Research & Development news

• Debates over AI consciousness are a trap

  20-08-2026 17:42 via technologyreview.com
  
  “Runaway” AI, “rogue” agents, and “autonomous” actors—the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly “superhuman” systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations and academic philosophers often aligned with the effective altruism movement, debat
  
  Read more

• The Download: polycrisis support networks and a hydrogen gold rush

  20-08-2026 14:10 via technologyreview.com
  
  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.
  Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisisSometime in the late 2000s, six-year-old Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car in Thailand when she saw a mountain that had been quarried away. It was the first time she recognized that humans could alter the world for the worse.She carried that knowledge with her, later joini
  
  Read more

• The next big thing in hydrogen could be underground

  20-08-2026 12:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  There’s a hunt for new sources of hydrogen, and the gas (or at least the right conditions to make it) could be hiding beneath our feet.Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in everything from large trucks to planes to steelmaking. It’s often hailed as a climate solution because when burned, it produces water and oxygen—none of the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.In a new story for our latest print issue, freelance reporter James Dineen took a look at the 21st-centu
  
  Read more

• Unlocking hidden revenue streams with market models

  20-08-2026 11:47 via technologyreview.com
  
  Each day, an airline transports tens of thousands of passengers on hundreds of flights. Often these are not straightforward point-to-point routes, with passengers requiring multiple connections. The airline can consider potentially hundreds of variables to price each of these journeys: demand, season, time of day, current events, global markets, and competitor airline activity to name just a few. It is a nuanced process that must constantly adapt to the goings on in the wider world.Generative AI
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis

  20-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried out,” she says. “Like half the mountain just dug out and disappeared, and so there was just this huge orange face.” Although she probably didn’t
  
  Read more

Follow @R_and_D_UK on Twitter!