The Download: autonomous narco submarines, and virtue signaling chatbots

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 uncrewed narco subs could transform the Colombian drug trade

For decades, handmade narco subs have been some of the cocaine trade’s most elusive and productive workhorses, ferrying multi-ton loads of illicit drugs from Colombian estuaries toward markets in North America and, increasingly, the rest of the world. Now off-the-shelf technology—Starlink terminals, plug-and-play nautical autopilots, high-resolution video cameras—may be advancing that cat-and-mouse game into a new phase.

Uncrewed subs could move more cocaine over longer distances, and they wouldn’t put human smugglers at risk of capture. And law enforcement around the world is just beginning to grapple with what this means for the future. Read the full story.

—Eduardo Echeverri López

This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is all about crime. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.

 Google DeepMind wants to know if chatbots are just virtue signaling

The news: Google DeepMind is calling for the moral behavior of large language models—such as what they do when called on to act as companions, therapists, medical advisors, and so on—to be scrutinized with the same kind of rigor as their ability to code or do math.

Why it matters: As LLMs improve, people are asking them to play more and more sensitive roles in their lives. Agents are starting to take actions on people’s behalf. LLMs may be able to influence human decision-making. And yet nobody knows how trustworthy this technology really is at such tasks. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

The building legal case for global climate justice

The United States and the European Union grew into economic superpowers by committing climate atrocities. They have burned a wildly disproportionate share of the world’s oil and gas, planting carbon time bombs that will detonate first in the poorest, hottest parts of the globe.

Morally, there’s an ironclad case that the countries or companies responsible for this mess should provide compensation. Legally, though, the case has been far harder to make. But now those tides might be turning. Read the full story.

—James Temple

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The US is building an online portal to access content banned elsewhere 
The freedom.gov site is Washington’s broadbrush solution to global censorship. (Reuters)
+ The Trump administration is on a mission to train a cadre of elite coders. (FT $)

2 Mark Zuckerberg overruled wellbeing experts to keep beauty filters on Instagram
Because removing them may have impinged on “free expression,” apparently. (FT $)+ The CEO claims that increasing engagement is not Instagram’s goal. (CNBC)
+ Instead, the company’s true calling is to give its users “something useful”. (WSJ $)
+ A new investigation found Meta is failing to protect children from predators. (WP $)

3 Silicon Valley is working on a shadow power grid for US data centers
AI firms are planning to build their own private power plants across the US. (WP $)
+ They’re pushing the narrative that generative AI will save the Earth. (Wired $)
+ We need better metrics to measure data center sustainability with. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ The data center boom in the desert. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Russian forces are struggling with Starlink and Telegram crackdowns
New restrictions have left troops without a means to communicate. (Bloomberg $)

5 Bill Gates won’t speak at India’s AI summit after all
Given the growing controversy surrounding his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. (BBC)
+ The event has been accused of being disorganized and poorly managed. (Reuters)
+ AI leaders didn’t appreciate this awkward photoshoot. (Bloomberg $)

6 AI software sales are slowing down
Last year’s boom appears to be waning, vendors have warned. (WSJ $)
+ What even is the AI bubble? (MIT Technology Review)

7 eBay has acquired its clothes resale rival Depop
It’s a naked play to corner younger Gen Z shoppers. (NYT $)

8 There’s a lot more going on inside cells than we originally thought
It’s seriously crowded inside there. (Quanta Magazine)

9 What it means to create a chart-topping app
Does anyone care any more? (The Verge)

10 Do we really need eight hours of sleep?
Research suggests some people really are fine operating on as little as four hours of snooze time. (New Yorker $)

Quote of the day

“Too often, those victims have been left to fight alone…That is not justice. It is failure.”

—Keir Starmer, the UK’s prime minister, outlines plans to force technology firms to remove deepfake nudes and revenge porn within 48 hours or risk being blocked in the UK, the Guardian reports.

One more thing

End of life decisions are difficult and distressing. Could AI help?

End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates—the people who have to make those calls on behalf of another person. Friends or family members may disagree over what’s best for their loved one, which can lead to distressing situations.

David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues have been working on an idea for something that could make things easier: an artificial intelligence-based tool that can help surrogates predict what the patients themselves would want in any given situation.

Wendler hopes to start building their tool as soon as they secure funding for it, potentially in the coming months. But rolling it out won’t be simple. Critics wonder how such a tool can ethically be trained on a person’s data, and whether life-or-death decisions should ever be entrusted to AI. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

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.)

+ Oakland Library keeps a remarkable public log of all the weird and wonderful artefacts their librarians find tucked away in the pages of their books.
+ Orchids are beautiful, but temperamental. Here’s how to keep them alive.
+ I love that New York’s Transit Museum is holding a Pizza Rat Debunked event.
+ These British indie bands aren’t really lauded at home—but in China, they’re treated like royalty.