft and get computing time on Nvidia chips directly. As this dramatic struggle over market share unfolds, the coming year will be about whether customers see Big Tech’s chips as akin to Nvidia’s most advanced chips, or more like their little cousins. 

Nvidia battles the startups 

Despite Nvidia’s dominance, there is a wave of investment flowing toward startups that aim to outcompete it in certain slices of the chip market of the future. Those startups all promise faster AI training, but they have different ideas about which flashy computing technology will get them there, from quantum to photonics to reversible computation. 

But Murat Onen, the 28-year-old founder of one such chip startup, Eva, which he spun out of his PhD work at MIT, is blunt about what it’s like to start a chip company right now.

“The king of the hill is Nvidia, and that’s the world that we live in,” he says.

Many of these companies, like SambaNova, Cerebras, and Graphcore, are trying to change the underlying architecture of chips. Imagine an AI accelerator chip as constantly having to shuffle data back and forth between different areas: a piece of information is stored in the memory zone but must move to the processing zone, where a calculation is made, and then be stored back to the memory zone for safekeeping. All that takes time and energy. 

Making that process more efficient would deliver faster and cheaper AI training to customers, but only if the chipmaker has good enough software to allow the AI training company to seamlessly transition to the new chip. If the software transition is too clunky, model makers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral are likely to stick with big-name chipmakers.That means companies taking this approach, like SambaNova, are spending a lot of their time not just on chip design but on software design too.

Onen is proposing changes one level deeper. Instead of traditional transistors, which have delivered greater efficiency over decades by getting smaller and smaller, he’s using a new component called a proton-gated transistor that he says Eva designed specifically for the mathematical needs of AI training. It allows devices to store and process data in the same place, saving time and computing energy. The idea of using such a component for AI inference dates back to the 1960s, but researchers could never figure out how to use it for AI training, in part because of a materials roadblock—it requires a material that can, among other qualities, precisely control conductivity at room temperature. 

One day in the lab, “through optimizing these numbers, and getting very lucky, we got the material that we wanted,” Onen says. “All of a sudden, the device is not a science fair project.” That raised the possibility of using such a component at scale. After months of working to confirm that the data was correct, he founded Eva, and the work was published in Science.

But in a sector where so many founders have promised—and failed—to topple the dominance of the leading chipmakers, Onen frankly admits that it will be years before he’ll know if the design works as intended and if manufacturers will agree to produce it. Leading a company through that uncertainty, he says, requires flexibility and an appetite for skepticism from others.

“I think sometimes people feel too attached to their ideas, and then kind of feel insecure that if this goes away there won’t be anything next,” he says. “I don’t think I feel that way. I’m still looking for people to challenge us and say this is wrong.”

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

If you could talk again to someone you love who has passed away, would you? For a long time, this has been a hypothetical question. No longer. 

Deepfake technologies have evolved to the point where it’s now easy and affordable to clone people’s looks and voices with AI. Meanwhile, large language models mean it’s more feasible than ever before to conduct full conversations with AI chatbots. 

I just published a story today about the burgeoning market in China for applying these advances to re-create deceased family members. Thousands of grieving individuals have started turning to dead relatives’ digital avatars for conversations and comfort. 

It’s a modern twist on a cultural tradition of talking to the dead, whether at their tombs, during funeral rituals, or in front of their memorial portraits. Chinese people have always liked to tell lost loved ones what has happened since they passed away. But what if the dead could talk back? This is the proposition of at least half a dozen Chinese companies offering “AI resurrection” services. The products, costing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, are lifelike avatars, accessed in an app or on a tablet, that let people interact with the dead as if they were still alive.

I talked to two Chinese companies that, combined, have provided this service for over 2,000 clients. They describe a growing market of people accepting the technology. Their customers usually look to the products to help them process their grief.

To read more about how these products work and the potential implications of the technology, go here.

However, what I didn’t get into in the story is that the same technology used to clone the dead has also been used in other interesting ways.

For one, this process is being applied not just to private individuals, but also to public figures. Sima Huapeng, CEO and cofounder of the Chinese company Silicon Intelligence, tells me that about one-third of the “AI resurrection” cases he has worked on involve making avatars of dead Chinese writers, thinkers, celebrities, and religious leaders. The generated product is not intended for personal mourning but more for public education or memorial purposes.

Last year, Silicon Intelligence replicated Mei Lanfang, a renowned Peking opera singer born in 1894. The avatar of Mei was commissioned to address a 2023 Peking opera festival held in his hometown, Taizhou. Mei talked about seeing how drastically Taizhou had changed through modern urban development, even though the real artist died in 1961.

But an even more interesting use of this technology is that people are using it to clone themselves while they are still alive, to preserve their memories and leave a legacy. 

Sima said this is becoming more popular among successful families that feel the need to pass on their stories. He showed me a video of an avatar the company created for a 92-year-old Chinese entrepreneur, which was displayed on a big vertical monitor screen. The entrepreneur wrote a book documenting his life, and the company only had to feed the whole book to a large language model for it to start role-playing him. “This grandpa cloned himself so he could pass on the stories of his life to the whole family. Even when he dies, he can still talk to his descendants like this,” says Sima.

Sun Kai, another cofounder of Silicon Intelligence, is also featured in my story because he made a replica of his mom, who passed away in 2019. One of his regrets is that he didn’t have enough video recordings of his mom that he could use to train her avatar to be more like her. That inspired him to start recording voice memos of his life and working on his own digital “twin,” even though, in his 40s, death still seems far away.

He compares the process to a complicated version of a photo shoot, but a digital avatar that has his looks, voice, and knowledge can preserve much more information than photographs do. 

And there’s still another use: Just as parents can spend money on an expensive photo shoot to capture their children at a specific age, they can also choose to create an AI avatar for the same purpose. “The parents tell us no matter how many photos or videos they took of their 12-year-old kid, it always felt like something was lacking. But once we digitized this kid, they could talk to the 12-year-old version of them anytime, anywhere,” Sun says.

At the end of the day, the deepfake technologies used to clone both the living and the deceased are the same. And seeing that there’s already a market in China for such services, I’m sure these companies will keep on developing more use cases for it. 

But what’s also certain is that we’d have to answer a lot more questions about the ethical challenges of these applications, from the issue of consent to violations of copyright. 

Would you make a replica of yourself if given the chance? Tell me your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

---

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. Zhang Yongzhen, the first Chinese scientist to publish a sequence of the covid-19 virus, staged a protest last week over being locked out of his lab—likely a result of the Chinese government’s efforts to discourage research on covid origins. (Associated Press $)

2. Chinese president Xi Jinping is visiting Europe for five days. Half of the trip will be spent in Hungary and Serbia, the only two European countries that are welcoming Chinese investment and manufacturing. Xi is expected to announce an electric-vehicle manufacturing deal in Hungary while he’s there. (Associated Press)

3. China launched a new moon-exploring rover on Friday. It will collect samples near the moon’s south pole, an area where the US and China are competing to build permanent bases. Maybe the Netflix comedy series Space Force will look like a documentary soon. (Wall Street Journal $)

4. Huawei is secretly funding an optics research competition in the US. The act likely isn’t illegal, but it’s deceptive, since university participants, some of whom had vowed to not work with the company, didn’t know the source of the funding. (Bloomberg $)

5. China is quickly catching up on brain-computer interfaces, and there’s strong interest in using the technology for non-medical cognitive improvement. (Wired $)

6. Taiwan has been rocked by frequent earthquakes this year, and developers are racing to make earthquake warning apps that might save lives. One such app has seen user numbers increase from 3,000 to 370,000. (Reuters $)

7. Prestigious Chinese media publications, which still publish hard-hitting stories at times, are being forced to distance themselves from the highest-profile journalism award in Asia to avoid being accused by the government of “colluding with foreign forces.”  (Nikkei Asia $)

Lost in translation

While generative AI companies have taken the spotlight during the current AI frenzy, China’s older “AI Four Dragons”—four companies that rose to market prominence because of their technological lead in computer vision and facial recognition—are grappling with profit setbacks and commercialization hurdles, reports the Chinese publication Guiji Yanjiushi.

In response to these challenges, the “Dragons” have chosen different strategies. Yitu leaned further into security cameras; Megvii focused on applying computer vision in logistics and the Internet of Things; CloudWalk prioritized AI assistants; and SenseTime, the largest of them all, ventured into generative AI with its self-developed LLMs. Even though they are not as trendy as the startups, some experts believe these established players, having accumulated more computing power and AI talent over the years, may prove to be more resilient in the end.

One more thing

During this year’s Met Gala, fans were struggling to discern real photos of celebrities from AI-generated ones. To add to the confusion, some social media accounts were running real photos in AI-powered enhancement apps, which slightly distorted the images and made it even harder to tell the difference. 

One of the most widely used such apps is called Remini, but few people know that it was actually developed by a Chinese company called Caldron and later acquired by an Italian software company. Remini now has over 20 million users and is extremely profitable. Still, it seems its AI enhancement tools have a long way to go.

bestie… @2015smetgala it’s time to delete the remini app… you’ve gone too far https://t.co/Q4Aj2454U8 pic.twitter.com/yqH46EJlJd

— swiftie wins (@swifferwins) May 7, 2024

The market for shares of hot start-ups like SpaceX and Stripe is projected to reach a record $64 billion this year.

© Ryan Inzana

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

I’ve wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was invented in the US, today about 80% of the world’s solar manufacturing takes place in China. For some parts of the process, it’s responsible for even more: 97% of wafer manufacturing, for example. 

So I jumped at the opportunity to interview Shawn Qu, the founder and chairman of Canadian Solar, one of the largest and longest-standing solar manufacturing companies in the world, last week.

Qu’s company provides a useful lens on wider efforts by the US to reshape the global solar supply chain and bring more of it back to American shores. Although most of its production is still in China and Southeast Asia, it’s now building two factories in the US, spurred on by incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. You can read my story here.

I met Qu in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was attending the Harvard College China Forum, a two-day annual conference that often draws a fair number of Chinese entrepreneurs. I also attended, hoping to meet representatives of Chinese tech companies there.

At the conference, I noticed three interesting things.

One, there was a glaring absence of Chinese consumer tech companies. With the exception of one US-based manager from TikTok, I didn’t see anyone from Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, or ByteDance. 

These companies, with their large influence on Chinese people’s everyday lives, used to be the stars of discussions around China’s tech sector. If you had come to the Harvard conference before covid-19, you would have met plenty of people representing them, as well as the venture capitalists that funded their successes. You can get a sense just by reading past speaker lists: executives from Xiaomi, Ant Financial, Sogou, Sequoia China, and Hillhouse Capital. These are the equivalents of Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel in China’s tech world.

But these companies have become much more low profile since then, for a couple of main reasons. First, they underwent a harsh domestic crackdown after the government decided to tame them. (I recently talked to Angela Zhang, a law professor studying Chinese tech regulations, to understand these crackdowns.) And second, they have become the subject of national security scrutiny in the US, making it politically unwise for them to engage too much on the public stage here.

The second thing I noticed at the conference is what stood in their place: a batch of new Chinese companies, mostly in climate tech. William Li, the CEO of China’s EV startup NIO, was one of the most popular guest speakers during the conference’s opening ceremony this year. There were at least three solar panel companies present—two (JA Solar and Canadian Solar) among the top-tier manufacturers in the world, and a third that sells solar panels to Latin America. There were also many academics, investors, and even influencers working in the field of electric vehicles and other electrified transportation methods.

It’s clear that amid the increasingly urgent task of addressing climate change, China’s climate technology companies have become the new stars of the show. And they are very much willing to appear on the global stage, both bragging about their technological lead and seeking new markets. 

“The Chinese entrepreneurs are very eager,” says Jinhua Zhao, a professor studying urban transportation at MIT, who also spoke on one of the panels at the conference. “They want to come out. I think the Chinese government side also started to send signals, inviting foreign leadership and financial industries to visit China. I see a lot of gestures.” 

The problem, however, is they are also becoming subject to a lot of political animosity in the US. The Biden administration has started an investigation into Chinese-made cars, mostly electric vehicles; Chinese battery companies have been navigating a minefield of politicians’ resistance to their setting up plants in North America; and Chinese solar panel companies have been subject to sky-high tariffs. 

Back in the mid-2010s, when Chinese consumer tech companies emerged onto the global stage, the US and China had a warm relationship, creating a welcoming environment. Unfortunately, that’s not something climate tech companies can enjoy today. Even though climate change is a global issue that requires countries to collaborate, political tensions stand in the way when companies and investors on opposite sides try to work together.

On that note, the last thing I noticed at the conference is a rising geopolitical force in tech: the Middle East. A few speakers at the conference are working in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and they represent other deep-pocketed players who are betting on technologies like EVs and AI in both the United States and China.

But can they navigate the tensions and benefit from the technological advantages on both sides? It’ll be interesting to watch how that unfolds. 

What do you think of the role of the Middle East in the future of climate technologies? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

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Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. A batch of documents mistakenly unsealed by a Pennsylvania court reveals the origin story of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Who knew it started out as a real estate venture? (New York Times $)

2. Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s richest man, said he would move some of his copper smelting factories to China to reduce the impact of Western sanctions, which block Russian companies from using international payment systems. (Financial Times $)

3. Chinese universities have found a way to circumvent the US export ban on high-end Nvidia chips: by buying resold server products made by Dell, Super Micro Computer, and Taiwan’s Gigabyte Technology. (Reuters $)

4. TikTok is testing “TikTok Notes,” a rival product to Instagram, in Australia and Canada. (The Verge)

5. Since there’s no route for personal bankruptcy in China, those who are unable to pay their debts are being penalized in novel ways: they can’t take high-speed trains, fly on planes, stay in nice hotels, or buy expensive insurance policies. (Wall Street Journal $)

6. The hunt for the origins of covid-19 has stalled in China, as Chinese politicians worry about being blamed for the findings. (Associated Press)

7. Because of pressure from the US government, Mexico will not hand out tax cuts and other incentives to Chinese EV companies. (Reuters $)

Lost in translation

Until last year, it was normal for Chinese hotels to require facial recognition to check guests in, but the city of Shanghai is now turning against the practice, according to the Chinese publication 21st Century Business Herald. The police bureau of Shanghai recently published a notice that says “scanning faces” is required only if guests don’t have any identity documents. Otherwise, they have the right to refuse it. Most hotel chains in Shanghai, and some in other cities, have updated their policies in response. 

China has a national facial recognition database tied to the government ID system, and businesses such as hotels can access it to verify customers’ identities. However, Chinese people are increasingly pushing back on the necessity of facial recognition in scenarios like this, and questioning whether hotels are handling such sensitive biometric data properly. 

One more thing

The latest queer icon in Asia is Nymphia Wind, the drag persona of a 28-year-old Taiwanese-American named Leo Tsao, who just won the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Fully embracing the color yellow as part of her identity, Nymphia Wind is also called the “Banana Buddha” by her fans. She’s hosting shows in Taoist temples in Taiwan, attracting audiences old and young.

Whenever you see a solar panel, most parts of it probably come from China. The US invented the technology and once dominated its production, but over the past two decades, government subsidies and low costs in China have led most of the solar manufacturing supply chain to be concentrated there. The country will soon be responsible for over 80% of solar manufacturing capacity around the world.

But the US government is trying to change that. Through high tariffs on imports and hefty domestic tax credits, it is trying to make the cost of manufacturing solar panels in the US competitive enough for companies to want to come back and set up factories. The International Energy Agency has forecast that by 2027, solar-generated energy will be the largest source of power capacity in the world, exceeding both natural gas and coal—making it a market that already attracts over $300 billion in investment every year.

To understand the chances that the US will succeed, MIT Technology Review spoke to Shawn Qu. As the founder and chairman of Canadian Solar, one of the largest and longest-standing solar manufacturing companies in the world, Qu has observed cycle after cycle of changing demand for solar panels over the last 28 years. 

After decades of mostly manufacturing in Asia, Canadian Solar is pivoting back to the US because it sees a real chance for a solar industry revival, mostly thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in 2022. The incentives provided in the bill are just enough to offset the higher manufacturing costs in the US, Qu says. He believes that US solar manufacturing capacity could grow significantly in two to three years, if the industrial policy turns out to be stable enough to keep bringing companies in. 

How tariffs forced manufacturing capacity to move out of China

There are a few important steps to making a solar panel. First silicon is purified; then the resulting polysilicon is shaped and sliced into wafers. Wafers are treated with techniques like etching and coating to become solar cells, and eventually those cells are connected and assembled into solar modules.

For the past decade, China has dominated almost all of these steps, for a few reasons: low labor costs, ample supply of proficient workers, and easy access to the necessary raw materials. All these factors make made-in-China solar modules extremely price-competitive. By the end of 2024, a US-made solar panel will still cost almost three times as much as one produced in China, according to researchers at BloombergNEF. 

The question for the US, then, is how to compete. One tool the government has used since 2012 is tariffs. If a solar module containing cells made in China is imported to the US, it’s subject to as much as a 250% tariff. To avoid those tariffs, many companies, including Canadian Solar, have moved solar cell manufacturing and the downstream supply chain to Southeast Asia. Labor costs and the availability of labor forces are “the number one reason” for that move, Qu says.

When Canadian Solar was founded in 2001, it made all its solar products in China. By early 2023, the company had factories in four countries: China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Canada. (Qu says it used to manufacture in Brazil and Taiwan too, but later scaled back production in response to contracting local demand.)

But that equilibrium is changing again as further tariffs imposed by the US government aim to force supply chains to move out of China. Starting in June 2024, companies importing silicon wafers from China to make cells outside the country will also be subject to tariffs. The most likely solution for solar companies would be to “set up wafer capacity or set up partnerships with wafer makers in Southeast Asia,” says Jenny Chase, the lead solar analyst at BloombergNEF.

Qu says he’s confident the company will meet the new requirements for tariff exemption after June. “They gave the industry about two years to adapt, so I believe most of the companies, at least the tier-one companies, will be able to adapt,” he says.

The IRA, and moving the factories to the US

While US policies have succeeded in turning Southeast Asia into a solar manufacturing hot spot, not much of the supply chain has actually come back to the US. But that’s slowly changing thanks to the IRA, introduced in 2022. The law will hand out tax credits for companies producing solar modules in the US, as well as those installing the panels. 

The credits, Qu says, are enough to make Canadian Solar move some production from Southeast Asia to the US. “According to our modeling, the incentives provided just offset the cost differences—labor and supply chain—between Southeast Asia and the US,” he says.

Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor in energy and engineering at Princeton University, has come to the same conclusion through his research. He says that the IRA subsidies and tax credits should offset higher costs of manufacturing in the US. “That should drive a significant increase in demand for made-In-America solar modules and subcomponents,” Jenkins says. And the early signs point that way too: since the introduction of the IRA, solar companies have announced plans to build over 40 factories in the US.

In 2023, Canadian Solar announced it would build its first solar module plant in Mesquite, Texas, and a solar cell plant in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The Texas factory started operating in late 2023, while the Indiana one is still in the works. 

The remaining challenges

While the IRA has brought new hope to American solar manufacturing, there are still a few obstacles ahead.

Qu says one big challenge to getting his Texas factory up and running is the lack of experienced workers. “Let’s face the reality: there was almost no silicon-based solar manufacturing in the US, so it takes time to train people,” he says. That’s a process that he expects to take at least six months. 

Another challenge to reshoring solar manufacturing is the uncertainty about whether the US will keep heavily subsidizing the clean energy industry, especially if the White House changes hands after the election this year. “The key is stability,” Qu says, “Sometimes politicians are swayed by special-interest groups.”

“Obviously, if you build a factory, then you do want to know that the incentives to support that factory will be there for a while,” says Chase. There are some indications that support for the IRA won’t necessarily be swayed by the elections. For example, jobs created in the solar industry would be concentrated in red states, so even a Republican administration would be motivated to maintain them. But there’s no guarantee that US policies won’t change course.

As a child, Emily Baker loved to make paper versions of things: cameras, a spaceship cockpit, buildings for a town in outer space.

It was a habit that stuck. Years later, studying architecture in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, she was playing around with some paper and scissors. It was 2010, and the school was about to buy a CNC plasma cutter, a computer-controlled machine capable of cutting lines into sheets of steel. As she thought about how she might experiment with it, she made a striking discovery.

By making a series of cuts and folds in a sheet of paper, Baker found she could produce two planes connected by a complex set of thin strips. Without the need for any adhesive like glue or tape, this pattern created a surface that was thick but lightweight. Baker named her creation Spin-Valence. Structural tests later showed that an individual tile made this way, and rendered in steel, can bear more than a thousand times its own weight. 

In chemistry, spin valence is a theory dealing with molecular behavior. Baker didn’t know of the existing term when she named her own invention—“It was a total accident,” she says. But diagrams related to chemical spin valence theory, she says, do “seem to have a network of patterns that are very similar to the tilings I’m working with.” 

Soon, Baker began experimenting with linking individual tiles together to produce a larger plane. There are perhaps thousands of geometric cutting patterns that can create these multiplane structures, and she has so far discovered only some of them. Certain patterns are stronger than others, and some are better at making curved planes. 

Baker uses software to explore each pattern type but continues to work with cut paper to model possibilities. The Form Finding Lab at Princeton is now testing various tiles under tension and compression loads, and the results have already proved incredibly strong. 

Baker is also exploring ways to use Spin-Valence in architecture and design. She envisions using the technique to make shelters or bridges that are easier to transport and assemble following a natural disaster, or to create lightweight structures that could be packed with supplies for missions to outer space. (Closer to home, her mother has begun passing along ideas to her quilting group; the designs bear a strong resemblance to quilt patterns.)

“What I find most exciting about the system is the way it adds stiffness to something that was previously very flexible,” says Isabel Moreira de Oliveira, a PhD candidate in civil engineering at Princeton, who is writing her dissertation on Spin-Valence and testing which shapes work best for specific applications. “It entirely changes the behavior of something without adding material to it.” Plus, she adds, “you can ship this flat. The assembly information is embedded in how it’s cut.” This could help reduce transportation costs and lower carbon emissions generated from shipping. 

Baker grew up in Alabama and Arkansas, the daughter of a librarian and a chemical engineer at Eastman Kodak. Everybody in the family made things by hand—her mother taught her how to sew, and her father taught her how to work with wood. In high school, she took some classes in the school’s agricultural program, including welding, where she had a particularly supportive teacher. “I’ll tell you who the best two welders in the class are gonna be right now,” she recalls him saying, as he pointed at her and the only other female student. And, she says, “it was true. We picked it up a little faster than the guys. It was really empowering.”

Baker went on to study chemical engineering at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville before she switched to architecture, drawn to the more tactile work. After five years at a small architecture firm in Jackson, Mississippi, she enrolled at Cranbrook, where she sensed she would have the space and tools to experiment. She now teaches in the architecture program at the University of Arkansas.

No doubt her experience in high school welding class aided in a more recent collaboration. Together with her UA colleague Edmund Harriss, an assistant professor of mathematics and art, she has developed Zip-Form—a system for welding and bending two sheets of steel together to make complex 3D curves using low-cost tools and easily learned skills. 

As a process, it is “a physical manifestation of integrating differential properties of the curve,” Harriss says. “The way the mathematical theory links to manufacturing process in Zip-Form is incredibly clean and elegant.” He explains that Baker’s willingness to engage seriously with the mathematics sets her apart from other architects he has worked with: “I think often people get intimidated by the mathematics and try to fall back on their expertise to say where the mathematics isn’t working.” Baker wasn’t like that. 

Like Spin-Valence, Zip-Form has potential applications in construction. Shortly after developing the technique, Baker met Mohamed Ismail, now an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Virginia, who was then a PhD student at MIT. He was working on low-cost, low-­carbon structural systems for housing in developing countries. When Ismail learned that Baker and Harris had found a way to make complex 3D structures out of flat sheets, his mind immediately went to concrete. A system like this, he says, is “exactly the kind of thing that is necessary when you’re trying to build complex concrete formwork [molds to pour the concrete into] in places where you don’t have a robotic arm or 3D printer.” 

In a project they worked on together, Baker and Ismail used Zip-Form to create a mold for a 16-foot prototype curved beam that’s more environmentally sustainable than a traditional beam, reducing the total carbon emissions associated with resource extraction, production, transport and other stages in the typical life cycle of a beam by 40%. 

While most concrete buildings use vastly more material than is structurally necessary, curved beams save concrete by using material only where it is needed to bear a structural load. Concrete is responsible for approximately 8% of total global carbon emissions, but it is also desperately needed to build housing, especially in places like India and Africa, where the population is forecast to grow rapidly in the next 20 years. Zip-Form demands more labor than more automated processes, but the equipment it uses is more affordable. 

Ismail and Baker are now working with a fabrication company in Kenya to demonstrate to real estate developers and an African housing nonprofit that this technology is competitive on price with traditional methods, and thus has a key role to play in affordable construction. The construction industry in the US can be mind-numbingly slow to adopt new techniques, Baker and Ismail both say, but they believe Zip-Form can easily be brought into building projects, using tools and materials that are already available. 

Zip-Form has creative potential, too. Danielle Hatch, an artist known for large-scale fabric installations, is using the system to make a public sculpture in Arkansas inspired by the movement of ribbons on the dancers she saw at a Hispanic cultural festival. “How could I evoke that sense of lightness and play, with metal?” she wondered. Zip-Form allowed her to make steel that she describes as “lyrical.” 

Baker has been inspired by the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, the polymath known for popularizing the geodesic dome—and for turning his mind to everything from affordable housing and transportation to renewable energy. She has studied his story closely, especially reflecting on the gaps between the broad scope of his thought—which often sought to revolutionize entire systems—and the limited real-world changes that resulted from his ideas. “Is there something I should have learned from his life and experience?” she wonders. 

Like Fuller, whose work extended far beyond architecture to consider the ways people relate to one another and to materials, Baker doesn’t think just about physical forms but about how people build, live, and manufacture—and the hierarchies that determine who does what. She thinks of architecture as always being in conversation with the body of the builder. A brick, she points out, is an excellent example because it’s the perfect size for a worker to hold while slathering it with mortar. Baker wants the tools she creates to be just as practical.

Sofi Thanhauser is a writer, artist, and musician based in Brooklyn, New York, and the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing.