This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Roblox is launching a generative AI that builds 3D environments in a snap
What’s new: Roblox has announced plans to roll out a generative AI tool that will let creators make whole 3D scenes just using text prompts. Users will also be able to modify scenes or expand their scope—say, to change a daytime scene to night or switch the desert for a forest.
How it works: Once it’s up and running, developers on the hugely popular online game platform will be able to simply write “Generate a race track in the desert,” for example, and the AI will spin one up.
Why it’s a big deal: Although developers can already create similar scenes like this manually in the platform’s creator studio, Roblox claims its new generative AI model will make the changes happen in a fraction of the time. It also claims that it will give developers with minimal 3D art skills the ability to craft more compelling environments. Read the full story.
—Scott J Mulligan
Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity
—Ray Kurzweil is a technologist and futurist and the author, most recently, of The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. The views represented here are his own.
By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics will become a sprint.
But our destiny isn’t a hollow Jetsons future of gadgetry and pampered boredom. By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect.
This sounds fantastically utopian, but humans have made such a leap before. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived on a razor’s edge of precarity. While modern life can often feel like a rat race, to our paleolithic ancestors, we would seem to enjoy impossible abundance and freedom. But what will the next leap look like? Read the full story.
Ray Kurzweil will be speaking at our flagship EmTech MIT conference, sharing his latest predictions on artificial general intelligence, singularity, and the infinite possibilities of an AI-integrated world.
Join us, either in-person at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge or via our virtual livestream, between September 30 and October 1. Even better—The Download readers get 30% off tickets with the code DOWNLOADM24!
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Apple is hoping AI will help it sell more iPhones
Today’s keynote is likely to focus on AI smarts over big hardware updates. (Bloomberg $)
+ AI isn’t really a motivator for consumers to upgrade their handsets, though. (WSJ $)
+ Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Google is facing yet another monopoly trial
This time, it’s focusing on how the company dominates the online ad market. (WP $)
+ The US Department of Justice will issue other antitrust guidelines by December. (Reuters)
3 The jet stream appears to be shifting
And climate change is likely to be the driving factor. (New Scientist $)
4 China is going all in on cracking nuclear fusion
Startup Energy Singularity is fundraising to try and leapfrog Western rivals. (FT $)
+ This startup says its first fusion plant is five years away. Experts doubt it. (MIT Technology Review)
5 A growing number of European schools are banning smartphones
But parents and teachers don’t always agree. (The Guardian)
+ Between phones and AI, educators are caught between a rock and a hard place. (The Information $)
+ Watermarking AI text could help teachers—but it’s not infallible. (Vox)
6 Pakistan’s internet firewall is disrupting its startups
They’re struggling to raise funds amid the restrictions. (Rest of World)
7 The Arctic was a little-known testbed for military research
The Cold War birthed a range of bizarre projects in the region. (Undark Magazine)
+ Russia has been testing its intelligence operations there too. (New Yorker $)
8 Inside the race to retrieve discarded bombs from the ocean
The explosives the allies dumped following the World Wars are still dangerous. (The Atlantic $)
9 We could harness gravitational waves to detect alien ships
The technology exists, we’re just learning how best to use it. (Wired $)
10 How to improve how driverless cars “see” in the dark
Using a bit of inspiration from the human eye. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ The big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“Everyone is dealing with a sea of sameness.”
—Govind Balakrishnan, senior vice-president of creative platform Adobe Express, laments the growing trend for jobseekers to use the same AI tools to write their applications to the Financial Times.
The big story
The flawed logic of rushing out extreme climate solutions
April 2023
Early in 2022, entrepreneur Luke Iseman says, he released a pair of sulfur dioxide–filled weather balloons from Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, in the hope that they’d burst miles above Earth.
It was a trivial act in itself, effectively a tiny, DIY act of solar geoengineering, the controversial proposal that the world could counteract climate change by releasing particles that reflect more sunlight back into space.
Entrepreneurs like Iseman invoke the stark dangers of climate change to explain why they do what they do—even if they don’t know how effective their interventions are. But experts say that urgency doesn’t create a social license to ignore the underlying dangers or leapfrog the scientific process. Read the full story.
—James Temple
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)+ Life is full of pesky little tasks. These tips can help to make tackling them that bit easier.
+ The Eagles’ Don Felder and Joe Walsh would be so proud.
+ Bad news for Titanic fans: Jack and Rose’s famous railing is no more.
+ Congratulations to 10-year old Karin Tabira, Japan’s youngest expert in preparing deadly pufferfish! 