Ecommerce Management Advisors
Ecommerce Management Advisors
Google tightens Indexing API rules, warning users of spam detection and possible loss of access revocation for abuse.
The co-founders of Yoast have launched a plugin that helps users plan tasks, defeat procrastination, and remove distractions, making it easier to achieve success. This plugin simplifies managing critical tasks like maintaining website health, publishing posts, and updating content.
A reason why some websites fail to achieve all that they are capable of is momentum and consistent output. Creators to have a plan that is rigorously followed generally experience more success in search. Winning is fun but getting there is not always fun.
Immediate rewards are a powerful motivator for success. This new plugin makes achievement feel instantly gratifying, which is why it deserves serious consideration.
Working at home as a solopreneur or with remote workers can be challenging because there are so many distractions. People are generally task oriented but not necessarily hard-wired to follow a mental list of things to do. It’s easier when someone tells you what to do but the reality is that we have to take charge and tell ourselves what to do in order to achieve great things.
That’s the brilliant thing about the new Progress Planner plugin, it allows users to create a road map to success within the context of the WordPress site itself, embedded within the environment the user is working in.
One of the ingenious features of Progress Planner is that it gamifies task completion with badges that remind users of how much they’ve achieved, subtly encouraging them to continue completing tasks. It’s literally rewarding the brain with feedback on completion of a task, a mental pat on the back.
The Progress Planner website describes the tool like this:
“It simplifies website management by providing a clear overview of your tasks, tracking your progress, and keeping you motivated.”
Money’s a nice motivator but immediate positive feedback is a powerful motivator for progressing from achievement to achievement.
The plugin is currently in Beta, which is one step ahead of the Alpha stage where bugs are worked out. This means that the plugin has full functionality but is still collecting feedback from users. Nevertheless, Progress Planner is ready for use right now and the official launch date is set for October 3, 2024.
The plugin is 100% free to use and a pro version is planned for sometime in the future that will add even more features.
Progress Planner, by the co-founders of Yoast, is available right now from the official WordPress Plugin Repository and also in the plugin dashboard in the WordPress admin.
Read more and download the plugin: Progress Planner Plugin At WordPress.org
Visit the Progress Planner Website: Progress Planner
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
Google has announced a new feature integrating links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine within its search results.
This update, rolled out globally today, allows searchers to access archived versions of webpages directly from Google’s search interface.
The new functionality is part of Google’s existing ‘About this page’ feature.
You can now find a link to the Wayback Machine by clicking the three dots next to a search result, selecting “About this result,” and then choosing “More about this page.”
A Google spokesperson explained the rationale behind the update:
“We know that many people, including those in the research community, value being able to see previous versions of webpages when available. That’s why we’ve added links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to our ‘About this page’ feature.”
The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, has been preserving snapshots of websites through its Wayback Machine for over 25 years.
Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, commented on the significance of this integration:
“The web is aging, and with it, countless URLs now lead to digital ghosts. Businesses fold, governments shift, disasters strike, and content management systems evolve—all erasing swaths of online history,” Graham stated. “This digital time capsule transforms our ‘now-only’ browsing into a journey through internet history.”
It’s important to note that this feature will not be available for all websites.
Links to archived pages will not appear if the rights holder has opted out of archiving or if the webpage violates content policies.
This collaboration between Google and the Internet Archive marks a step in improving access to historical web content.
Tools like this are valuable for researchers and general users seeking to understand how online information has changed over time.
This feature is available now, and users worldwide should be able to access these archive links through Google Search.
Featured Image: Postmodern Studio/Shutterstock
Google’s John Mueller offers guidance on interpreting website performance data. He cautions against overreacting to minor fluctuations.
Has Google recently turned up the visibility dial for “brands”?
Every consulting pitch deck has a “build a strong brand” slide. We all know “brand” is important for SEO.
We’ve all heard Eric Schmidt’s quote: “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
The impact of branding is not exclusive to SEO. The whole industry of brand marketing exists because consumers seek out brands they trust.
But Schmidt’s quote dropped in 2008 (when users were interestingly just as frustrated with web results as today). Back then, Google didn’t understand content as well as today and leaned much more on user and basic backlink signals.
Today, the organic search landscape looks very different:
So, have “brands” gained? The answer is yes, but only in some verticals. But what even defines a brand?
In the context of SEO, I define a “brand” as a domain that gets:
The way it might materialize in Search:
Google gives brands preferential treatment because:
The consequences for SEO Aggregators can be severe.
In David vs. Goliath, I analyzed the top 1,000 winner and loser sites over the last 12 months and found that “bigger sites indeed grow faster than smaller sites, but likely not because they’re big but because they’ve found growth levers they can pull over a long time period.”
Important: “ecommerce retailers and publishers have lost the most,” while brands like Lenovo, Sigma, Coleman, or Hanes gained visibility, as I called out in the follow-up article.
Digging deeper into a set of almost 10,000 keywords I track in the Semrush Enterprise Suite, we can see a shift in some verticals over the last 12 months.
Travel: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin IndigFashion: mixed picture
Image Credit: Kevin IndigBeds: mixed picture
Image Credit: Kevin IndigFinance: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin IndigHealth: mixed picture
Image Credit: Kevin IndigSaaS: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin IndigNote:
To top it off, three exemplary, hypercompetitive keywords also show major SERP mix shifts over the last two years (non-brands highlighted in red):
Credit Cards: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin IndigCar insurance: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin IndigWatches: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin IndigHere is how I work with companies that I don’t see as established brands:
We work on reputation by mining reviews on third-party review sites and developing a plan for improving them if necessary.
Google strongly cares about third-party reviews (and so do users), which you can see in the fact that it enriches the shopping graph with them or cites them in the SERPs.
We invest in brand marketing and monitor brand recall/NPS in relation to competitors. We aim always to be a little better, which is part of a larger product strategy.
In my experience, SEO and product are not separable. We monitor and invest in brand mentions and in what context they’re mentioned (co-occurrence).
We consider hard calls when it comes to exact match domains (EMDs). Even though you will find plenty of examples that they work and the cost of migration is very high, sometimes moving to a brand name is the best long-term option. How many EMDs do you know that are memorable?
We take a close look at the ratio of brand to non-brand traffic – are both growing? If you have a low number of branded searches compared to non-branded ones, you don’t have a brand.
We look at brand links and mentions. While generic anchor text links are valuable, people tend to underestimate the impact of brand links on the homepage.
The most effective things you typically do (in the white hat space) for more brand links are also things that get your brand “on the map,” so this also funnels into a larger brand marketing strategy.
Back in 2008, brand links were likely the deciding brand factor.
Today, it’s paired with brand name searches, as Tom Capper’s analysis on Moz shows: domains that lost during Helpful Content Updates had a high ratio of Domain Authority to Brand Authority, meaning lots of links but few brand links.
The Helpful Content Update Was Not What You Think
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
Ecommerce mistakes are as common as shopping carts filled to the brim during a Black Friday sale. Why is that, you ask? Well, the ecommerce world is complex. It’s easy for online retailers to trip over unexpected — but also quite common — hurdles. But fear not! Identifying and correcting these technical SEO mistakes helps turn your online store into a success story.
A well-organized site structure is fundamental for both user experience and SEO. It helps search engines crawl and index your site efficiently while guiding users seamlessly through your products and categories. Yet, many ecommerce retailers make the mistake of using very complex site structures.
/category/subcategory/product-name instead of non-descriptive strings. This structure helps search engines understand the importance and context of each page.It seems strange to say this in 2024, but mobile is where it’s at. Today, if your online store isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re missing out on a big chunk of potential customers. Mobile shopping is not just a trend; it’s the norm. Remember, your customers are swiping, tapping, and buying on their phones — don’t make the mistake of focusing your ecommerce business on desktop users only.
Schema structured data markup is code that helps search engines understand the context of your content. Among other things, search engines use this to help display rich snippets in search results. Despite its benefits, many ecommerce sites underestimate its potential, missing out on enhanced visibility and click-through rates.
Page speed is critical to user experience and SEO. Google’s emphasis on Core Web Vitals and page experience underscores the importance of fast, smooth, and stable web experiences. Slow pages frustrate users and negatively impact SEO, which can reduce visibility and traffic.
async attribute for scripts that can load asynchronously or defer for scripts that are not crucial for initial rendering.Canonicalization helps search engines understand the preferred version of a webpage when multiple versions exist. This is important for ecommerce sites, where similar or duplicate content is common due to variations in products, categories, and pagination. Improper canonicalization can lead to duplicate content issues.
XML sitemaps and robots.txt files help guide search engines through your ecommerce site. These tools ensure that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your pages. Missing or misconfigured files can lead to indexing issues, negatively impacting your site’s SEO performance.
For ecommerce retailers targeting global markets, international SEO is crucial for reaching audiences in different countries and languages. A good international SEO strategy ensures your site is accessible and relevant to users worldwide. International ecommerce SEO is all about maximizing your global reach and sales potential — it would be a mistake to forget about this.
This is a bit of a sneaky addition, but number eight in this list of common ecommerce mistakes to avoid is not using Yoast SEO for Shopify or our WooCommerce SEO add-on. Both come with solutions for many of the common errors described in this article. Our tools make it easier to manage ecommerce SEO and Shopify SEO so you can focus on improving many other aspects of your online store. We provide a solid groundwork in a technical SEO sense and provide tools to improve your product content. We even have AI features that make this takes easier than ever.
Be sure to check out Yoast SEO for Shopify and WooCommerce SEO!
Regular technical audits and improvements are crucial if you want your online store to keep performing well. Addressing these technical issues helps ecommerce retailers improve search visibility, user experience, and conversion rates. Just be sure not to make these common ecommerce SEO mistakes again!
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Last week, we tackled setting your data strategy for value-based bidding.
The next key is to assign the right values for the conversion actions that are important to your business.
We know this step is often seen as trickier for lead gen-focused businesses than, say, ecommerce businesses.
How much is a whitepaper download, newsletter signup, or online quote request worth to your business? While you may not have exact figures, that’s OK. What you do know is they aren’t all valued equally.
Check out the quick 2-minute video in our series below, and then keep reading as we dive deeper into assigning conversion values to optimize your value-based bidding strategy.
First, let’s get on the same page about what “conversion value” means.
A conversion refers to a desired action taken by a user, such as filling out a lead form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter.
Conversion value is simply a numerical representation of how much each of these conversions is worth to your business.
Ideally, you’d have a precise understanding of how much revenue each conversion generates.
However, we understand that this is not always feasible.
In such cases, it’s perfectly acceptable to use “proxy values” – estimations that align with your business priorities.
The important thing is to ensure that these proxy values reflect the relative importance of different conversions to your business.
For example, a whitepaper download may indicate less “value” than a product demo registration based on what you understand about your past customer acquisition efforts.
Let’s explore some scenarios to illustrate how you might establish proxy values.
Take the event florist example mentioned in the video. You’ve seen that clients who provide larger guest counts or budgets in their online quote requests tend to result in more lucrative events.
Knowing this, you can assign higher proxy values to these leads compared to those with smaller guest counts or budgets.
Similarly, if you’re an auto insurance advertiser, you might leverage your existing lead scoring system as a basis for proxy values. Leads with higher scores, indicating a greater likelihood of a sale, would naturally be assigned higher values.
You don’t need to have exact value figures to make value-based bidding effective. Work with your sales and finance teams to help identify the key factors that influence lead quality and value.
This will help you understand which conversion actions indicate a higher likelihood of becoming a customer – and even which actions indicate the likelihood of becoming a higher-value customer for your business.
Once you’ve determined the proxy values for your conversion actions, you’ll need to share that information with Google Ads. This enables the system to prioritize actions that drive the most value for your business.
To do this, go to the Summary tab on the Conversions page (under the Goals icon) in your account. From there, you can edit your conversion actions settings to input the value for each. More here.
As I noted in the last episode, strive for daily uploads of your conversion data, if possible, to ensure Google Ads has the most up-to-date information by connecting your sources via Google Ads Data Manager or the Google Ads API.
To add another layer of precision, you can utilize conversion value rules.
Conversion value rules allow you to adjust the value assigned to a conversion based on specific attributes or conditions that aren’t already indicated in your account. For example, you may have different margins for different types of customers.
Instead of every lead form submission having the same static value you’ve assigned, you can tell Google Ads which leads are more valuable to your business based on three factors:
When implementing these rules, your value-based bidding strategies (maximize conversion value with an optional target ROAS) will take them into account and optimize accordingly.
Conversion value rules can be set at the account or campaign levels. They are supported in Search, Shopping, Display, and Performance Max campaigns.
Google Ads will prioritize showing your ads to users predicted to be more likely to generate those leads you value more.
These rules also impact how you report conversion value in your account.
For example, you may value a lead at $5, but know that these leads from Californian users are typically worth twice as much. With conversion value rules, you could specify this, and Google Ads would multiply values for users from California by two and report that accordingly in the conversion volume column in your account.
Additionally, you can segment your conversion value rules in Campaigns reporting to see the impact by selecting Conversions, then Value rule adjustment.
There are three segment options:
You can add the conversion value rules column to your reporting as well. These columns are called “All value adjustment” and “Value adjustment.”
Also note that reporting for conversion value rules applies to all conversions, not just the ones in the ‘conversions’ column.
You can also create more complex rules by combining conditions.
For example, if you observe that users from Texas who have also subscribed to your newsletter are exceptionally valuable, you could create a rule that increases their conversion value even further.
When using conversion value rules, keep in mind:
Assigning the right values to your conversions is a crucial step in maximizing the effectiveness of your value-based bidding strategies.
By providing Google Ads with accurate and nuanced conversion data, you empower the system to make smarter decisions, optimize your bids, and ultimately drive more valuable outcomes for your business.
Up next, we’ll talk about determining which bid strategy is right for you. Stay tuned!
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here.
Video game development has long been plagued by fear of the “crunch”—essentially, being forced to work overtime on a game to meet a deadline. In the early days of video games, the crunch was often viewed as a rite of passage: In the last days before release, an obsessed group of scrappy developers would work late into the night to perfect their dream game.
However, nowadays the crunch is less likely to be glamorized than to be seen as a form of exploitation that risks causing mental illness and burnout. Part of the issue is that crunch time used to be just before a game launched, but now whole game development periods are “crunchy.” With games getting more expensive, companies are incentivized to make even more short-term profits by squeezing developers.
But what if AI could help to alleviate game-development hell? It may already be happening. According to a recent poll by a16z, 87% of studios are using generative AI tools like Midjourney to create in-game environments. Others are using it for game testing or looking for bugs, while Ubisoft is experimenting with using AI to create different basic dialogue options.
And even more help is coming. A tool developed by the team at Roblox aims to allow developers to make 3D environments and scenes in an instant with nothing but text prompts. Typically, creating an environment may take a week for a small game or much longer for a studio project, depending on how complex the designs are. But Roblox aims to let developers almost instantly bring their personal vision to life.
For example, let’s say you wanted your game to be set in a spaceship with the interior design of a Buddhist temple. You’d just put that into a prompt—“Create a spaceship …”—and BAM! Your one-of-a-kind environment would be generated immediately.
The technology behind this can be used for any 3D environment, not just Roblox. My article here goes into more depth, but essentially, if ChatGPT’s tokens are words, the Roblox system’s tokens are 3D cubes that form a larger scene, allowing the 3D generation equivalent of what ChatGPT can do for text. This means the model could potentially be used to generate a whole city in the Grand Theft Auto universe. That said, the demo I saw from Roblox was far smaller, generating only a racetrack. So more realistically, I imagine it would be used to build one aspect of a city in Grand Theft Auto, like a stadium—at least for now.
Roblox claims you’re also able to modify a scene with prompts. So let’s say you get bored of the Buddhist temple aesthetic. You can prompt the model again—“Make the spaceship interior a forest”—and within an instant, all the Buddhist statues will turn to trees.
A lot of these types of things can already be done manually, of course, but it can take a lot of time. Ideally, this kind of technology will allow 3D artists to offload some of the tedium of their job to an AI. (Though some of them may argue that building the environment is creatively fulfilling—maybe even one of their favorite parts of their job. Having an AI spawn an environment in an instant may take away some of the joy of slowly discovering an environment as you build it.)
Personally, I’m fairly skeptical of AI in video games. As a former developer myself, I cringe a little bit when I hear about AI being used to write dialogue for characters. I worry about terribly stilted results and the possibility that writers will lose their jobs. In the same vein, I worry about putting 3D artists out of work and ending up with 3D environments that look off, or obviously generated by AI without care or thought.
It’s clear that the big AI wave is crashing upon us. And whether it leads to better work-life balance for game developers is going to be determined by how these systems are implemented. Will developers have a tool to reduce tedium and eliminate repetitive tasks, or will they have fewer colleagues, and new colleagues who insist on using words like “delves” and “showcasing” in every other sentence?
AI is already being used in games for eliminating inappropriate language
This new Roblox development comes after the company introduced AI to analyze in-game voice chat in real time last fall. Other games, like Call of Duty, have implemented similar systems. If the AI determines that a player is using foul language, it will issue a warning, and then a ban if restricted words keep coming.
Why this matters: As we’ve written previously, content moderation with AI has proved to be tricky. It seems like an obvious way to make good use of the technology’s ability to look at masses of information and make quick assessments, but AI still has a hard time with nuance and cultural contexts. That hasn’t stopped it from being implemented in video games, which have been and will continue to be one of the testing grounds for the latest innovations in AI. My colleague Niall explains in his recent piece how it could make virtual worlds more immersive and flexible.
What this futuristic Olympics video says about the state of generative AI
Filmmaker Josh Kahn used AI to create a short video that imagines what an Olympics in LA might look like in the year 3028, which he shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review. The short demonstrates AI’s immense power for video creation, but it also highlights some of the issues with using the technology for that purpose.
(MIT Technology Review)
A Dutch regulator has slapped Clearview AI with a $33 million fine
Years ago, Clearview AI scraped images of people from the internet without their permission. Now Dutch authorities are suing the company, claiming that Clearview’s database is illegal because it violates individuals’ right to privacy. Clearview hasn’t paid past fines and doesn’t plan to pay this one, claiming that Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over the company since it doesn’t have a business in the Netherlands. The Dutch are considering holding the directors of Clearview personally financially liable.
(The Verge)
How OpenAI is changing
OpenAI continues to evolve; recent moves include adding the former director of the US National Security Agency to its board and considering plans to restructure the company to be more attractive for investors. Additionally, there are talks over a new investment into OpenAI that would value it at over $100 billion. It sure feels like a long time since OpenAI could credibly claim to just be a research lab.
(The New York Times)
NaNoWriMo says condemning AI Is “classist and ableist”
The organizers of the “write a book in a month” challenge have got themselves into hot water recently, with a big backlash against their decision to support the use of AI for writers. They’ve countered the haters by claiming that opposing the use of AI in writing is both classist and ableist, as some people require extra assistance and accommodation from AI tools.
(404 media)
Shawn Shan is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2024 Innovators Under 35. Meet the rest of this year’s honorees.
When image-generating models such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion kick-started the generative AI boom in early 2022, artists started noticing odd similarities between AI-generated images and those they’d created themselves. Many found that their work had been scraped into massive data sets and used to train AI models, which then produced knockoffs in their creative style. Many also lost work when potential clients used AI tools to generate images instead of hiring artists, and others were asked to use AI themselves and received lower rates.
Now artists are fighting back. And some of the most powerful tools they have were built by Shawn Shan, 26, a PhD student in computer science at the University of Chicago (and MIT Technology Review’s 2024 Innovator of the Year).
Shan got his start in AI security and privacy as an undergraduate there and participated in a project that built Fawkes, a tool to protect faces from facial recognition technology. But it was conversations with artists who had been hurt by the generative AI boom that propelled him into the middle of one of the biggest fights in the field. Soon after learning about the impact on artists, Shan and his advisors Ben Zhao (who made our Innovators Under 35 list in 2006) and Heather Zheng (who was on the 2005 list) decided to build a tool to help. They gathered input from more than a thousand artists to learn what they needed and how they would use any protective technology.
Shan coded the algorithm behind Glaze, a tool that lets artists mask their personal style from AI mimicry. Glaze came out in early 2023, and last October, Shan and his team introduced another tool called Nightshade, which adds an invisible layer of “poison” to images to hinder image-generating AI models if they attempt to incorporate those images into their data sets. If enough poison is drawn into a machine-learning model’s training data, it could permanently break models and make their outputs unpredictable. Both algorithms work by adding invisible changes to the pixels of images that disrupt the way machine-learning models interpret them.
The response to Glaze was both “overwhelming and stressful,” Shan says. The team received backlash from generative AI boosters on social media, and there were several attempts to break the protections.
But artists loved it. Glaze has been downloaded nearly 3.5 million times (and Nightshade over 700,000). It has also been integrated into the popular new art platform Cara, allowing artists to embed its protection in their work when they upload their images. And Glaze received a distinguished paper award and the Internet Defense Prize at the Usenix Security Symposium, a top computer security conference
Shan’s work has also allowed artists to be creative online again, says Karla Ortiz, an artist who has worked with him and the team to build Glaze and is part of a class action lawsuit against generative AI companies for copyright violation.
Meet the rest of this year’s
Innovators Under 35.
“They do it because they’re passionate about a community that’s been … taken advantage of [and] exploited, and they’re just really invested in it,” says Ortiz.
It was Shan, Zhao says, who first understood what kinds of protections artists were looking for and realized that the work they did together on Fawkes could help them build Glaze. Zhao describes Shan’s technical abilities as some of the strongest he’s ever seen, but what really sets him apart, he says, is his ability to connect dots across disciplines. “These are the kinds of things that you really can’t train,” Zhao adds.
Shan says he wants to tilt the power balance back from large corporations to people.
“Right now, the AI powerhouses are all private companies, and their job is not to protect people and society,” he says. “Their job is to make shareholders happy.” He aims to show, through his work on Glaze and Nightshade, that AI companies can collaborate with artists and help them benefit from AI or empower them to opt out. Some firms are looking into how they could use the tools to protect their intellectual property.
Next, Shan wants to build tools to help regulators audit AI models and enforce laws. He also plans to further develop Glaze and Nightshade in ways that could make them easier to apply to other industries, such as gaming, music, or journalism. “I will be in [this] project for life,” he says.
Watch Shan talk about what’s next for his work in a recent interview by Amy Nordrum, MIT Technology Review’s executive editor.
This story has been updated.
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.
Introducing: our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2024
Tomorrow’s technologies are being developed today. And every year, we recognize young people from around the world who are leading the way through their research and entrepreneurship.
This year’s 35 young innovators are driving progress toward better health, a more stable climate, and greater equality. Each was selected from hundreds of nominees by expert judges. Keep an eye out for these innovators in the years to come—they’re already making an impact.
Today, we’re excited to unveil our latest cohort of Innovators. Read the full list of this year’s honorees making a difference in robotics, computing, biotech, climate and energy, and AI.
This year’s list is available exclusively to MIT Technology Review subscribers. If you’re not a subscriber already, sign up here to save 25%.
Innovator of the Year: Shawn Shan builds tools to help artists fight back against exploitative AI
When image-generating models kick-started the generative AI boom in early 2022, artists started noticing odd similarities between AI-generated images and those they’d created themselves. Many found that their work had been scraped into massive data sets and used to train AI models, which then produced knockoffs in their creative style.
Now artists are fighting back. And some of the most powerful tools they have were built by Shawn Shan, 26, a PhD student in computer science at the University of Chicago, and MIT Technology Review’s 2024 Innovator of the Year.
Shan created the algorithm behind Glaze, a tool that lets artists mask their personal style from AI mimicry, and another tool called Nightshade. Both algorithms work by adding invisible changes to the pixels of images that disrupt the way machine-learning models interpret them—allowing artists to be creative online again. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
To be more useful, robots need to become lazier
Unlike humans, robots treat all the information they receive about their surroundings with equal importance. Driverless cars, for example, have to continuously analyze data about things around them whether or not they are relevant. This keeps drivers and pedestrians safe, but it draws on a lot of energy and computing power. What if there’s a way to cut that down by teaching robots what they should prioritize and what they can safely ignore?
That’s the principle underpinning “lazy robotics,” a field of study which proposes that teaching all kinds of robots to be “lazier” with their data could help pave the way for better, more efficient machines. And researchers have hit on a fun way to test this line of enquiry: teaching robots to play soccer. Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
What impact will AI have on video game development?
Video game development has long been plagued by fear of the “crunch”—essentially, being forced to work overtime on a game to meet a deadline.
In the early days of video games, the crunch was often viewed as a rite of passage. However, nowadays the crunch is less likely to be glamorized than to be seen as a form of exploitation. With games getting more expensive, companies are incentivized to make even more short-term profits by squeezing developers.
But what if AI could help to alleviate game-development hell? If you look closely, it may in fact already be happening. Here’s how.
—Scott J Mulligan
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The first private human spacewalk mission is underway
The ambitious mission will see four astronauts spend five days in space. (BBC)
+ It’s also the riskiest private mission to date—they’ve got limited life support. (CNN)
2 The first artificially intelligent iPhone is here
But its Apple Intelligence software is far from infallible. (WP $)
+ Not all of the AI features will be available when the iPhone 16 goes on sale. (FT $)
+ Here’s a list of everything Apple announced during its annual keynote. (WSJ $)
3 How to weather this winter’s viral illnesses
Colds, flu, and covid will be doing the rounds. (Vox)
+ How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Apple and Google owe Europe billions of euros in fines
Both companies have lost appeals against European Union rulings. (CNN)
+ It’s a major victory for European regulators seeking to curb Big Tech. (WP $)
5 We’re developing a new weapon for the war against antibiotic resistance
In the form of trapping bacteria between hostile viruses and antibiotics. (Knowable Magazine)
+ How CRISPR could help to make UTIs a thing of the past. (Wired $)
+ How bacteria-fighting viruses could go mainstream. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Can you spot an AI-generated video?
It’s a lot harder than you may think. (NYT $)
+ AI slop and social media is a match made in heaven. (The Atlantic $)
+ Audible will invite US audiobook narrators to create AI models of their voices. (Bloomberg $)
+ What this futuristic Olympics video says about the state of generative AI. (MIT Technology Review)
7 We’re still waiting for useful robots
The former head of Google’s robotic moonshot project has some ideas about how we should build them.(Wired $)
+ Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment? (MIT Technology Review)
8 How solar panels can help boost biodiversity efforts
The same patch of land can help to address two crises at once. (New Yorker $)
9 Elon Musk may be summoned before UK Parliament
But, like Mark Zuckerberg before him, he may simply choose not to appear. (FT $)
10 Doctors can’t get enough of this medical TikTok star
His insider jokes are resonating with fellow physicians. (NY Mag $)
Quote of the day
“One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
—Julia Tarver Wood, a lawyer for the US Department of Justice, makes her opening statement during the first day of Google’s latest antitrust trial, Ars Technica reports.
The big story
How one mine could unlock billions in EV subsidies
January 2024
On a pine farm north of the tiny town of Tamarack, Minnesota, Talon Metals has uncovered one of America’s densest nickel deposits—and now it wants to begin extracting it.
If regulators approve the mine, it could mark the starting point in what the company claims would become the country’s first complete domestic nickel supply chain, running from the bedrock beneath the Minnesota earth to the batteries in electric vehicles across the nation.
MIT Technology Review wanted to provide a clearer sense of the law’s on-the-ground impact by zeroing in on a single project and examining how these rich subsidies could be unlocked at each point along the supply chain. Take a look at what we found out.
—James Temple
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