This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 9)

Why AI Could Eat Quantum Computing’s Lunch
Edd Gent | MIT Technology Review
“The scale and complexity of quantum systems that can be simulated using AI is advancing rapidly, says Giuseppe Carleo, a professor of computational physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). …Given the pace of recent advances, a growing number of researchers are now asking whether AI could solve a substantial chunk of the most interesting problems in chemistry and materials science before large-scale quantum computers become a reality.”

MIT Debuts a Large Language Model-Inspired Method for Teaching Robots New Skills
Brian Heater | TechCrunch
“The team introduced a new architecture called heterogeneous pretrained transformers (HPT), which pulls together information from different sensors and different environments. …’Our dream is to have a universal robot brain that you could download and use for your robot without any training at all,’ CMU associate professor David Held said of the research. ‘While we are just in the early stages, we are going to keep pushing hard and hope scaling leads to a breakthrough in robotic policies, like it did with large language models.’”

Why Futurist Amy Webb Sees a ‘Technology Supercycle’ Headed Our Way
Tim Brinkhof | Big Think
“[Webb] predicts that we are on the cusp of a ‘technology supercycle,’ in which advances in three complementary and increasingly interconnected fields of research—AI, biotech, and smart sensors—will transform our economy and society to a similar extent as the wheel and the steam engine.”

A ‘Crazy’ Idea for Treating Autoimmune Diseases Might Actually Work
Sarah Zhang | The Atlantic
“Lupus cannot be cured. No autoimmune disease can be cured. Two years ago, however, a study came out of Germany that rocked all of these assumptions. Five patients with uncontrolled lupus went into complete remission after undergoing a repurposed cancer treatment called CAR-T-cell therapy, which largely wiped out their rogue immune cells. The first treated patient has had no symptoms for almost four years now.”

How a Breakthrough Gene-Editing Tool Will Help the World Cope With Climate Change
James Temple | MIT Technology Review
“Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions. ‘The potential is huge,’ says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her role in the discovery. ‘There is a coming revolution right now with CRISPR.’”

The Death of Search
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.”

One Way That Could Improve Space-Based Power: Relays
Michelle Hampson | IEEE Spectrum
“Intermediate transmitters could more effectively beam power to the ground. …In their study, the researchers designed and tested several low-cost, light-weight proof of concept transmit arrays to refocus the beam, finding the tactic could transfer nearly 2.5 times as much power as a system that would beam power straight to Earth.”

Debate May Help AI Models Converge on Truth
Stephen Ornes | Quanta
“Letting AI systems argue with each other may help expose when a large language model has made mistakes. …The approach was first proposed six years ago, but two sets of findings released earlier this year—one in February from the AI startup Anthropic and the second in July from Google DeepMind—offer the first empirical evidence that debate between two LLMs helps a judge (human or machine) recognize the truth.”

Life-Seeking, Ice-Melting Robots Could Punch Through Europa’s Icy Shell
Robin George Andrews | MIT Technology Review
“Can robots actually get through that ice shell and survive the journey? A simple way to start is with a cryobot—a melt probe that can gradually thaw its way through the shell, pulled down by gravity. …Once it gets through the ice, the cryobot could unfurl a suite of scientific investigation tools, or perhaps deploy an independent submersible that could work in tandem with the cryobot—all while making sure none of that radioactive matter contaminates the ocean.”

Image Credit: Harry Borrett on Unsplash