LEKANDO ANALYSIS: Our View on This Global Tech Trend
Welcome to Lekando's intelligence hub. We believe that technology is not just about code—it's about strategic market foresight. This article, sourced from the original publisher, highlights crucial global developments in AI and tech. Our expert perspective is that these trends will directly impact the UAE market and regional business strategy in the near future.
Read Date - Continue reading the original report below to get the full technical details.
LEKANDO ANALYSIS: Our View on This Global Tech Trend
Welcome to Lekando's intelligence hub. We believe that technology is not just about code—it's about strategic market foresight. This article, sourced from the original publisher, highlights crucial global developments in AI and tech. Our expert perspective is that these trends will directly impact the UAE market and regional business strategy in the near future.
Read Date - Continue reading the original report below to get the full technical details.
LEKANDO ANALYSIS: Our View on This Global Tech Trend
Welcome to Lekando's intelligence hub. We believe that technology is not just about code—it's about strategic market foresight. This article, sourced from the original publisher, highlights crucial global developments in AI and tech. Our expert perspective is that these trends will directly impact the UAE market and regional business strategy in the near future.
Read Date - Continue reading the original report below to get the full technical details.
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.
How conspiracy theories infiltrated the doctor’s office
As anyone who has googled their symptoms and convinced themselves that they’ve got a brain tumor will attest, the internet makes it very easy to self-(mis)diagnose your health problems. And although social media and other digital forums can be a lifeline for some people looking for a diagnosis or community, when that information is wrong, it can put their well-being and even lives in danger.
We spoke to a number of health-care professionals who told us how this modern impulse to “do your own research” is changing their profession. Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.
Stop worrying about your AI footprint. Look at the big picture instead.
—Casey Crownhart
As a climate technology reporter, I’m often asked by people whether they should be using AI, given how awful it is for the environment. Generally, I tell them not to worry—let a chatbot plan your vacation, suggest recipe ideas, or write you a poem if you want.
That response might surprise some. I promise I’m not living under a rock, and I have seen all the concerning projections about how much electricity AI is using. But I feel strongly about not putting the onus on individuals. Here’s why.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
A new ion-based quantum computer makes error correction simpler
A company called Quantinuum has just unveiled Helios, its third-generation quantum computer, which includes expanded computing power and error correction capability.
Like all other existing quantum computers, Helios is not powerful enough to execute the industry’s dream money-making algorithms, such as those that would be useful for materials discovery or financial modeling.
But Quantinuum’s machines, which use individual ions as qubits, could be easier to scale up than quantum computers that use superconducting circuits as qubits, such as Google’s and IBM’s.Read the full story.
—Sophia Chen
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 A new California law could change how all Americans browse online It gives web users the chance to opt out of having their personal information sold or shared. (The Markup)
2 The FDA has fast-tracked a pill to treat pancreatic cancer The experimental drug appears promising, but experts worry corners may be cut. (WP $) + Demand for AstraZeneca’s cancer and diabetes drugs is pushing profits up. (Bloomberg $) + A new cancer treatment kills cells using localized heat. (Wired $)
3 AI pioneers claim it is already superior to humans in many tasks But not all tasks are created equal. (FT $) + Are we all wandering into an AGI trap? (Vox) + How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time. (MIT Technology Review)
4 IBM is planning on cutting thousands of jobs It’s shifting its focus to software and AI consulting, apparently. (Bloomberg $) + It’s keen to grow the number of its customers seeking AI advice. (NYT $)
5 Big Tech’s data centers aren’t the job-generators we were promised The jobs they do create are largely in security and cleaning. (Rest of World) + We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Microsoft let AI shopping agents loose in a fake marketplace They were easily manipulated into buying goods, it found. (TechCrunch) + When AIs bargain, a less advanced agent could cost you. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Sony has compiled a dataset to test the fairness of computer vision models And it’s confident it’s been compiled in a fair and ethical way. (The Register) + These new tools could make AI vision systems less biased. (MIT Technology Review)
8 The social network is no more We’re living in an age of anti-social media. (The Atlantic $) + Scam ads are rife across platforms, but these former Meta workers have a plan. (Wired $) + The ultimate online flex? Having no followers. (New Yorker $)
9 Vibe coding is Collins dictionary’s word of 2025 Beating stiff competition from “clanker.” (The Guardian) + What is vibe coding, exactly? (MIT Technology Review)
10 These people found romance with their chatbot companions The AI may not be real, but the humans’ feelings certainly are. (NYT $) + It’s surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“The opportunistic side of me is realizing that your average accountant won’t be doing this.”
—Sal Abdulla, founder of accounting-software startup NixSheets, tells the Wall Street Journal he’s using AI tools to gain an edge on his competitors.
One more thing
Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine
Many challenges in medicine stem, in large part, from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically-sourced human bodies.
There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain.
Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman. Read the full story.
—Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely & Hiromitsu Nakauchi
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 skeet ’em at me.)
+ Make sure to look up so you don’t miss November’s supermoon. + If you keep finding yourself mindlessly scrolling (and who doesn’t?), maybe this whopping six-pound phone case could solve your addiction. + Life lessons from a 101-year old who has no plans to retire. + Are you a fan of movement snacking?
Picture it: I’m minding my business at a party, parked by the snack table (of course). A friend of a friend wanders up, and we strike up a conversation. It quickly turns to work, and upon learning that I’m a climate technology reporter, my new acquaintance says something like: “Should I be using AI? I’ve heard it’s awful for the environment.”
This actually happens pretty often now. Generally, I tell people not to worry—let a chatbot plan your vacation, suggest recipe ideas, or write you a poem if you want.
That response might surprise some people, but I promise I’m not living under a rock, and I have seen all the concerning projections about how much electricity AI is using. Data centers could consume up to 945 terawatt-hours annually by 2030. (That’s roughly as much as Japan.)
But I feel strongly about not putting the onus on individuals, partly because AI concerns remind me so much of another question: “What should I do to reduce my carbon footprint?”
That one gets under my skin because of the context: BP helped popularize the concept of a carbon footprint in a marketing campaign in the early 2000s. That framing effectively shifts the burden of worrying about the environment from fossil-fuel companies to individuals.
The reality is, no one person can address climate change alone: Our entire society is built around burning fossil fuels. To address climate change, we need political action and public support for researching and scaling up climate technology. We need companies to innovate and take decisive action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Focusing too much on individuals is a distraction from the real solutions on the table.
I see something similar today with AI. People are asking climate reporters at barbecues whether they should feel guilty about using chatbots too frequently when we need to focus on the bigger picture.
Big tech companies are playing into this narrative by providing energy-use estimates for their products at the user level. A couple of recent reports put the electricity used to query a chatbot at about 0.3 watt-hours, the same as powering a microwave for about a second. That’s so small as to be virtually insignificant.
But stopping with the energy use of a single query obscures the full truth, which is that this industry is growing quickly, building energy-hungry infrastructure at a nearly incomprehensible scale to satisfy the AI appetites of society as a whole. Meta is currently building a data center in Louisiana with five gigawatts of computational power—about the same demand as the entire state of Maine at the summer peak. (To learn more, read our Power Hungry series online.)
Increasingly, there’s no getting away from AI, and it’s not as simple as choosing to use or not use the technology. Your favorite search engine likely gives you an AI summary at the top of your search results. Your email provider’s suggested replies? Probably AI. Same for chatting with customer service while you’re shopping online.
Just as with climate change, we need to look at this as a system rather than a series of individual choices.
Massive tech companies using AI in their products should be disclosing their total energy and water use and going into detail about how they complete their calculations. Estimating the burden per query is a start, but we also deserve to see how these impacts add up for billions of users, and how that’s changing over time as companies (hopefully) make their products more efficient. Lawmakers should be mandating these disclosures, and we should be asking for them, too.
That’s not to say there’s absolutely no individual action that you can take. Just as you could meaningfully reduce your individual greenhouse-gas emissions by taking fewer flights and eating less meat, there are some reasonable things that you can do to reduce your AI footprint. Generating videos tends to be especially energy-intensive, as does using reasoning models to engage with long prompts and produce long answers. Asking a chatbot to help plan your day, suggest fun activities to do with your family, or summarize a ridiculously long email has relatively minor impact.
Ultimately, as long as you aren’t relentlessly churning out AI slop, you shouldn’t be too worried about your individual AI footprint. But we should all be keeping our eye on what this industry will mean for our grid, our society, and our planet.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
