This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 13)

Future

AI Could Make the Smartphone Passé. What Comes Next?Brian X. Chen and Tripp Mickle | The New York Times

“Every major tech company is thinking about this million-dollar question: What comes after the smartphone? Here is a list of predictions from current and former employees of some of the world’s largest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, and Meta.”

Computing

Good Old IBM Is Leading the Way in the Race for ‘Quantum Advantage’Christopher Mims | The Wall Street Journal

“IBM hasn’t been associated with breakthrough innovation since its Watson AI won ‘Jeopardy!’ in 2011. But quantum computing, which could see a breakthrough to commercialization by 2030, gives the 114-year-old stalwart of business computing a chance to reclaim some of its past glory.”

Robotics

Reality Is Ruining the Humanoid Robot HypeEvan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum

“Future projections seem to be based on an extraordinarily broad interpretation of jobs that a capable, efficient, and safe humanoid robot—which does not currently exist—might conceivably be able to do. Can the current reality connect with the promised scale?”

Robotics

We Are Entering a Golden Age of Robotics Startups—and Not Just Because of AIRebecca Szkutak | TechCrunch

“Investors poured $6 billion into robotics startups in the first seven months of 2025 according to Crunchbase data. The data company predicts that this year’s funding totals will eclipse 2024, making it one of the only non-AI categories to experience a boost in funding.”

Future

New Pathway Engineered Into Plants Lets Them Suck Up More CO₂John Timmer | Ars Technica

“It would be nice to think that we could reforest our way out of the mess we’re creating, but recent studies have indicated there’s simply not enough productive land for this to work out. One alternative might be to get plants to take up carbon dioxide more efficiently.”

Rendezvous Robotics Exits Stealth With $3M to Build Reconfigurable Space InfrastructureAria Alamalhodaei | TechCrunch

“Instead of astronauts and robotic arms, Rendezvous is betting on autonomous swarm assembly and electromagnetism. The company is commercializing a technology called ‘tesserae,’ flat-packed modular tiles that can launch in dense stacks and magnetically latch to form structures on orbit. With a software command, the tiles are designed to unlatch and rearrange themselves when the mission changes.”

Future

Will AI Choke Off the Supply of Knowledge?Greg Ip | The Wall Street Journal

“When humans answer questions, such as whether Einstein should be energy secretary, they often pursue novel avenues of inquiry, creating new knowledge and insight as they go. They do this for a variety of reasons: salary, wealth, fame, tenure, ‘likes,’ clicks, curiosity. If LLMs come to dominate the business of answering questions, those incentives shrivel.”

Energy

Geothermal Is Too Expensive, but Dig Energy’s Impossibly Small Drill Rig Might Fix ThatTim De Chant | TechCrunch

“The startup, which has been operating in stealth for the last five years, developed the water-jet drilling rig in an effort to make geothermal heating and cooling so inexpensive that it will displace fossil fuel boilers and furnaces. The rig is central to that, promising to slash drilling costs by up to 80%.”

A Single, ‘Naked’ Black Hole Rewrites the History of the UniverseCharlie Wood | Quanta Magazine

“A black hole unlike any seen before has been spotted in the early universe. It’s huge and appears to be essentially on its own, with few stars circling it. The object, which may represent a whole new class of enormous ‘naked’ black holes, upends the textbook understanding of the young universe.”

Future

Pay-Per-Output? AI Firms Blindsided by Beefed Up Robots.txt Instructions.Ashley Belanger | Ars Technica

“Leading Internet companies and publishers—including Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, Medium, The Daily Beast, Fastly, and more—think there may finally be a solution to end AI crawlers hammering websites to scrape content without permission or compensation.”

Artificial Intelligence

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded MessesEmanuel Maiberg | 404 Media

“The alleged benefit of vibe coding, which refers to the practice of building software with AI-coding tools without much attention to the underlying code, is that it allows anyone to build a piece of software very quickly and easily. …[But] if the resulting software is so poor you need to hire a human specialist software engineer to come in and rewrite the vibe coded software, it defeats the entire purpose.”

Biotechnology

Scientists Infuse Cement With Bacteria to Create Living Energy DeviceGayoung Lee | Gizmodo

“‘We envision this technology being integrated into real buildings, in walls, foundations, or bridges, where it can support renewable energy sources like solar panels by providing local energy storage,’ Luo said. ‘Imagine a regular room built with bacteria-infused cement: Even at a modest energy density of 5 Wh/kg, the walls alone could store about 10 kWh—enough to keep a standard enterprise server running for a whole day.'”