This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 26)

Anthropic Wants Its AI Agent to Control Your Computer
Will Knight | Wired
“It took a while for people to adjust to the idea of chatbots that seem to have minds of their own. The next leap into the unknown may involve trusting artificial intelligence to take over our computers, too. Anthropic, a high-flying competitor to OpenAI, announced [this week] that it has taught its AI model Claude to do a range of things on a computer, including search the web, open applications, and input text using the mouse and keyboard.”

A Neuralink Rival Says Its Eye Implant Restored Vision in Blind People
Emily Mullin | Wired
“For years, they had been losing their central vision—what allows people to see letters, faces, and details clearly. The light-receiving cells in their eyes had been deteriorating, gradually blurring their sight. But after receiving an experimental eye implant as part of a clinical trial, some study participants can now see well enough to read from a book, play cards, and fill in a crossword puzzle despite being legally blind.”

DNA Has Been Modified to Make It Store Data 350 Times Faster
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | New Scientist
“DNA has been used for years to store data, but encoding information into the molecule is painstaking work. Now, researchers have drastically sped it up by mimicking a natural biological process that drives gene expression. This could lead to durable, do-it-yourself DNA data storage technologies.”

Air Taxis and Other Electric-Powered Aircraft Cleared for Takeoff With Final FAA Rules
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“The FAA says these ‘powered-lift’ vehicles will be the first completely new category of aircraft since helicopters were introduced in 1940. These aircraft will be used for a variety of services, including air taxis, cargo delivery, and rescue and retrieval operations. The final rules published today contain guidelines for pilot training as well as operational requirements regarding minimum safe altitudes and visibility.”

Cheap Solar Panels Are Changing the World
Zoë Schlanger | The Atlantic
“‘In a single year, in a single technology, we’re providing as much new electricity as the entirety of global growth the year before,’ Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, told me. A decade or two ago, analysts ‘did not imagine in their wildest dreams that solar by the middle of the 2020s would already be supplying all of the growth of global electricity demand,’ he said. Yet here we are.”

GMOs Could Reboot Chestnut Trees
Anya Kamenetz | MIT Technology Review
“The sprouts, no higher than our knees, are samples of likely the first genetically modified trees to be considered for federal regulatory approval as a tool for ecological restoration. American Castanea’s founders, and all the others here today, hope that the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) will be the first tree species ever brought back from functional extinction—but, ideally, not the last.”

Here’s What the Regenerative Cities of Tomorrow Could Look Like
Kotaro Okada | Wired
“Wired Japan collaborated with the urban design studio For Cities to highlight some of the world’s best sustainable urban developments, which are harbingers of what is to come. From using local materials and construction methods to restoring ecosystems, these projects go beyond merely making green spaces and provide hints of how cities of the future will function as well as how they will be built. Here are some places where the future is now.”

How Wayve’s Driverless Cars Will Meet One of Their Biggest Challenges Yet
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
“The move to the US will be a test of Wayve’s technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering. Wayve’s approach has attracted massive investment—including a $1 billion funding round that broke UK records this May—and partnerships with Uber and online grocery firms such as Asda and Ocado. But it will now go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla.”

PRIVACY

Two Students Created Face Recognition Glasses. It Wasn’t Hard.
Kashmir Hill | The New York Times
“Mr. Nguyen and a fellow Harvard student, Caine Ardayfio, had built glasses used for identifying strangers in real time, and had demonstrated them on two ‘real people’ at the subway station, including Mr. Hoda, whose name was incorrectly transcribed in the video captions as ‘Vishit.’ Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Ardayfio, who are both 21 and studying engineering, said in an interview that their system relied on widely available technologies.”

Google Is Now Watermarking Its AI-Generated Text
Eliza Strickland | IEEE Spectrum
“The system, called SynthID-Text, doesn’t compromise ‘the quality, accuracy, creativity, or speed of the text generation,’ says Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind and a coauthor of the paper. But the researchers acknowledge that their system is far from foolproof, and isn’t yet available to everyone—it’s more of a demonstration than a scalable solution.”

Image Credit: Sylwia Bartyzel on Unsplash