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Computing

- How gamification took over the world

Computing

How gamification took over the world

J. Juniper Friedman   13 Jun, 2024

It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one?

Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question to ask. Life, after all, is hard. And while video games are too, there’s something almost magical about the way they can promote sustained bouts of superhuman concentration and resolve.

For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to play more games. For a handful of consultants, startup gurus, and game designers in the late 2000s, it became the key to unlocking our true human potential.

In her 2010 TED Talk, “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” the game designer Jane McGonigal called this engaged state “blissful productivity.” “There’s a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week,” she said. “It’s because we know when we’re playing a game that we’re actually happier working hard than we are relaxing or hanging out. We know that we are optimized as human beings to do hard and meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time.”

McGonigal’s basic pitch was this: By making the real world more like a video game, we could harness the blissful productivity of millions of people and direct it at some of humanity’s thorniest problems—things like poverty, obesity, and climate change. The exact details of how to accomplish this were a bit vague (play more games?), but her objective was clear: “My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games.”

While the word “gamification” never came up during her talk, by that time anyone following the big-ideas circuit (TED, South by Southwest, DICE, etc.) or using the new Foursquare app would have been familiar with the basic idea. Broadly defined as the application of game design elements and principles to non-game activities—think points, levels, missions, badges, leaderboards, reinforcement loops, and so on—gamification was already being hawked as a revolutionary new tool for transforming education, work, health and fitness, and countless other parts of life.

Instead of liberating us, gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control.

Adding “world-saving” to the list of potential benefits was perhaps inevitable, given the prevalence of that theme in video-game storylines. But it also spoke to gamification’s foundational premise: the idea that reality is somehow broken. According to McGonigal and other gamification boosters, the real world is insufficiently engaging and motivating, and too often it fails to make us happy. Gamification promises to remedy this design flawby engineering a new reality, one that transforms the dull, difficult, and depressing parts of life into something fun and inspiring. Studying for exams, doing household chores, flossing, exercising, learning a new language—there was no limit to the tasks that could be turned into games, making everything IRL better.

Today, we live in an undeniably gamified world. We stand up and move around to close colorful rings and earn achievement badges on our smartwatches; we meditate and sleep to recharge our body batteries; we plant virtual trees to be more productive; we chase “likes” and “karma” on social media sites and try to swipe our way toward social connection. And yet for all the crude gamelike elements that have been grafted onto our lives, the more hopeful and collaborative world that gamification promised more than a decade ago seems as far away as ever. Instead of liberating us from drudgery and maximizing our potential, gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control.

Con game

This was not an unforeseeable outcome. From the start, a small but vocal group of journalists and game designers warned against the fairy-tale thinking and facile view of video games that they saw in the concept of gamification. Adrian Hon, author of You’ve Been Played, a recent book that chronicles its dangers, was one of them.

“As someone who was building so-called ‘serious games’ at the time the concept was taking off, I knew that a lot of the claims being made around the possibility of games to transform people’s behaviors and change the world were completely overblown,” he says.

Hon isn’t some knee-jerk polemicist. A trained neuroscientist who switched to a career in game design and development, he’s the co-creator of Zombies, Run!—one of the most popular gamified fitness apps in the world. While he still believes games can benefit and enrich aspects of our nongaming lives, Hon says a one-size-fits-all approach is bound to fail. For this reason, he’s firmly against both the superficial layering of generic points, leaderboards, and missions atop everyday activities and the more coercive forms of gamification that have invaded the workplace.

SELMAN DESIGN

Ironically, it’s these broad and varied uses that make criticizing the practice so difficult. As Hon notes in his book, gamification has always been a fast-moving target, varying dramatically in scale, scope, and technology over the years. As the concept has evolved, so too have its applications, whether you think of the gambling mechanics that now encourage users of dating apps to keep swiping, the “quests” that compel exhausted Uber drivers to complete just a few more trips, or the utopian ambition of using gamification to save the world.

In the same way that AI’s lack of a fixed definition today makes it easy to dismiss any one critique for not addressing some other potential definition of it, so too do gamification’s varied interpretations. “I remember giving talks critical of gamification at gamification conferences, and people would come up to me afterwards and be like, ‘Yeah, bad gamification is bad, right? But we’re doing good gamification,’” says Hon. (They weren’t.)

For some critics, the very idea of “good gamification” was anathema. Their main gripe with the term and practice was, and remains, that it has little to nothing to do with actual games.

“A game is about play and disruption and creativity and ambiguity and surprise,” wrote the late Jeff Watson, a game designer, writer, and educator who taught at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Gamification is about the opposite—the known, the badgeable, the quantifiable. “It’s about ‘checking in,’ being tracked … [and] becoming more regimented. It’s a surveillance and discipline system—a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Beware its lure.”

Another game designer, Margaret Robertson, has argued that gamification should really be called “pointsification,” writing: “What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards.”

For the author and game designer Ian Bogost, the entire concept amounted to a marketing gimmick. In a now-famous essay published in the Atlantic in 2011, he likened gamification to the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit—that is, a strategy intended to persuade or coerce without regard for actual truth.

“The idea of learning or borrowing lessons from game design and applying them to other areas was never the issue for me,” Bogost told me. “Rather, it was not doing that—acknowledging that there’s something mysterious, powerful, and compelling about games, but rather than doing the hard work, doing no work at all and absconding with the spirit of the form.”

Gaming the system

So how did a misleading term for a misunderstood process that’s probably just bullshit come to infiltrate virtually every part of our lives? There’s no one simple answer. But gamification’s meteoric rise starts to make a lot more sense when you look at the period that gave birth to the idea.

The late 2000s and early 2010s were, as many have noted, a kind of high-water mark for techno-optimism. For people both inside the tech industry and out, there was a sense that humanity had finally wrapped its arms around a difficult set of problems, and that technology was going to help us squeeze out some solutions. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, money was more or less free, and “____ can save the world” articles were legion (with ____ being everything from “eating bugs” to “design thinking”).

This was also the era that produced the 10,000-hours rule of success, the long tail, the four-hour workweek, the wisdom of crowds, nudge theory, and a number of other highly simplistic (or, often, flat-out wrong) theories about the way humans, the internet, and the world work.

“All of a sudden you had VC money and all sorts of important, high-net-worth people showing up at game developer conferences.”

Ian Bogost, author and game designer

Adding video games to this heady stew of optimism gave the game industry something it had long sought but never achieved: legitimacy. Even with games ascendant in popular culture—and on track to eclipse both the film and music industries in terms of revenue—they still were largely seen as a frivolous, productivity-squandering, violence-encouraging form of entertainment. Seemingly overnight, gamification changed all that.

“There was definitely this black-sheep mentality in the game development community—the sense that what we had been doing for decades was just a joke to people,” says Bogost. “All of a sudden you had VC money and all sorts of important, high-net-worth people showing up at game developer conferences, and it was like, ‘Finally someone’s noticing. They realize that we have something to offer.’”

This wasn’t just flattering; it was intoxicating. Gamification took a derided pursuit and recast it as a force for positive change, a way to make the real world better. While  enthusiastic calls to “build a game layer on top of reality” may sound dystopian to many of us today, the sentiment didn’t necessarily have the same ominous undertones at the end of the aughts.

Combine the cultural recasting of games with an array of cheaper and faster technologies—GPS, ubiquitous and reliable mobile internet, powerful smartphones, Web 2.0 tools and services—and you arguably had all the ingredients needed for gamification’s rise. In a very real sense, reality in 2010 was ready to be gamified. Or to put it a slightly different way: Gamification was an idea perfectly suited for its moment.

Gaming behavior

Fine, you might be asking at this point, but does it work? Surely, companies like Apple, Uber, Strava, Microsoft, Garmin, and others wouldn’t bother gamifying their products and services if there were no evidence of the strategy’s efficacy. The answer to the question, unfortunately, is super annoying: Define work.

Because gamification is so pervasive and varied, it’s hard to address its effectiveness in any direct or comprehensive way. But one can confidently say this: Gamification did not save the world. Climate change still exists. As do obesity, poverty, and war. Much of generic gamification’s power supposedly resides in its ability to nudge or steer us toward, or away from, certain behaviors using competition (challenges and leaderboards), rewards (points and achievement badges), and other sources of positive and negative feedback.

Gamification is, and has always been, a way to induce specific behaviors in people using virtual carrots and sticks.

On that front, the results are mixed. Nudge theory lost much of its shine with academics in 2022 after a meta-analysis of previous studies concluded that, after correcting for publication bias, there wasn’t much evidence it worked to change behavior at all. Still, there are a lot of ways to nudge and a lot of behaviors to modify. The fact remains that plenty of people claim to be highly motivated to close their rings, earn their sleep crowns, or hit or exceed some increasingly ridiculous number of steps on their Fitbits (see humorist David Sedaris).

Sebastian Deterding, a leading researcher in the field, argues that gamification can work, but its successes tend to be really hard to replicate. Not only do academics not know what works, when, and how, according to Deterding, but “we mostly have just-so stories without data or empirical testing.”

SELMAN DESIGN

In truth, gamification acolytes were always pulling from an old playbook—one that dates back to the early 20th century. Then, behaviorists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner saw human behaviors (a category that for Skinner included thoughts, actions, feelings, and emotions) not as the products of internal mental states or cognitive processes but, rather, as the result of external forces—forces that could conveniently be manipulated.

If Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning, which doled out rewards to positively reinforce certain behaviors, sounds a lot like Amazon’s “Fulfillment Center Games,” which dole out rewards to compel workers to work harder, faster, and longer—well, that’s not a coincidence. Gamification is, and has always been, a way to induce specific behaviors in people using virtual carrots and sticks.

Sometimes this may work; other times not. But ultimately, as Hon points out, the question of efficacy may be beside the point. “There is no before or after to compare against if your life is always being gamified,” he writes. “There isn’t even a static form of gamification that can be measured, since the design of coercive gamification is always changing, a moving target that only goes toward greater and more granular intrusion.”

The game of life

Like any other art form, video games offer a staggering array of possibilities. They can educate, entertain, foster social connection, inspire, and encourage us to see the world in different ways. Some of the best ones manage to do all of this at once.

Yet for many of us, there’s the sense today that we’re stuck playing an exhausting game that we didn’t opt into. This one assumes that our behaviors can be changed with shiny digital baubles, constant artificial competition, and meaningless prizes. Even more insulting, the game acts as if it exists for our benefit—promising to make us fitter, happier, and more productive—when in truth it’s really serving the commercial and business interests of its makers.

Metaphors can be an imperfect but necessary way to make sense of the world. Today, it’s not uncommon to hear talk of leveling up, having a God Mode mindset, gaining XP, and turning life’s difficulty settings up (or down). But the metaphor that resonates most for me—the one that seems to neatly capture our current predicament—is that of the NPC, or non-player character.

NPCs are the “Sisyphean machines” of video games, programmed to follow a defined script forever and never question or deviate. They’re background players in someone else’s story, typically tasked with furthering a specific plotline or performing some manual labor. To call someone an NPC in real life is to accuse them of just going through the motions, not thinking for themselves, not being able to make their own decisions. This, for me, is gamification’s real end result. It’s acquiescence pretending to be empowerment. It strips away the very thing that makes games unique—a sense of agency—and then tries to mask that with crude stand-ins for accomplishment.

So what can we do? Given the reach and pervasiveness of gamification, critiquing it at this point can feel a little pointless, like railing against capitalism. And yet its own failed promises may point the way to a possible respite. If gamifying the world has turned our lives into a bad version of a video game, perhaps this is the perfect moment to reacquaint ourselves with why actual video games are great in the first place. Maybe, to borrow an idea from McGonigal, we should all start playing better games.

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.

Culture

- Supershoes are reshaping distance running

Culture

Supershoes are reshaping distance running

J. Juniper Friedman   25 Jun, 2024

Athletes train at

Kipchoge Keino Stadium

in Eldoret, Kenya.

The track at Moi University’s Eldoret Town Campus doesn’t look like a facility designed for champions. Its surface is a modest mix of clay and gravel, and it’s 10 meters longer than the standard 400. Runners use a classroom chair to mark the start and finish. Yet it’s as good a place as any to spot the athletes who make Kenya the world’s greatest distance-running powerhouse.

On a morning in January, nearly a hundred athletes, including Olympic medalists and winners of major marathons, have gathered here for “speedwork”: high-intensity intervals that the best runners make look effortless. The track is packed with so much talent that it is easy to miss the man of the moment, a gangly runner in a turquoise shirt and thick-soled Nike shoes. In just over a year, Kelvin Kiptum had gone from virtual unknown to global phenom, running three of the seven fastest marathons in history and setting the official men’s world record, 2:00:35, in Chicago in October 2023. On this day, he was less than three months out from his next race, in Rotterdam, where he planned to try for something once unthinkable: completing the 26-mile, 385-yard event in less than two hours.

Although fans were left in awe by Kiptum’s Chicago triumph, not everyone celebrated the shoes that had propelled him to victory. Since 2016, when Nike introduced the Vaporfly, a paradigm-shifting shoe that helped athletes run more efficiently (and therefore faster), the elite running world has muddled through a period of soul-searching over the impact of high-tech footwear on the sport. The Vaporfly was only the beginning. Today, most major brands offer multiple versions of the “supershoe”—a technology that combines a lightweight, energy-returning foam with a carbon-fiber plate for stiffness. “Superspikes” based on a similar concept are now widely used on the track as well. Performances have adjusted accordingly. Since 2020, according to the sport’s governing body, World Athletics, runners wearing so-called advanced footwear technology have broken all road and outdoor track world records in distances from 5,000 meters to the marathon—a concentration unlike any in the sport’s modern history.

The steady stream of footwear innovation has brought unending speculation over which brand’s shoes are best. Critics say that places too much emphasis on gear at the expense of runners’ ability.

Some of the most impressive feats have come in the marathon. In a 2019 exhibition that wasn’t eligible for records, Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge covered the distance in an astonishing 1:59:40. Last September, Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa lowered the women’s world record by more than two minutes in Berlin, running 2:11:53 in the ultralight Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1, a shoe designed to be worn only once. For his own record two weeks later, Kiptum wore the slightly heavier yet uber-bouncy Nike Alphafly 3. The uninitiated could have been forgiven for thinking the white platform shoes, which almost looked designed for walking on the moon, belonged on a sci-fi set rather than the streets of Chicago.

To some, this is all a sign of progress. In much of the world, elite running lacks a widespread following. Record-breaking adds a layer of excitement. And as I’d hear repeatedly from top athletes and coaches in Kenya, the shoes have benefits beyond the clock: most important, they help minimize wear on the body and enable faster recovery from hard workouts and races.

Most marathoners prefer the clay and gravel track at Moi University’s Eldoret Town Campus but shift to Kipchoge Keino Stadium (shown here) when it rains.

PATRICK MEINHARDT

Still, some argue that they’ve changed the sport too quickly. Not only has it become hard to compare new records fairly with old ones, but the steady stream of footwear innovation has brought unending speculation over which brand’s shoes are best, and critics say that places too much emphasis on gear at the expense of runners’ ability. Laboratory research also suggests that some runners get a greater boost from the technology than others, depending on their biomechanics. Ross Tucker, a South African sports scientist and outspoken supershoe critic, has argued that these differences make it effectively impossible to “evaluate performances between different athletes independent of this nagging doubt over what the shoes do.”

How much of Kiptum’s success was due to his talent, training, drive, and mental toughness—and how much to his body’s responsiveness to Nike’s tech? It’s difficult to know—and, tragically, he’s not around to offer input. A few weeks after I saw him in Eldoret, a city of several hundred thousand that serves as Kenya’s unofficial running capital, he and coach Gervais Hakizimana were killed in a late-night car crash en route to the nearby town they used as a base for training.

Shoes were the last thing on the mind of Kenya’s running community in the wake of Kiptum’s death. Yet his dramatic rise offers a window into their significance. Although the shoe-tech revolution has affected runners the world over, in few places has its effect been more pronounced than Kenya, where running is not only a sport but an exit strategy from a life of poverty. In this sense, the new high-tech shoes are something of a mixed blessing, giving a boost to established runners with company sponsorships while forming an obstacle to those still pining for their big break. Even the cheapest models here sell for well over $100—no small sum for young people who mostly come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Today most Kenyan athletes, whether beginners or household names with six-figure shoe contracts, have come to accept that there’s no turning back—that even the most elemental of sports is not immune to scientific innovation. Still, the new shoes are transforming the sport in myriad ways, throwing new variables into training and racing, exacerbating inequalities between athletes, and altering the collective imagination of what performances are possible. They’re also writing a new, tech-fueled chapter to one of the sports world’s most unlikely tales: how a small corner of one African country became such a dominant force in running, and how running, in turn, became the stuff of dreams for so many of its youth.

Engineered to Fly

Supershoes are carefully optimized to help runners go the distance

Beneath the boat-like exterior, supershoes boast a variety of features designed to lower the energetic cost of running, allowing athletes to go faster and help them endure the strain of a long-distance race.

The most crucial feature is the (often proprietary) foams that are used to construct parts of the sole. These absorb the impact of the foot and return energy from each foot strike back to the runner. Some use other features, like the orange “air pod” in the Nike Alphafly 3 (bottom), for an added bounce.

Bounciness alone would not provide much advantage—today’s foams are so soft and thick (World Athletics allows up to 40 millimeters in competitions) that without additional support they would make the feet highly unstable. To give the shoes structure, manufacturers add rigid components like carbon-fiber plates or rods, typically sandwiched between layers of foam.

These rigid parts and foams are combined with wafer-thin mesh uppers to create shoes that are increasingly ultralight: the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1 (top), released in 2023, weighs just 4.9 ounces (measured in the men’s size 9). Lighter shoes also reduce the energy expended with each stride—enabling runners to move at a given pace with less effort.

The Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1 was designed to be worn just once

The Nike Vaporfly was the first shoe to combine energy-returning foam with a carbon-fiber plate for stiffness.

The late Kelvin Kiptum set the official men’s world record in Chicago last October while wearing Nike’s Alphafly 3.

A bounce in the step

To understand the impact of shoes on running performance, it’s helpful to think of the human body as a vehicle. In a long-distance event like the marathon, competitors are limited by three physiological factors. VO_2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen the body can absorb, is akin to an engine’s horsepower—it effectively measures the upper limits of a runner’s aerobic capacity. Lactate threshold, the point at which lactic acid accumulates in the blood faster than the body can remove it, is like the redline on a dashboard tachometer—it tells you how close you can run to your VO_2 max without succumbing to exhaustion. The third parameter, running economy, describes the rate at which a runner expends energy, similar to gas mileage. A light, aerodynamic coupe will use less fuel, or energy, to travel at a given speed than a hulking SUV. So too will a lithe, efficiently striding marathoner.

It is running economy that’s affected by footwear—most obviously when it comes to weight. As a leg in stride moves through space, added weight closer to the end (i.e., the foot) has a greater energetic cost than weight closer to the center of gravity. Soles made with foams that are soft, or compliant (good at storing mechanical energy), and resilient (good at returning it) can also lead to significant energy savings. Studies have shown that shoes with stiffening elements, like plates, can improve running economy as well, by reducing the muscular effort of the feet.

Benson Kipruto (left) and Cyprian Kotut stretch at the 2 Running Club, a training camp sponsored by Adidas in Kapsabet, Kenya.

PATRICK MEINHARDT

The trick, for shoe manufacturers, has long been to optimize these properties—and for much of competitive running’s history, they weren’t particularly good at it. As recently as the 1970s, shoes worn for racing had clunky rubber soles and stiff leather or canvas uppers—not so different from the O’Sullivan’s “Live Rubber Heels” that propelled the American Johnny Hayes to victory in the marathon at the 1908 Olympics, the first run at today’s standard distance. The 1975 release of the first shoe with a midsole made from ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), an air-infused foam, heralded a new generation of footwear that was lighter and bouncier. With a few exceptions, innovations over the next four decades would focus on making EVA shoes as light as possible.

That all changed with the Vaporfly. After its release, most attention focused on its curved carbon-fiber plate, which many suspected functioned like a spring. Research has shown that to be incorrect: while the plate may add some energy-saving stiffness, says Wouter Hoogkamer, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, its main benefit appears to be in stabilizing the technology’s most vital component: a thick midsole material made from a foamed polymer known as polyether block amide, or PEBA. Not only is this foam light; tests in 2017 at Hoogkamer’s lab, then at the University of Colorado, Boulder, found that a Vaporfly prototype stored and returned significantly more energy than the leading marathon shoes at the time: the EVA-soled Nike Streak and the Adidas Boost, made with a thermoplastic polyurethane. Hoogkamer’s team also recruited 18 high-performing athletes and tracked their energy expenditure, measured in watts per kilogram of body weight, as they ran for five-minute bouts on a treadmill at different paces in all three. The Vaporfly, they found, improved running economy by an average of 4%—in part by increasing the amount of ground covered with each stride. More recent studies have found a slightly smaller benefit when comparing the Vaporfly and other supershoes with “control shoes” over short distances. However, preliminary data from a Brigham Young University study, which tested subjects during runs lasting an hour, suggests that supershoes may offer a greater running-economy benefit as an athlete progresses through a race, in part because softer foams help reduce muscle fatigue. “A runner with a 3% running-economy benefit in the lab might be at 4% or 5% at the end of a marathon,” says Iain Hunter, a professor of biomechanics who led the research.

Coach Claudio Berardelli estimates that his runners cover at least 60% of their mileage in supershoes.

PATRICK MEINHARDT

Although it’s widely accepted that better running economy translates into faster racing, the exact impact on elite performances is subject to uncertainty. At world-record marathon pace, statistical models predict, 4% better running economy would lower time by more than three minutes. But few runners and coaches I spoke with in Kenya believe the technology is worth that much, even as they acknowledge that it’s become essential to competing at the highest level. Many note that footwear has advanced alongside better marathon-specific training and new hydrogel-based sports drinks that make it possible to digest more calories during races. There’s also the scourge of doping: drug-related offenses had left 81 Kenyan athletes ineligible to compete in World Athletics events as of May 1, though Kipchoge has never tested positive, and neither had Kiptum.

Speaking at the track after Kiptum’s January workout, his coach, Hakizimana, estimated that the shoes improved Kiptum’s marathon time by a minute, or perhaps a little more. The technology, he stressed, was only one factor among many that contributed to Kiptum’s rapid ascent. There was the punishing training; the way he’d “attack” with so much confidence in races; the stoicism with which he approached the running lifestyle.

On top of that, there was the influence of the generations before him, who helped transform a land of unparalleled running talent into the home of champions.

From talent to big business

While Kenya’s runners are renowned today for their marathoning dominance, the country first emerged on the global stage in track races. The watershed moment came at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, where Kenya won eight medals in track and field, including gold in the men’s 1,500 meters, 10,000 meters, and 3,000-meter steeplechase. For the next two decades, the country’s athletes largely shied away from the marathon: according to Moses Tanui, a Kenyan who won the Boston Marathon twice in the 1990s, many men believed the event would prevent them from fathering children. Eventually, though, as money shifted away from the track and toward the roads, the longer distance had greater allure. Today, the winner of a major race like Boston can expect a several-hundred-thousand-dollar payday, between appearance fees, prize money, and shoe-company bonuses. As of May, according to World Athletics, Kenya-born athletes accounted for 28 of the event’s all-time 50 fastest men and 17 of its 50 fastest women.

Kenya’s outsize success is also closely linked to the concept of running economy. Studies of the Kalenjin, a community of nine closely related tribes that produce the majority of Kenya’s top athletes, point to several physical attributes more common in this group that are conducive to an energy-efficient gait, including thin lower legs, long Achilles tendons, and a high ratio of leg length to torso. Active childhoods in the highlands to the west of the Great Rift Valley, where altitudes between 6,000 and 9,000 feet help boost aerobic capacity, is likely a component of their success as well. It’s the prospect of financial rewards, though, that drives participation—and transforms raw talent into records. Although Kenya is one of Africa’s most industrialized countries, even top university graduates struggle to find well-paid jobs. In the villages and small towns of the Rift Valley region, where economic prospects are especially limited, many are drawn to running by default. “After high school, if you don’t continue with your studies, you can run or you can be idle,” says Brigid Kosgei, a Kenyan who held the women’s marathon world record before Assefa. “So you run—you try your best.”

It is in this context that the stakes of shoe technology are so high: in top competitions, places worth tens of thousands of dollars—representing new homes for parents and school fees for children—can come down to seconds. For a few years after Nike’s release of the Vaporfly, the odds were stacked against runners sponsored by other companies, whose contracts prevented them from using competitors’ products. The gap was partly psychological: Cyprian Kotut, an Adidas-sponsored runner who’s won marathons in Paris and Hamburg, recalls feeling disillusioned mid-race next to Nike-shod competitors. Some sought out workarounds. One cobbler in Ethiopia gained fame for his skill in attaching Vaporfly soles to Adidas uppers—thereby helping some Adidas runners stealthily utilize the Nike tech.

“After high school, if you don’t continue with your studies, you can run or you can be idle … So you run—you try your best.”

Brigid Kosgei, Kenyan who held the women’s marathon world record

Today, the playing field is far more level—at least among established pros. At the 2 Running Club, an Adidas-sponsored camp set amid rolling tea fields south of Eldoret, Kotut and his teammates give me a glimpse of their Adizero carbon-fiber lineup. There’s the ultra-padded Prime X for long sessions on pavement; the more compact Takumi Sen for speedwork; one pair of the featherlight black-and-white Evo, which Kotut used to run a personal best of 2:04:34 last year in Amsterdam. Claudio Berardelli, the group’s Italian coach, estimates that his runners cover at least 60% of their mileage in supershoes. For most, they’ve become as vital to training as they have to racing. Not only do they enable faster workouts, says Benson Kipruto, a club member who won the Tokyo Marathon in March and finished second to Kiptum in Chicago last fall; the softer foams also promote quicker recovery—to the point where the day after a hard session, “your legs are a bit fresh.”

Many credit the shoes with keeping runners healthy. David Kirui, a physiotherapist who’s treated many of Kenya’s top marathoners, estimates that overuse-related injuries, like stress fractures, Achilles tendinitis, and iliotibial band syndrome, are down at least 25%. Several veteran runners tell me the shoes have helped extend their careers, and therefore their earning power. “In the old shoes, after 10 marathons you’d be completely exhausted,” says Jonathan Maiyo, who’s been an elite road racer since 2007. “Now 10 marathons are like nothing.”

Who benefits?

Runners like those in Berardelli’s group are a chosen few. The majority of athletes training in Kenya have never made any money from the sport; many run in secondhand shoes gifted by friends or purchased in local markets, and few can afford supershoes of their own. One day in Iten, a small town north of Eldoret that clings to the edge of the Rift Valley escarpment, I meet Daisy Kandie, a 23-year-old who moved here after high school and is among the hundreds of aspiring pros who toil along the town’s clay roads each morning. Her goal is the same as most: get noticed by an agent, most likely a foreigner, who’ll provide gear, arrange races outside the country, and in some cases negotiate a contract with a shoe company.

Among Iten’s legion of dreamers, Kandie is luckier than most: her parents see her as a future breadwinner, so they’ve supported her quest, and even sold a plot of farmland so they could buy her a pair of neon-green-and-pink Nike Alphaflys. The shoes were cheaper in Iten—approximately $180—than they would have been in the US; it’s an open secret that some runners with sponsorships sell shoes they get for free to local shops, which resell them at below-market prices. That money, nonetheless, represents a lot of sacrifice: Kandie pays roughly that amount for a year’s worth of rent on the small room she keeps at the edge of town. The cost of the shoes, which she refers to as her “Sub-2” for the idea of a below-two-hour marathon, doesn’t make her resentful. Instead, she says, having the latest gear helps keep her motivated. Still, while she uses them only for fast runs twice a week, as well as in occasional local races, their soles have considerable wear, and she doesn’t have a plan for a replacement.

“By then I’ll have gone,” she said, referring to racing outside Kenya, when I asked what she’ll do for her next pair. “I have hopes.”

A sign welcomes travelers to Iten, a small town north of Eldoret that clings to the edge of the Rift Valley escarpment

PATRICK MEINHARDT

Although supershoe technology has raised the cost of doing business for Kandie and others like her, it’s most controversial for its role in skewing results at the very top. Hoogkamer’s landmark study of the Vaporfly, which found that the shoes improved running economy by 4% on average, also found that the benefit ranged from roughly 2% to 6% depending on the athlete.

Subsequent research involving other supershoes has documented a similar range of responses. One 2023 study by Adidas-affiliated researchers, which tested seven elite Kenyans in three carbon-fiber prototypes and a traditional racing flat, recorded a runner using 11% less energy in one shoe and a runner using 11% more energy in another. Melanie Knopp, the study’s lead author, cautions that each athlete was tested in each shoe only once, and that some of the subjects were unfamiliar with running on a treadmill. Nonetheless, researchers generally agree that individual athletes “respond” to some shoes better than others. Why isn’t entirely clear: Hoogkamer estimates there may be 20 variables at play, including weight, foot length, calf muscle strength, and whether the runner strikes the ground with the forefoot, midfoot, or heel. Shoe geometry matters as well. Abdi Nageeye, a Dutch marathoner who trains in Iten and finished second to Kipchoge at the Tokyo Olympics, says he struggled with the first two versions of Nike’s Alphafly; as a 120-pound heel-striker, it forced him to “skip” in a way that felt unnatural. He says the newest Alphafly model, which has a greater drop in “stack height”—or foam thickness—from heel to toe, is a much better fit.

“If everybody is in their ideal shoe, are there still some people who’ll get more benefit than others? The answer is probably yes.”

Dustin Joubert, a supershoe expert and professor of kinesiology at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas

What all this means for the marathon’s integrity is a hotly debated topic. Today, many pro runners in the West undergo treadmill-based metabolic tests to determine which shoe works best, and in some cases which company to sign with. That’s less common in Kenya, where greater competition leaves athletes less room to negotiate. Among runners I spoke with, most of those with shoe contracts said their sponsor has a model they like, but it’s difficult to know if it’s their absolute best fit. Even if it is, some suspect that certain runners are better suited to the supershoe technology more broadly. “If everybody is in their ideal shoe, are there still some people who’ll get more benefit than others?” asks Dustin Joubert, a supershoe expert and professor of kinesiology at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. “The answer is probably yes.”

Daisy Kandie’s Alphaflys cost $180 on the secondary market. She pays roughly that amount each year to rent a small room on the outskirts of Iten.

PATRICK MEINHARDT

Despite the benefits his runners gain in training, Berardelli says the shoes have introduced “question marks”: in a marathon today, he says, it’s less clear than ever whether the winner is indeed the runner who’s the strongest or has the smartest racing tactics. Stephen Cherono, a Kenyan who competed for Qatar as Saif Saaeed Shaheen and held the world record in the 3,000-meter steeplechase from 2004 until it was broken with the aid of superspikes last year, believes World Athletics should have placed greater restrictions on the technology before it was too late: although the global body maintains limits on sole thickness and prohibits the use of shoes that aren’t made available for sale, these guidelines are meant to help steer innovation, not squelch it. Cherono tells me he’s a big fan of Formula 1, the global motor sport, but worries that running, in its focus on performance engineering, is becoming too much like it. “Too often the conversation is now about the shoe and not the person wearing it,” he says.

What might have been

If there’s one thing supershoe advocates and critics can agree upon, it’s that Kelvin Kiptum operated on another level. His margin of victory in Chicago—nearly three and a half minutes—was so large that some joked second-place Kipruto had won the race for mortals. Like most runners in Kenya, Kiptum grew up in a farming family where money was tight. When he began training as a teenager, he often ran barefoot; occasionally, pros he tagged along with gave him shoes. Among them was Hakizimana, a Rwandan who trained near Kiptum’s home and took him on as a protégé when his own running began to falter. After a stint training to be an electrician, Kiptum began running full-time in 2018; four years later, in his marathon debut, he ran the third-fastest time in history. Atypically, in all three of his marathons, he ran the second half faster than the first—perhaps because Nike’s PEBA foam had helped “save” his legs, or perhaps because his training was so grueling. Most world-class Kenyan marathoners top out around 220 kilometers per week. According to Hakizimana, Kiptum would often run up to 280, or roughly a marathon’s distance every day.

Kandie out for a run with friends in Iten.

PATRICK MEINHARDT

One month to the day after I watched Kiptum circling the Eldoret track, completing 1,000-meter repeats at roughly the pace of a two-hour marathon, I gather with hundreds of others on a property he’d purchased outside town, where he is being buried according to Kalenjin tradition. The crowd again includes a who’s-who list of champions; this time, instead of running gear, they are dressed in suits or black T-shirts emblazoned with the record-holder’s image. Their mourning is both for a man who died far too young—Kiptum was listed as 24, though he was likely at least a few years older—and for a remarkable performance that many had expected to be just around the corner. Entering Chicago, Kiptum had been dealing with an injury and wasn’t even in top shape, according to his training partner Daniel Kemboi. Ahead of Rotterdam, Kemboi says, “he was so confident.” Very few in Eldoret doubted he would shatter the two-hour barrier.

At some point that afternoon, my mind drifts to the shoes. Kiptum had been an extraordinary competitor regardless of what was on his feet. Still, absent supershoe technology, the prospect of a sub-two-hour marathon would never have been part of his dramatic rags-to-riches story. In this sense, the shoes didn’t minimize his greatness, as critics like Cherono feared; if anything, they helped build his brand and turbocharged his pursuit of the Kenyan running dream—of achieving a better life through sport. Tragically, Kiptum’s path was cut short when he was only getting started. But someone else, in rigid shoes with bouncy soles, will come along to blaze their own.

Jonathan W. Rosen is a journalist who writes about Africa. He reported from Eldoret with assistance from Godfrey Kiprotich.

Artificial intelligence

- How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play

- Why does AI hallucinate?

- An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

Artificial intelligence

How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play

J. Juniper Friedman   20 Jun, 2024

First, a confession. I only got into playing video games a little over a year ago (I know, I know). A Christmas gift of an Xbox Series S “for the kids” dragged me—pretty easily, it turns out—into the world of late-night gaming sessions. I was immediately attracted to open-world games, in which you’re free to explore a vast simulated world and choose what challenges to accept. Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2), an open-world game set in the Wild West, blew my mind. I rode my horse through sleepy towns, drank in the saloon, visited a vaudeville theater, and fought off bounty hunters. One day I simply set up camp on a remote hilltop to make coffee and gaze down at the misty valley below me.

To make them feel alive, open-world games are inhabited by vast crowds of computer-controlled characters. These animated people—called NPCs, for “nonplayer characters”—populate the bars, city streets, or space ports of games. They make these virtual worlds feel lived in and full. Often—but not always—you can talk to them.

In open-world games like Red Dead Redemption 2, players can choose diverse interactions within the same simulated experience.

After a while, however, the repetitive chitchat (or threats) of a passing stranger forces you to bump up against the truth: This is just a game. It’s still fun—I had a whale of a time, honestly, looting stagecoaches, fighting in bar brawls, and stalking deer through rainy woods—but the illusion starts to weaken when you poke at it. It’s only natural. Video games are carefully crafted objects, part of a multibillion-dollar industry, that are designed to be consumed. You play them, you loot a few stagecoaches, you finish, you move on.

It may not always be like that. Just as it is upending other industries, generative AI is opening the door to entirely new kinds of in-game interactions that are open-ended, creative, and unexpected. The game may not always have to end.

Startups employing generative-AI models, like ChatGPT, are using them to create characters that don’t rely on scripts but, instead, converse with you freely. Others are experimenting with NPCs who appear to have entire interior worlds, and who can continue to play even when you, the player, are not around to watch. Eventually, generative AI could create game experiences that are infinitely detailed, twisting and changing every time you experience them.

The field is still very new, but it’s extremely hot. In 2022 the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz launched Games Fund, a $600 million fund dedicated to gaming startups. A huge number of these are planning to use AI in gaming. And the firm, also known as A16Z, has now invested in two studios that are aiming to create their own versions of AI NPCs. A second $600 million round was announced in April 2024.

Early experimental demos of these experiences are already popping up, and it may not be long before they appear in full games like RDR2. But some in the industry believe this development will not just make future open-world games incredibly immersive; it could change what kinds of game worlds or experiences are even possible. Ultimately, it could change what it means to play.

“What comes after the video game? You know what I mean?” says Frank Lantz, a game designer and director of the NYU Game Center. “Maybe we’re on the threshold of a new kind of game.”

These guys just won’t shut up

The way video games are made hasn’t changed much over the years. Graphics are incredibly realistic. Games are bigger. But the way in which you interact with characters, and the game world around you, uses many of the same decades-old conventions.

“In mainstream games, we’re still looking at variations of the formula we’ve had since the 1980s,” says Julian Togelius, a computer science professor at New York University who has a startup called Modl.ai that does in-game testing. Part of that tried-and-tested formula is a technique called a dialogue tree, in which all of an NPC’s possible responses are mapped out. Which one you get depends on which branch of the dialogue tree you have chosen. For example, say something rude about a passing NPC in RDR2 and the character will probably lash out—you have to quickly apologize to avoid a shootout (unless that’s what you want).

In the most expensive, high-profile games, the so-called AAA games like Elden Ring or Starfield, a deeper sense of immersion is created by using brute force to build out deep and vast dialogue trees. The biggest studios employ teams of hundreds of game developers who work for many years on a single game in which every line of dialogue is plotted and planned, and software is written so the in-game engine knows when to deploy that particular line. RDR2 reportedly contains an estimated 500,000 lines of dialogue, voiced by around 700 actors.

“You get around the fact that you can [only] do so much in the world by, like, insane amounts of writing, an insane amount of designing,” says Togelius.

Generative AI is already helping take some of that drudgery out of making new games. Jonathan Lai, a general partner at A16Z and one of Games Fund’s managers, says that most studios are using image-generating tools like Midjourney to enhance or streamline their work. And in a 2023 survey by A16Z, 87% of game studios said they were already using AI in their workflow in some way—and 99% planned to do so in the future. Many use AI agents to replace the human testers who look for bugs, such as places where a game might crash. In recent months, the CEO of the gaming giant EA said generative AI could be used in more than 50% of its game development processes.

Ubisoft, one of the biggest game developers, famous for AAA open-world games such as Assassin’s Creed, has been using a large-language-model-based AI tool called Ghostwriter to do some of the grunt work for its developers in writing basic dialogue for its NPCs. Ghostwriter generates loads of options for background crowd chatter, which the human writer can pick from or tweak. The idea is to free the humans up so they can spend that time on more plot-focused writing.

GEORGE WYLESOL

Ultimately, though, everything is scripted. Once you spend a certain number of hours on a game, you will have seen everything there is to see, and completed every interaction. Time to buy a new one.

But for startups like Inworld AI, this situation is an opportunity. Inworld, based in California, is building tools to make in-game NPCs that respond to a player with dynamic, unscripted dialogue and actions—so they never repeat themselves. The company, now valued at $500 million, is the best-funded AI gaming startup around thanks to backing from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other high-profile investors.

Role-playing games give us a unique way to experience different realities, explains Kylan Gibbs, Inworld’s CEO and founder. But something has always been missing. “Basically, the characters within there are dead,” he says.

“When you think about media at large, be it movies or TV or books, characters are really what drive our ability to empathize with the world,” Gibbs says. “So the fact that games, which are arguably the most advanced version of storytelling that we have, are lacking these live characters—it felt to us like a pretty major issue.”

Gamers themselves were pretty quick to realize that LLMs could help fill this gap. Last year, some came up with ChatGPT mods (a way to alter an existing game) for the popular role-playing game Skyrim. The mods let players interact with the game’s vast cast of characters using LLM-powered free chat. One mod even included OpenAI’s speech recognition software Whisper AI so that players could speak to the players with their voices, saying whatever they wanted, and have full conversations that were no longer restricted by dialogue trees.

The results gave gamers a glimpse of what might be possible but were ultimately a little disappointing. Though the conversations were open-ended, the character interactions were stilted, with delays while ChatGPT processed each request.

Inworld wants to make this type of interaction more polished. It’s offering a product for AAA game studios in which developers can create the brains of an AI NPC that can be then imported into their game. Developers use the company’s “Inworld Studio” to generate their NPC. For example, they can fill out a core description that sketches the character’s personality, including likes and dislikes, motivations, or useful backstory. Sliders let you set levels of traits such as introversion or extroversion, insecurity or confidence. And you can also use free text to make the character drunk, aggressive, prone to exaggeration—pretty much anything.

Developers can also add descriptions of how their character speaks, including examples of commonly used phrases that Inworld’s various AI models, including LLMs, then spin into dialogue in keeping with the character.

“Because there’s such reliance on a lot of labor-intensive scripting, it’s hard to get characters to handle a wide variety of ways a scenario might play out, especially as games become more and more open-ended.”

Jeff Orkin, founder, Bitpart

Game designers can also plug other information into the system: what the character knows and doesn’t know about the world (no Taylor Swift references in a medieval battle game, ideally) and any relevant safety guardrails (does your character curse or not?). Narrative controls will let the developers make sure the NPC is sticking to the story and isn’t wandering wildly off-base in its conversation. The idea is that the characters can then be imported into video-game graphics engines like Unity or Unreal Engine to add a body and features. Inworld is collaborating with the text-to-voice startup ElevenLabs to add natural-sounding voices.

Inworld’s tech hasn’t appeared in any AAA games yet, but at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in March 2024, the firm unveiled an early demo with Nvidia that showcased some of what will be possible. In Covert Protocol, each player operates as a private detective who must solve a case using input from the various in-game NPCs. Also at the GDC, Inworld unveiled a demo called NEO NPC that it had worked on with Ubisoft. In NEO NPC, a player could freely interact with NPCs using voice-to-text software and use conversation to develop a deeper relationship with them.

LLMs give us the chance to make games more dynamic, says Jeff Orkin, founder of Bitpart AI, a new startup that also aims to create entire casts of LLM-powered NPCs that can be imported into games. “Because there’s such reliance on a lot of labor-intensive scripting, it’s hard to get characters to handle a wide variety of ways a scenario might play out, especially as games become more and more open-ended,” he says.

Bitpart’s approach is in part inspired by Orkin’s PhD research at MIT’s Media Lab. There, he trained AIs to role-play social situations using game-play logs of humans doing the same things with each other in multiplayer games.

Bitpart’s casts of characters are trained using a large language model and then fine-tuned in a way that means the in-game interactions are not entirely open-ended and infinite. Instead, the company uses an LLM and other tools to generate a script covering a range of possible interactions, and then a human game designer will select some. Orkin describes the process as authoring the Lego bricks of the interaction. An in-game algorithm searches out specific bricks to string them together at the appropriate time.

Bitpart’s approach could create some delightful in-game moments. In a restaurant, for example, you might ask a waiter for something, but the bartender might overhear and join in. Bitpart’s AI currently works with Roblox. Orkin says the company is now running trials with AAA game studios, although he won’t yet say which ones.

But generative AI might do more than just enhance the immersiveness of existing kinds of games. It could give rise to completely new ways to play.

Making the impossible possible

When I asked Frank Lantz about how AI could change gaming, he talked for 26 minutes straight. His initial reaction to generative AI had been visceral: “I was like, oh my God, this is my destiny and is what I was put on the planet for.”

Lantz has been in and around the cutting edge of the game industry and AI for decades but received a cult level of acclaim a few years ago when he created the Universal Paperclips game. The simple in-browser game gives the player the job of producing as many paper clips as possible. It’s a riff on the famous thought experiment by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, which imagines an AI that is given the same task and optimizes against humanity’s interest by turning all the matter in the known universe into paper clips.

Lantz is bursting with ideas for ways to use generative AI. One is to experience a new work of art as it is being created, with the player participating in its creation. “You’re inside of something like Lord of the Rings as it’s being written. You’re inside a piece of literature that is unfolding around you in real time,” he says. He also imagines strategy games where the players and the AI work together to reinvent what kind of game it is and what the rules are, so it is never the same twice.

For Orkin, LLM-powered NPCs can make games unpredictable—and that’s exciting. “It introduces a lot of open questions, like what you do when a character answers you but that sends a story in a direction that nobody planned for,” he says.

Generative A I might do more than just enhance the immersiveness of existing kinds of games. It could give rise to completely new ways to play.

It might mean games that are unlike anything we’ve seen thus far. Gaming experiences that unspool as the characters’ relationships shift and change, as friendships start and end, could unlock entirely new narrative experiences that are less about action and more about conversation and personalities.

Togelius imagines new worlds built to react to the player’s own wants and needs, populated with NPCs that the player must teach or influence as the game progresses. Imagine interacting with characters whose opinions can change, whom you could persuade or motivate to act in a certain way—say, to go to battle with you. “A thoroughly generative game could be really, really good,” he says. “But you really have to change your whole expectation of what a game is.”

Lantz is currently working on a prototype of a game in which the premise is that you—the player—wake up dead, and the afterlife you are in is a low-rent, cheap version of a synthetic world. The game plays out like a noir in which you must explore a city full of thousands of NPCs powered by a version of ChatGPT, whom you must interact with to work out how you ended up there.

His early experiments gave him some eerie moments when he felt that the characters seemed to know more than they should, a sensation recognizable to people who have played with LLMs before. Even though you know they’re not alive, they can still freak you out a bit.

“If you run electricity through a frog’s corpse, the frog will move,” he says. “And if you run $10 million worth of computation through the internet … it moves like a frog, you know.”

But these early forays into generative-AI gaming have given him a real sense of excitement for what’s next: “I felt like, okay, this is a thread. There really is a new kind of artwork here.”

If an AI NPC talks and no one is around to listen, is there a sound?

AI NPCs won’t just enhance player interactions—they might interact with one another in weird ways. Red Dead Redemption 2’s NPCs each have long, detailed scripts that spell out exactly where they should go, what work they must complete, and how they’d react if anything unexpected occurred. If you want, you can follow an NPC and watch it go about its day. It’s fun, but ultimately it’s hard-coded.

NPCs built with generative AI could have a lot more leeway—even interacting with one another when the player isn’t there to watch. Just as people have been fooled into thinking LLMs are sentient, watching a city of generated NPCs might feel like peering over the top of a toy box that has somehow magically come alive.

We’re already getting a sense of what this might look like. At Stanford University, Joon Sung Park has been experimenting with AI-generated characters and watching to see how their behavior changes and gains complexity as they encounter one another.

Because large language models have sucked up the internet and social media, they actually contain a lot of detail about how we behave and interact, he says.

Gamers came up with ChatGPT mods for the popular role-playing game Skyrim.

Although 2016’s hugely hyped No Man’s Sky used procedural generation to create endless planets to explore, many saw it as a letdown.

In Covert Protocol, players operate as private detectives who must solve the case using input from various in-game NPCs

In Park’s recent research, he and colleagues set up a Sims-like game, called Smallville, with 25 simulated characters that had been trained using generative AI. Each was given a name and a simple biography before being set in motion. When left to interact with each other for two days, they began to exhibit humanlike conversations and behavior, including remembering each other and being able to talk about their past interactions.

For example, the researchers prompted one character to organize a Valentine’s Day party—and then let the simulation run. That character sent invitations around town, while other members of the community asked each other on dates to go to the party, and all turned up at the venue at the correct time. All of this was carried out through conversations, and past interactions between characters were stored in their “memories” as natural language.

For Park, the implications for gaming are huge. “This is exactly the sort of tech that the gaming community for their NPCs have been waiting for,” he says.

His research has inspired games like AI Town, an open-source interactive experience on GitHub that lets human players interact with AI NPCs in a simple top-down game. You can leave the NPCs to get along for a few days and check in on them, reading the transcripts of the interactions they had while you were away. Anyone is free to take AI Town’s code to build new NPC experiences through AI.

For Daniel De Freitas, cofounder of the startup Character AI, which lets users generate and interact with their own LLM-powered characters, the generative-AI revolution will allow new types of games to emerge—ones in which the NPCs don’t even need human players.

The player is “joining an adventure that is always happening, that the AIs are playing,” he imagines. “It’s the equivalent of joining a theme park full of actors, but unlike the actors, they truly ‘believe’ that they are in those roles.”

If you’re getting Westworld vibes right about now, you’re not alone. There are plenty of stories about people torturing or killing their simple Sims characters in the game for fun. Would mistreating NPCs that pass for real humans cross some sort of new ethical boundary? What if, Lantz asks, an AI NPC that appeared conscious begged for its life when you simulated torturing it?

It raises complex questions he adds. “One is: What are the ethical dimensions of pretend violence? And the other is: At what point do AIs become moral agents to which harm can be done?”

There are other potential issues too. An immersive world that feels real, and never ends, could be dangerously addictive. Some users of AI chatbots have already reported losing hours and even days in conversation with their creations. Are there dangers that the same parasocial relationships could emerge with AI NPCs?

“We may need to worry about people forming unhealthy relationships with game characters at some point,” says Togelius. Until now, players have been able to differentiate pretty easily between game play and real life. But AI NPCs might change that, he says: “If at some point what we now call ‘video games’ morph into some all-encompassing virtual reality, we will probably need to worry about the effect of NPCs being too good, in some sense.”

A portrait of the artist as a young bot

Not everyone is convinced that never-ending open-ended conversations between the player and NPCs are what we really want for the future of games.

“I think we have to be cautious about connecting our imaginations with reality,” says Mike Cook, an AI researcher and game designer. “The idea of a game where you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, and do anything has always been a dream of a certain kind of player. But in practice, this freedom is often at odds with what we want from a story.”

In other words, having to generate a lot of the dialogue yourself might actually get kind of … well, boring. “If you can’t think of interesting or dramatic things to say, or are simply too tired or bored to do it, then you’re going to basically be reading your own very bad creative fiction,” says Cook.

Orkin likewise doesn’t think conversations that could go anywhere are actually what most gamers want. “I want to play a game that a bunch of very talented, creative people have really thought through and created an engaging story and world,” he says.

This idea of authorship is an important part of game play, agrees Togelius. “You can generate as much as you want,” he says. “But that doesn’t guarantee that anything is interesting and worth keeping. In fact, the more content you generate, the more boring it might be.”

GEORGE WYLESOL

Sometimes, the possibility of everything is too much to cope with. No Man’s Sky, a hugely hyped space game launched in 2016 that used algorithms to generate endless planets to explore, was seen by many players as a bit of a letdown when it finally arrived. Players quickly discovered that being able to explore a universe that never ended, with worlds that were endlessly different, actually fell a little flat. (A series of updates over subsequent years has made No Man’s Sky a little more structured, and it’s now generally well thought of.)

One approach might be to keep AI gaming experiences tight and focused.

Hilary Mason, CEO at the gaming startup Hidden Door, likes to joke that her work is “artisanal AI.” She is from Brooklyn, after all, says her colleague Chris Foster, the firm’s game director, laughing.

Hidden Door, which has not yet released any products, is making role-playing text adventures based on classic stories that the user can steer. It’s like Dungeons & Dragons for the generative AI era. It stitches together classic tropes for certain adventure worlds, and an annotated database of thousands of words and phrases, and then uses a variety of machine-learning tools, including LLMs, to make each story unique. Players walk through a semi-unstructured storytelling experience, free-typing into text boxes to control their character.

The result feels a bit like hand-annotating an AI-generated novel with Post-it notes.

In a demo with Mason, I got to watch as her character infiltrated a hospital and attempted to hack into the server. Each suggestion prompted the system to spin up the next part of the story, with the large language model creating new descriptions and in-game objects on the fly.

Each experience lasts between 20 and 40 minutes, and for Foster, it creates an “expressive canvas” that people can play with. The fixed length and the added human touch—Mason’s artisanal approach—give players “something really new and magical,” he says.

There’s more to life than games

Park thinks generative AI that makes NPCs feel alive in games will have other, more fundamental implications further down the line.

“This can, I think, also change the meaning of what games are,” he says.

For example, he’s excited about using generative-AI agents to simulate how real people act. He thinks AI agents could one day be used as proxies for real people to, for example, test out the likely reaction to a new economic policy. Counterfactual scenarios could be plugged in that would let policymakers run time backwards to try to see what would have happened if a different path had been taken.

“You want to learn that if you implement this social policy or economic policy, what is going to be the impact that it’s going to have on the target population?” he suggests. “Will there be unexpected side effects that we’re not going to be able to foresee on day one?”

And while Inworld is focused on adding immersion to video games, it has also worked with LG in South Korea to make characters that kids can chat with to improve their English language skills. Others are using Inworld’s tech to create interactive experiences. One of these, called Moment in Manzanar, was created to help players empathize with the Japanese-Americans the US government detained in internment camps during World War II. It allows the user to speak to a fictional character called Ichiro who talks about what it was like to be held in the Manzanar camp in California.

Inworld’s NPC ambitions might be exciting for gamers (my future excursions as a cowboy could be even more immersive!), but there are some who believe using AI to enhance existing games is thinking too small. Instead, we should be leaning into the weirdness of LLMs to create entirely new kinds of experiences that were never possible before, says Togelius. The shortcomings of LLMs “are not bugs—they’re features,” he says.

Lantz agrees. “You have to start with the reality of what these things are and what they do—this kind of latent space of possibilities that you’re surfing and exploring,” he says. “These engines already have that kind of a psychedelic quality to them. There’s something trippy about them. Unlocking that is the thing that I’m interested in.”

Whatever is next, we probably haven’t even imagined it yet, Lantz thinks.

“And maybe it’s not about a simulated world with pretend characters in it at all,” he says. “Maybe it’s something totally different. I don’t know. But I’m excited to find out.”

Artificial intelligence

Why does AI hallucinate?

J. Juniper Friedman   18 Jun, 2024

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

The World Health Organization’s new chatbot launched on April 2 with the best of intentions.

A fresh-faced virtual avatar backed by GPT-3.5, SARAH (Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health) dispenses health tips in eight different languages, 24/7, about how to eat well, quit smoking, de-stress, and more, for millions around the world.

But like all chatbots, SARAH can flub its answers. It was quickly found to give out incorrect information. In one case, it came up with a list of fake names and addresses for nonexistent clinics in San Francisco. The World Health Organization warns on its website that SARAH may not always be accurate.

Here we go again. Chatbot fails are now a familiar meme. Meta’s short-lived scientific chatbot Galactica made up academic papers and generated wiki articles about the history of bears in space. In February, Air Canada was ordered to honor a refund policy invented by its customer service chatbot. Last year, a lawyer was fined for submitting court documents filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations made up by ChatGPT.

The problem is, large language models are so good at what they do that what they make up looks right most of the time. And that makes trusting them hard.

This tendency to make things up—known as hallucination—is one of the biggest obstacles holding chatbots back from more widespread adoption. Why do they do it? And why can’t we fix it?

Magic 8 Ball

To understand why large language models hallucinate, we need to look at how they work. The first thing to note is that making stuff up is exactly what these models are designed to do. When you ask a chatbot a question, it draws its response from the large language model that underpins it. But it’s not like looking up information in a database or using a search engine on the web.

Peel open a large language model and you won’t see ready-made information waiting to be retrieved. Instead, you’ll find billions and billions of numbers. It uses these numbers to calculate its responses from scratch, producing new sequences of words on the fly. A lot of the text that a large language model generates looks as if it could have been copy-pasted from a database or a real web page. But as in most works of fiction, the resemblances are coincidental. A large language model is more like an infinite Magic 8 Ball than an encyclopedia.

Large language models generate text by predicting the next word in a sequence. If a model sees “the cat sat,” it may guess “on.” That new sequence is fed back into the model, which may now guess “the.” Go around again and it may guess “mat”—and so on. That one trick is enough to generate almost any kind of text you can think of, from Amazon listings to haiku to fan fiction to computer code to magazine articles and so much more. As Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist and cofounder of OpenAI, likes to put it: large language models learn to dream internet documents.

Think of the billions of numbers inside a large language model as a vast spreadsheet that captures the statistical likelihood that certain words will appear alongside certain other words. The values in the spreadsheet get set when the model is trained, a process that adjusts those values over and over again until the model’s guesses mirror the linguistic patterns found across terabytes of text taken from the internet.

To guess a word, the model simply runs its numbers. It calculates a score for each word in its vocabulary that reflects how likely that word is to come next in the sequence in play. The word with the best score wins. In short, large language models are statistical slot machines. Crank the handle and out pops a word.

It’s all hallucination

The takeaway here? It’s all hallucination, but we only call it that when we notice it’s wrong. The problem is, large language models are so good at what they do that what they make up looks right most of the time. And that makes trusting them hard.

Can we control what large language models generate so they produce text that’s guaranteed to be accurate? These models are far too complicated for their numbers to be tinkered with by hand. But some researchers believe that training them on even more text will continue to reduce their error rate. This is a trend we’ve seen as large language models have gotten bigger and better.

Another approach involves asking models to check their work as they go, breaking responses down step by step. Known as chain-of-thought prompting, this has been shown to increase the accuracy of a chatbot’s output. It’s not possible yet, but future large language models may be able to fact-check the text they are producing and even rewind when they start to go off the rails.

But none of these techniques will stop hallucinations fully. As long as large language models are probabilistic, there is an element of chance in what they produce. Roll 100 dice and you’ll get a pattern. Roll them again and you’ll get another. Even if the dice are, like large language models, weighted to produce some patterns far more often than others, the results still won’t be identical every time. Even one error in 1,000—or 100,000—adds up to a lot of errors when you consider how many times a day this technology gets used.

The more accurate these models become, the more we will let our guard down. Studies show that the better chatbots get, the more likely people are to miss an error when it happens.

Perhaps the best fix for hallucination is to manage our expectations about what these tools are for. When the lawyer who used ChatGPT to generate fake documents was asked to explain himself, he sounded as surprised as anyone by what had happened. “I heard about this new site, which I falsely assumed was, like, a super search engine,” he told a judge. “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases.”

Artificial intelligence

An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

Melissa Heikkila   25 Apr, 2024

In the not-too-distant future, Synthesia hopes to create full-body avatars that can walk and move around in a space that a person has generated.

I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity?

This makes it sound as if I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today it launches a new generation, its first to take advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI, and they are more realistic and expressive than anything I’ve ever seen. While today’s release means almost anyone will now be able to make a digital double, on this early April afternoon, before the technology goes public, they’ve agreed to make one of me.

When I finally arrive at the company’s stylish studio in East London, I am greeted by Tosin Oshinyemi, the company’s production lead. He is going to guide and direct me through the data collection process—and by “data collection,” I mean the capture of my facial features, mannerisms, and more—much as he normally does for actors and Synthesia’s customers.

In this AI-generated footage, synthetic “Melissa” gives a performance of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. (The magazine had no role in producing this video.)

SYNTHESIA

He introduces me to a waiting stylist and a makeup artist, and I curse myself for wasting so much time getting ready. Their job is to ensure that people have the kind of clothes that look good on camera and that they look consistent from one shot to the next. The stylist tells me my outfit is fine (phew), and the makeup artist touches up my face and tidies my baby hairs. The dressing room is decorated with hundreds of smiling Polaroids of people who have been digitally cloned before me.

Apart from the small supercomputer whirring in the corridor, which processes the data generated at the studio, this feels more like going into a news studio than entering a deepfake factory.

I joke that Oshinyemi has what MIT Technology Review might call a job title of the future: “deepfake creation director.”

“We like the term ‘synthetic media’ as opposed to ‘deepfake,’” he says.

It’s a subtle but, some would argue, notable difference in semantics. Both mean AI-generated videos or audio recordings of people doing or saying something that didn’t necessarily happen in real life. But deepfakes have a bad reputation. Since their inception nearly a decade ago, the term has come to signal something unethical, says Alexandru Voica, Synthesia’s head of corporate affairs and policy. Think of sexual content produced without consent, or political campaigns that spread disinformation or propaganda.

“Synthetic media is the more benign, productive version of that,” he argues. And Synthesia wants to offer the best version of that version.

Until now, all AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make them pretty easy to differentiate from reality. Because they’re so close to the real thing but not quite it, these videos can make people feel annoyed or uneasy or icky—a phenomenon commonly known as the uncanny valley. Synthesia claims its new technology will finally lead us out of the valley.

Thanks to rapid advancements in generative AI and a glut of training data created by human actors that has been fed into its AI model, Synthesia has been able to produce avatars that are indeed more humanlike and more expressive than their predecessors. The digital clones are better able to match their reactions and intonation to the sentiment of their scripts—acting more upbeat when talking about happy things, for instance, and more serious or sad when talking about unpleasant things. They also do a better job matching facial expressions—the tiny movements that can speak for us without words.

But this technological progress also signals a much larger social and cultural shift. Increasingly, so much of what we see on our screens is generated (or at least tinkered with) by AI, and it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not. This threatens our trust in everything we see, which could have very real, very dangerous consequences.

“I think we might just have to say goodbye to finding out about the truth in a quick way,” says Sandra Wachter, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, who researches the legal and ethical implications of AI. “The idea that you can just quickly Google something and know what’s fact and what’s fiction—I don’t think it works like that anymore.”

Tosin Oshinyemi, the company’s production lead, guides and directs actors and customers through the data collection process.

DAVID VINTINER

So while I was excited for Synthesia to make my digital double, I also wondered if the distinction between synthetic media and deepfakes is fundamentally meaningless. Even if the former centers a creator’s intent and, critically, a subject’s consent, is there really a way to make AI avatars safely if the end result is the same? And do we really want to get out of the uncanny valley if it means we can no longer grasp the truth?

But more urgently, it was time to find out what it’s like to see a post-truth version of yourself.

Almost the real thing

A month before my trip to the studio, I visited Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli at his office near Oxford Circus. As Riparbelli tells it, Synthesia’s origin story stems from his experiences exploring avant-garde, geeky techno music while growing up in Denmark. The internet allowed him to download software and produce his own songs without buying expensive synthesizers.

“I’m a huge believer in giving people the ability to express themselves in the way that they can, because I think that that provides for a more meritocratic world,” he tells me.

He saw the possibility of doing something similar with video when he came across research on using deep learning to transfer expressions from one human face to another on screen.

“What that showcased was the first time a deep-learning network could produce video frames that looked and felt real,” he says.

That research was conducted by Matthias Niessner, a professor at the Technical University of Munich, who cofounded Synthesia with Riparbelli in 2017, alongside University College London professor Lourdes Agapito and Steffen Tjerrild, whom Riparbelli had previously worked with on a cryptocurrency project.

Initially the company built lip-synching and dubbing tools for the entertainment industry, but it found that the bar for this technology’s quality was very high and there wasn’t much demand for it. Synthesia changed direction in 2020 and launched its first generation of AI avatars for corporate clients. That pivot paid off. In 2023, Synthesia achieved unicorn status, meaning it was valued at over $1 billion—making it one of the relatively few European AI companies to do so.

That first generation of avatars looked clunky, with looped movements and little variation. Subsequent iterations started looking more human, but they still struggled to say complicated words, and things were slightly out of sync.

The challenge is that people are used to looking at other people’s faces. “We as humans know what real humans do,” says Jonathan Starck, Synthesia’s CTO. Since infancy, “you’re really tuned in to people and faces. You know what’s right, so anything that’s not quite right really jumps out a mile.”

These earlier AI-generated videos, like deepfakes more broadly, were made using generative adversarial networks, or GANs—an older technique for generating images and videos that uses two neural networks that play off one another. It was a laborious and complicated process, and the technology was unstable.

But in the generative AI boom of the last year or so, the company has found it can create much better avatars using generative neural networks that produce higher quality more consistently. The more data these models are fed, the better they learn. Synthesia uses both large language models and diffusion models to do this; the former help the avatars react to the script, and the latter generate the pixels.

Despite the leap in quality, the company is still not pitching itself to the entertainment industry. Synthesia continues to see itself as a platform for businesses. Its bet is this: As people spend more time watching videos on YouTube and TikTok, there will be more demand for video content. Young people are already skipping traditional search and defaulting to TikTok for information presented in video form. Riparbelli argues that Synthesia’s tech could help companies convert their boring corporate comms and reports and training materials into content people will actually watch and engage with. He also suggests it could be used to make marketing materials.

He claims Synthesia’s technology is used by 56% of the Fortune 100, with the vast majority of those companies using it for internal communication. The company lists Zoom, Xerox, Microsoft, and Reuters as clients. Services start at $22 a month.

This, the company hopes, will be a cheaper and more efficient alternative to video from a professional production company—and one that may be nearly indistinguishable from it. Riparbelli tells me its newest avatars could easily fool a person into thinking they are real.

“I think we’re 98% there,” he says.

For better or worse, I am about to see it for myself.

Don’t be garbage

In AI research, there is a saying: Garbage in, garbage out. If the data that went into training an AI model is trash, that will be reflected in the outputs of the model. The more data points the AI model has captured of my facial movements, microexpressions, head tilts, blinks, shrugs, and hand waves, the more realistic the avatar will be.

Back in the studio, I’m trying really hard not to be garbage.

I am standing in front of a green screen, and Oshinyemi guides me through the initial calibration process, where I have to move my head and then eyes in a circular motion. Apparently, this will allow the system to understand my natural colors and facial features. I am then asked to say the sentence “All the boys ate a fish,” which will capture all the mouth movements needed to form vowels and consonants. We also film footage of me “idling” in silence.

The more data points the AI system has on facial movements, microexpressions, head tilts, blinks, shrugs, and hand waves, the more realistic the avatar will be.

DAVID VINTINER

He then asks me to read a script for a fictitious YouTuber in different tones, directing me on the spectrum of emotions I should convey. First I’m supposed to read it in a neutral, informative way, then in an encouraging way, an annoyed and complain-y way, and finally an excited, convincing way.

“Hey, everyone—welcome back to Elevate Her with your host, Jess Mars. It’s great to have you here. We’re about to take on a topic that’s pretty delicate and honestly hits close to home—dealing with criticism in our spiritual journey,” I read off the teleprompter, simultaneously trying to visualize ranting about something to my partner during the complain-y version. “No matter where you look, it feels like there’s always a critical voice ready to chime in, doesn’t it?”

Don’t be garbage, don’t be garbage, don’t be garbage.

“That was really good. I was watching it and I was like, ‘Well, this is true. She’s definitely complaining,’” Oshinyemi says, encouragingly. Next time, maybe add some judgment, he suggests.

We film several takes featuring different variations of the script. In some versions I’m allowed to move my hands around. In others, Oshinyemi asks me to hold a metal pin between my fingers as I do. This is to test the “edges” of the technology’s capabilities when it comes to communicating with hands, Oshinyemi says.

Historically, making AI avatars look natural and matching mouth movements to speech has been a very difficult challenge, says David Barber, a professor of machine learning at University College London who is not involved in Synthesia’s work. That is because the problem goes far beyond mouth movements; you have to think about eyebrows, all the muscles in the face, shoulder shrugs, and the numerous different small movements that humans use to express themselves.

The motion capture process uses reference patterns to help align footage captured from multiple angles around the subject.

DAVID VINTINER

Synthesia has worked with actors to train its models since 2020, and their doubles make up the 225 stock avatars that are available for customers to animate with their own scripts. But to train its latest generation of avatars, Synthesia needed more data; it has spent the past year working with around 1,000 professional actors in London and New York. (Synthesia says it does not sell the data it collects, although it does release some of it for academic research purposes.)

The actors previously got paid each time their avatar was used, but now the company pays them an up-front fee to train the AI model. Synthesia uses their avatars for three years, at which point actors are asked if they want to renew their contracts. If so, they come into the studio to make a new avatar. If not, the company will delete their data. Synthesia’s enterprise customers can also generate their own custom avatars by sending someone into the studio to do much of what I’m doing.

The initial calibration process allows the system to understand the subject’s natural colors and facial features.

Synthesia also collects voice samples. In the studio, I read a passage indicating that I explicitly consent to having my voice cloned.

Between takes, the makeup artist comes in and does some touch-ups to make sure I look the same in every shot. I can feel myself blushing because of the lights in the studio, but also because of the acting. After the team has collected all the shots it needs to capture my facial expressions, I go downstairs to read more text aloud for voice samples.

This process requires me to read a passage indicating that I explicitly consent to having my voice cloned, and that it can be used on Voica’s account on the Synthesia platform to generate videos and speech.

Consent is key

This process is very different from the way many AI avatars, deepfakes, or synthetic media—whatever you want to call them—are created.

Most deepfakes aren’t created in a studio. Studies have shown that the vast majority of deepfakes online are nonconsensual sexual content, usually using images stolen from social media. Generative AI has made the creation of these deepfakes easy and cheap, and there have been several high-profile cases in the US and Europe of children and women being abused in this way. Experts have also raised alarms that the technology can be used to spread political disinformation, a particularly acute threat given the record number of elections happening around the world this year.

Synthesia’s policy is to not create avatars of people without their explicit consent. But it hasn’t been immune from abuse. Last year, researchers found pro-China misinformation that was created using Synthesia’s avatars and packaged as news, which the company said violated its terms of service.

Since then, the company has put more rigorous verification and content moderation systems in place. It applies a watermark with information on where and how the AI avatar videos were created. Where it once had four in-house content moderators, people doing this work now make up 10% of its 300-person staff. It also hired an engineer to build better AI-powered content moderation systems. These filters help Synthesia vet every single thing its customers try to generate. Anything suspicious or ambiguous, such as content about cryptocurrencies or sexual health, gets forwarded to the human content moderators. Synthesia also keeps a record of all the videos its system creates.

And while anyone can join the platform, many features aren’t available until people go through an extensive vetting system similar to that used by the banking industry, which includes talking to the sales team, signing legal contracts, and submitting to security auditing, says Voica. Entry-level customers are limited to producing strictly factual content, and only enterprise customers using custom avatars can generate content that contains opinions. On top of this, only accredited news organizations are allowed to create content on current affairs.

“We can’t claim to be perfect. If people report things to us, we take quick action, [such as] banning or limiting individuals or organizations,” Voica says. But he believes these measures work as a deterrent, which means most bad actors will turn to freely available open-source tools instead.

I put some of these limits to the test when I head to Synthesia’s office for the next step in my avatar generation process. In order to create the videos that will feature my avatar, I have to write a script. Using Voica’s account, I decide to use passages from Hamlet, as well as previous articles I have written. I also use a new feature on the Synthesia platform, which is an AI assistant that transforms any web link or document into a ready-made script. I try to get my avatar to read news about the European Union’s new sanctions against Iran.

Voica immediately texts me: “You got me in trouble!”

The system has flagged his account for trying to generate content that is restricted.

AI-powered content filters help Synthesia vet every single thing its customers try to generate. Only accredited news organizations are allowed to create content on current affairs.

COURTESY OF SYNTHESIA

Offering services without these restrictions would be “a great growth strategy,” Riparbelli grumbles. But “ultimately, we have very strict rules on what you can create and what you cannot create. We think the right way to roll out these technologies in society is to be a little bit over-restrictive at the beginning.”

Still, even if these guardrails operated perfectly, the ultimate result would nevertheless be an internet where everything is fake. And my experiment makes me wonder how we could possibly prepare ourselves.

Our information landscape already feels very murky. On the one hand, there is heightened public awareness that AI-generated content is flourishing and could be a powerful tool for misinformation. But on the other, it is still unclear whether deepfakes are used for misinformation at scale and whether they’re broadly moving the needle to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.

If people become too skeptical about the content they see, they might stop believing in anything at all, which could enable bad actors to take advantage of this trust vacuum and lie about the authenticity of real content. Researchers have called this the “liar’s dividend.” They warn that politicians, for example, could claim that genuinely incriminating information was fake or created using AI.

Claire Leibowicz, the head of AI and media integrity at the nonprofit Partnership on AI, says she worries that growing awareness of this gap will make it easier to “plausibly deny and cast doubt on real material or media as evidence in many different contexts, not only in the news, [but] also in the courts, in the financial services industry, and in many of our institutions.” She tells me she’s heartened by the resources Synthesia has devoted to content moderation and consent but says that process is never flawless.

Even Riparbelli admits that in the short term, the proliferation of AI-generated content will probably cause trouble. While people have been trained not to believe everything they read, they still tend to trust images and videos, he adds. He says people now need to test AI products for themselves to see what is possible, and should not trust anything they see online unless they have verified it.

Never mind that AI regulation is still patchy, and the tech sector’s efforts to verify content provenance are still in their early stages. Can consumers, with their varying degrees of media literacy, really fight the growing wave of harmful AI-generated content through individual action?

Watch out, PowerPoint

The day after my final visit, Voica emails me the videos with my avatar. When the first one starts playing, I am taken aback. It’s as painful as seeing yourself on camera or hearing a recording of your voice. Then I catch myself. At first I thought the avatar was me.

The more I watch videos of “myself,” the more I spiral. Do I really squint that much? Blink that much? And move my jaw like that? Jesus.

It’s good. It’s really good. But it’s not perfect. “Weirdly good animation,” my partner texts me.

“But the voice sometimes sounds exactly like you, and at other times like a generic American and with a weird tone,” he adds. “Weird AF.”

He’s right. The voice is sometimes me, but in real life I umm and ahh more. What’s remarkable is that it picked up on an irregularity in the way I talk. My accent is a transatlantic mess, confused by years spent living in the UK, watching American TV, and attending international school. My avatar sometimes says the word “robot” in a British accent and other times in an American accent. It’s something that probably nobody else would notice. But the AI did.

My avatar’s range of emotions is also limited. It delivers Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” speech very matter-of-factly. I had guided it to be furious when reading a story I wrote about Taylor Swift’s nonconsensual nude deepfakes; the avatar is complain-y and judgy, for sure, but not angry.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made myself a test subject for new AI. Not too long ago, I tried generating AI avatar images of myself, only to get a bunch of nudes. That experience was a jarring example of just how biased AI systems can be. But this experience—and this particular way of being immortalized—was definitely on a different level.

Carl Öhman, an assistant professor at Uppsala University who has studied digital remains and is the author of a new book, The Afterlife of Data, calls avatars like the ones I made “digital corpses.”

“It looks exactly like you, but no one’s home,” he says. “It would be the equivalent of cloning you, but your clone is dead. And then you’re animating the corpse, so that it moves and talks, with electrical impulses.”

That’s kind of how it feels. The little, nuanced ways I don’t recognize myself are enough to put me off. Then again, the avatar could quite possibly fool anyone who doesn’t know me very well. It really shines when presenting a story I wrote about how the field of robotics could be getting its own ChatGPT moment; the virtual AI assistant summarizes the long read into a decent short video, which my avatar narrates. It is not Shakespeare, but it’s better than many of the corporate presentations I’ve had to sit through. I think if I were using this to deliver an end-of-year report to my colleagues, maybe that level of authenticity would be enough.

And that is the sell, according to Riparbelli: “What we’re doing is more like PowerPoint than it is like Hollywood.”

Once a likeness has been generated, Synthesia is able to generate video presentations quickly from a script. In this video, synthetic “Melissa” summarizes an article real Melissa wrote about Taylor Swift deepfakes.

SYNTHESIA

The newest generation of avatars certainly aren’t ready for the silver screen. They’re still stuck in portrait mode, only showing the avatar front-facing and from the waist up. But in the not-too-distant future, Riparbelli says, the company hopes to create avatars that can communicate with their hands and have conversations with one another. It is also planning for full-body avatars that can walk and move around in a space that a person has generated. (The rig to enable this technology already exists; in fact, it’s where I am in the image at the top of this piece.)

But do we really want that? It feels like a bleak future where humans are consuming AI-generated content presented to them by AI-generated avatars and using AI to repackage that into more content, which will likely be scraped to generate more AI. If nothing else, this experiment made clear to me that the technology sector urgently needs to step up its content moderation practices and ensure that content provenance techniques such as watermarking are robust.

Even if Synthesia’s technology and content moderation aren’t yet perfect, they’re significantly better than anything I have seen in the field before, and this is after only a year or so of the current boom in generative AI. AI development moves at breakneck speed, and it is both exciting and daunting to consider what AI avatars will look like in just a few years. Maybe in the future we will have to adopt safewords to indicate that you are in fact communicating with a real human, not an AI.

But that day is not today.

I found it weirdly comforting that in one of the videos, my avatar rants about nonconsensual deepfakes and says, in a sociopathically happy voice, “The tech giants? Oh! They’re making a killing!”

I would never.

Climate change and energy

- The cost of building the perfect wave

- These board games want you to beat climate change

Climate change and energy

The cost of building the perfect wave

J. Juniper Friedman   17 Jun, 2024

For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. It’s not just a question of size, but also of shape, surface conditions, and duration—ideally in a beautiful natural environment.

While this hunt has taken surfers from tropical coastlines reachable only by boat to swells breaking off icebergs, these days—as the sport goes mainstream—that search may take place closer to home. That is, at least, the vision presented by developers and boosters in the growing industry of surf pools, spurred by advances in wave-generating technology that have finally created artificial waves surfers actually want to ride.

Some surf evangelists think these pools will democratize the sport, making it accessible to more communities far from the coasts—while others are simply interested in cashing in. But a years-long fight over a planned surf pool in Thermal, California, shows that for many people who live in the places where they’re being built, the calculus isn’t about surf at all.

Just some 30 miles from Palm Springs, on the southeastern edge of the Coachella Valley desert, Thermal is the future home of the 118-acre private, members-only Thermal Beach Club (TBC). The developers promise over 300 luxury homes with a dazzling array of amenities; the planned centerpiece is a 20-plus-acre artificial lagoon with a 3.8-acre surf pool offering waves up to seven feet high. According to an early version of the website, club memberships will start at $175,000 a year. (TBC’s developers did not respond to multiple emails asking for comment.)

That price tag makes it clear that the club is not meant for locals. Thermal, an unincorporated desert community, currently has a median family income of $32,340. Most of its residents are Latino; many are farmworkers. The community lacks much of the basic infrastructure that serves the western Coachella Valley, including public water service—leaving residents dependent on aging private wells for drinking water.

Just a few blocks away from the TBC site is the 60-acre Oasis Mobile Home Park. A dilapidated development designed for some 1,500 people in about 300 mobile homes, Oasis has been plagued for decades by a lack of clean drinking water. The park owners have been cited numerous times by the Environmental Protection Agency for providing tap water contaminated with high levels of arsenic, and last year, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against them for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Some residents have received assistance to relocate, but many of those who remain rely on weekly state-funded deliveries of bottled water and on the local high school for showers.

Stephanie Ambriz, a 28-year-old special-needs teacher who grew up near Thermal, recalls feeling “a lot of rage” back in early 2020 when she first heard about plans for the TBC development. Ambriz and other locals organized a campaign against the proposed club, which she says the community doesn’t want and won’t be able to access. What residents do want, she tells me, is drinkable water, affordable housing, and clean air—and to have their concerns heard and taken seriously by local officials.

Despite the grassroots pushback, which twice led to delays to allow more time for community feedback, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the plans for the club in October 2020. It was, Ambriz says, “a shock to see that the county is willing to approve these luxurious developments when they’ve ignored community members” for decades. (A Riverside County representative did not respond to specific questions about TBC.)

The desert may seem like a counterintuitive place to build a water-intensive surf pool, but the Coachella Valley is actually “the very best place to possibly put one of these things,” argues Doug Sheres, the developer behind DSRT Surf, another private pool planned for the area. It is “close to the largest [and] wealthiest surf population in the world,” he says, featuring “360 days a year of surfable weather” and mountain and lake views in “a beautiful resort setting” served by “a very robust aquifer.”

In addition to the two planned projects, the Palm Springs Surf Club (PSSC) has already opened locally. The trifecta is turning the Coachella Valley into “the North Shore of wave pools,” as one aficionado described it to Surfer magazine.

The effect is an acute cognitive dissonance—one that I experienced after spending a few recent days crisscrossing the valley and trying out the waves at PSSC. But as odd as this setting may seem, an analysis by MIT Technology Review reveals that the Coachella Valley is not the exception. Of an estimated 162 surf pools that have been built or announced around the world, as tracked by the industry publication Wave Pool Magazine, 54 are in areas considered by the nonprofit World Resources Institute (WRI) to face high or extremely high water stress, meaning that they regularly use a large portion of their available surface water supply annually. Regions in the “extremely high” category consume 80% or more of their water, while those in the “high” category use 40% to 80% of their supply. (Not all of Wave Pool Magazine’s listed pools will be built, but the publication tracks all projects that have been announced. Some have closed and over 60 are currently operational.)

Zoom in on the US and nearly half are in places with high or extremely high water stress, roughly 16 in areas served by the severely drought-stricken Colorado River. The greater Palm Springs area falls under the highest category of water stress, according to Samantha Kuzma, a WRI researcher (though she notes that WRI’s data on surface water does not reflect all water sources, including an area’s access to aquifers, or its water management plan).

Now, as TBC’s surf pool and other planned facilities move forward and contribute to what’s becoming a multibillion-dollar industry with proposed sites on every continent except Antarctica, inland waves are increasingly becoming a flash point for surfers, developers, and local communities. There are at least 29 organized movements in opposition to surf clubs around the world, according to an ongoing survey from a coalition called No to the Surf Park in Canéjan, which includes 35 organizations opposing a park in Bordeaux, France.

While the specifics vary widely, at the core of all these fights is a question that’s also at the heart of the sport: What is the cost of finding, or now creating, the perfect wave—and who will have to bear it?

Though wave pools have been around since the late 1800s, the first artificial surfing wave was built in 1969, and also in the desert—at Big Surf in Tempe, Arizona. But at that pool and its early successors, surfing was secondary; people who went to those parks were more interested in splashing around, and surfers themselves weren’t too excited by what they had to offer. The manufactured waves were too small and too soft, without the power, shape, or feel of the real thing.

The tide really turned in 2015, when Kelly Slater, widely considered to be the greatest professional surfer of all time, was filmed riding a six-foot-tall, 50-second barreling wave. As the viral video showed, he was not in the wild but atop a wave generated in a pool in California’s Central Valley, some 100 miles from the coast.

Waves of that height, shape, and duration are a rarity even in the ocean, but “Kelly’s wave,” as it became known, showed that “you can make waves in the pool that are as good as or better than what you get in the ocean,” recalls Sheres, the developer whose company, Beach Street Development, is building multiple surf pools around the country, including DSRT Surf. “That got a lot of folks excited—myself included.”

In the ocean, a complex combination of factors—including wind direction, tide, and the shape and features of the seafloor—is required to generate a surfable wave. Re-creating them in an artificial environment required years of modeling, precise calculations, and simulations.

Surf Ranch, Slater’s project in the Central Valley, built a mechanical system in which a 300-ton hydrofoil—which resembles a gigantic metal fin—is pulled along the length of a pool 700 yards long and 70 yards wide by a mechanical device the size of several train cars running on a track. The bottom of the pool is precisely contoured to mimic reefs and other features of the ocean floor; as the water hits those features, its movement creates the 50-second-long barreling wave. Once the foil reaches one end of the pool, it runs backwards, creating another wave that breaks in the opposite direction.

While the result is impressive, the system is slow, producing just one wave every three to four minutes.

Around the same time Slater’s team was tinkering with his wave, other companies were developing their own technologies to produce multiple waves, and to do so more rapidly and efficiently—key factors in commercial viability.

Fundamentally, all the systems create waves by displacing water, but depending on the technology deployed, there are differences in the necessary pool size, the project’s water and energy requirements, the level of customization that’s possible, and the feel of the wave.

Thomas Lochtefeld is a pioneer in the field and the CEO of Surf Loch, which powers PSSC’s waves. Surf Loch uses pneumatic technology, in which compressed air cycles water through chambers the size of bathroom stalls and lets operators create countless wave patterns.

One demo pool in Australia uses what looks like a giant mechanical doughnut that sends out waves the way a pebble dropped in water sends out ripples. Another proposed plan uses a design that spins out waves from a circular fan—a system that is mobile and can be placed in existing bodies of water.

Of the two most popular techniques in commercial use, one relies on modular paddles attached to a pier that runs across a pool, which move in precise ways to generate waves. The other is pneumatic technology, which uses compressed air to push water through chambers the size of bathroom stalls, called caissons; the caissons pull in water and then push it back out into the pool. By choosing which modular paddles or caissons move first against the different pool bottoms, and with how much force at a time, operators can create a range of wave patterns.

Regardless of the technique used, the design and engineering of most modern wave pools are first planned out on a computer. Waves are precisely calculated, designed, simulated, and finally tested in the pool with real surfers before they are set as options on a “wave menu” in proprietary software that surf-pool technologists say offers a theoretically endless number and variety of waves.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early April, I am the lucky tester at the Palm Springs Surf Club, which uses pneumatic technology, as the team tries out a shoulder-high right-breaking wave.

I have the pool to myself as the club prepares to reopen; it had closed to rebuild its concrete “beach” just 10 days after its initial launch because the original beach had not been designed to withstand the force of the larger waves that Surf Loch, the club’s wave technology provider, had added to the menu at the last minute. (Weeks after reopening in April, the surf pool closed again as the result of “a third-party equipment supplier’s failure,” according to Thomas Lochtefeld, Surf Loch’s CEO.)

I paddle out and, at staffers’ instructions, take my position a few feet away from the third caisson from the right, which they say is the ideal spot to catch the wave on the shoulder—meaning the unbroken part of the swell closest to its peak.

The entire experience is surreal: waves that feel like the ocean in an environment that is anything but.

An employee test rides a wave, which was first calculated, designed, and simulated on a computer.

SPENCER LOWELL

In some ways, these pneumatic waves are better than what I typically ride around Los Angeles—more powerful, more consistent, and (on this day, at least) uncrowded. But the edge of the pool and the control tower behind it are almost always in my line of sight. And behind me are the PSSC employees (young men, incredible surfers, who keep an eye on my safety and provide much-needed tips) and then, behind them, the snow-capped San Jacinto Mountains. At the far end of the pool, behind the recently rebuilt concrete beach, is a restaurant patio full of diners who I can’t help but imagine are judging my every move. Still, for the few glorious seconds that I ride each wave, I am in the same flow state I experience in the ocean itself.

Then I fall and sheepishly paddle back to PSSC’s encouraging surfer-employees to restart the whole process. I would be having a lot of fun—if I could just forget my self-consciousness, and the jarring feeling that I shouldn’t be riding waves in the middle of the desert at all.

Though long inhabited by Cahuilla Indians, the Coachella Valley was sparsely populated until 1876, when the Southern Pacific Railroad added a new line out to the middle of the arid expanse. Shortly after, the first non-native settlers came to the valley and realized that its artesian wells, which flow naturally without the need to be pumped, provided ideal conditions for farming.

Agricultural production exploded, and by the early 1900s, these once freely producing wells were putting out significantly less, leading residents to look for alternative water sources. In 1918, they created the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) to import water from the Colorado River via a series of canals. This water was used to supply the region’s farms and recharge the Coachella Aquifer, the region’s main source of drinking water.

The author tests a shoulder-high wave at PSSC, where she says the waves were in some ways better than what she rides around Los Angeles.

SPENCER LOWELL

The water imports continue to this day—though the seven states that draw on the river are currently renegotiating their water rights amid a decades-long megadrought in the region.

The imported water, along with CVWD’s water management plan, has allowed Coachella’s aquifer to maintain relatively steady levels “going back to 1970, even though most development and population has occurred since,” Scott Burritt, a CVWD spokesperson, told MIT Technology Review in an email.

This has sustained not only agriculture but also tourism in the valley, most notably its world-class—and water-intensive—golf courses. In 2020, the 120 golf courses under the jurisdiction of the CVWD consumed 105,000 acre-feet of water per year (AFY); that’s an average of 875 AFY, or 285 million gallons per year per course.

Surf pools’ proponents frequently point to the far larger amount of water golf courses consume to argue that opposing the pools on grounds of their water use is misguided.

PSSC, the first of the area’s three planned surf clubs to open, requires an estimated 3 million gallons per year to fill its pool; the proposed DSRT Surf holds 7 million gallons and estimates that it will use 24 million gallons per year, which includes maintenance and filtration, and accounts for evaporation. TBC’s planned 20-acre recreational lake, 3.8 acres of which will contain the surf pool, will use 51 million gallons per year, according to Riverside County documents. Unlike standard swimming pools, none of these pools need to be drained and refilled annually for maintenance, saving on potential water use. DSRT Surf also boasts about plans to offset its water use by replacing 1 million square feet of grass from an adjacent golf course with drought-tolerant plants.

Pro surfer and PSSC’s full-time “wave curator” Cheyne Magnusson watches test waves from the club’s control tower.

SPENCER LOWELL

With surf parks, “you can see the water,” says Jess Ponting, a cofounder of Surf Park Central, the main industry association, and Stoke, a nonprofit that aims to certify surf and ski resorts—and, now, surf pools—for sustainability. “Even though it’s a fraction of what a golf course is using, it’s right there in your face, so it looks bad.”

But even if it were just an issue of appearance, public perception is important when residents are being urged to reduce their water use, says Mehdi Nemati, an associate professor of environmental economics and policy at the University of California, Riverside. It’s hard to demand such efforts from people who see these pools and luxury developments being built around them, he says. “The questions come: Why do we conserve when there are golf courses or surfing … in the desert?”

(Burritt, the CVWD representative, notes that the water district “encourages all customers, not just residents, to use water responsibly” and adds that CVWD’s strategic plans project that there should be enough water to serve both the district’s golf courses and its surf pools.)

Locals opposing these projects, meanwhile, argue that developers are grossly underestimating their water use, and various engineering firms and some county officials have in fact offered projections that differ from the developers’ estimates. Opponents are specifically concerned about the effects of spray, evaporation, and other factors, which increase with higher temperatures, bigger waves, and larger pool sizes.

As a rough point of reference, Slater’s 14-acre wave pool in Lemoore, California, can lose up to 250,000 gallons of water per day to evaporation, according to Adam Fincham, the engineer who designed the technology. That’s roughly half an Olympic swimming pool.

More fundamentally, critics take issue with even debating whether surf clubs or golf courses are worse. “We push back against all of it,” says Ambriz, who organized opposition to TBC and argues that neither the pool nor an exclusive new golf course in Thermal benefits the local community. Comparing them, she says, obscures greater priorities, like the water needs of households.

The PSSC pool requires an estimated 3 million gallons of water per year. On top of a $40 admission fee, a private session there would cost between $3,500 and $5,000 per hour.

SPENCER LOWELL

The “primary beneficiary” of the area’s water, says Mark Johnson, who served as CVWD’s director of engineering from 2004 to 2016, “should be human consumption.”

Studies have shown that just one AFY, or nearly 326,000 gallons, is generally enough to support all household water needs of three California families every year. In Thermal, the gap between the demands of the surf pool and the needs of the community is even more stark: each year for the past three years, nearly 36,000 gallons of water have been delivered, in packages of 16-ounce plastic water bottles, to residents of the Oasis Mobile Home Park—some 108,000 gallons in all. Compare that with the 51 million gallons that will be used annually by TBC’s lake: it would be enough to provide drinking water to its neighbors at Oasis for the next 472 years.

Furthermore, as Nemati notes, “not all water is the same.” CVWD has provided incentives for golf courses to move toward recycled water and replace grass with less water-intensive landscaping. But while recycled water and even rainwater have been proposed as options for some surf pools elsewhere in the world, including France and Australia, this is unrealistic in Coachella, which receives just three to four inches of rain per year.

Instead, the Coachella Valley surf pools will depend on a mix of imported water and nonpotable well water from Coachella’s aquifer.

But any use of the aquifer worries Johnson. Further drawing down the water, especially in an underground aquifer, “can actually create water quality problems,” he says, by concentrating “naturally occurring minerals … like chromium and arsenic.” In other words, TBC could worsen the existing problem of arsenic contamination in local well water.

When I describe to Ponting MIT Technology Review’s analysis showing how many surf pools are being built in desert regions, he seems to concede it’s an issue. “If 50% of the surf parks in development are in water-stressed areas,” he says, “then the developers are not thinking about the right things.”

Before visiting the future site of Thermal Beach Club, I stopped in La Quinta, a wealthy town where, back in 2022, community opposition successfully stopped plans for a fourth pool planned for the Coachella Valley. This one was developed by the Kelly Slater Wave Company, which was acquired by the World Surf League in 2016.

Alena Callimanis, a longtime resident who was a member of the community group that helped defeat the project, says that for a year and a half, she and other volunteers often spent close to eight hours a day researching everything they could about surf pools—and how to fight them. “We knew nothing when we started,” she recalls. But the group learned quickly, poring over planning documents, consulting hydrologists, putting together presentations, providing comments at city council hearings, and even conducting their own citizen science experiments to test the developers’ assertions about the light and noise pollution the project could create. (After the council rejected the proposal for the surf club, the developers pivoted to previously approved plans for a golf course. Callimanis’s group also opposes the golf course, raising similar concerns about water use, but since plans have already been approved, she says, there is little they can do to fight back.)

Just a few blocks from the site of the planned Thermal Beach Club is the Oasis Mobile Home Park, which has been plagued for decades by a lack of clean drinking water.

A water pump sits at the corner of farm fields in Thermal, California, where irrigation water is imported from the Colorado River.

It was a different story in Thermal, where three young activists juggled jobs and graduate programs as they tried to mobilize an under-resourced community. “Folks in Thermal lack housing, lack transportation, and they don’t have the ability to take a day off from work to drive up and provide public comment,” says Ambriz.

But the local pushback did lead to certain promises, including a community benefit payment of $2,300 per luxury housing unit, totaling $749,800. In the meeting approving the project, Riverside County supervisor Manuel Perez called this “unprecedented” and credited the efforts of Ambriz and her peers. (Ambriz remains unconvinced. “None of that has happened,” she says, and payments to the community don’t solve the underlying water issues that the project could exacerbate.)

That affluent La Quinta managed to keep a surf pool out of its community where working-class Thermal failed is even more jarring in light of industry rhetoric about how surf pools could democratize the sport. For Bryan Dickerson, the editor in chief of Wave Pool Magazine, the collective vision for the future is that instead of “the local YMCA … putting in a skate park, they put in a wave pool.” Other proponents, like Ponting, describe how wave pools can provide surf therapy or opportunities for underrepresented groups. A design firm in New York City, for example, has proposed to the city a plan for an indoor wave pool in a low-income, primarily black and Latino neighborhood in Queens—for $30 million.

For its part, PSSC cost an estimated $80 million to build. On top of a $40 general admission fee, a private session like the one I had would cost $3,500 to $5,000 per hour, while a public session would be at least $100 to $200, depending on the surfer’s skill level and the types of waves requested.

In my two days traversing the 45-mile Coachella Valley, I kept thinking about how this whole area was an artificial oasis made possible only by innovations that changed the very nature of the desert, from the railroad stop that spurred development to the irrigation canals and, later, the recharge basins that stopped the wells from running out.

In this transformed environment, I can see how the cognitive dissonance of surfing a desert wave begins to shrink, tempting us to believe that technology can once again override the reality of living (or simply playing) in the desert in a warming and drying world.

But the tension over surf pools shows that when it comes to how we use water, maybe there’s no collective “us” here at all.

Climate change and energy

These board games want you to beat climate change

J. Juniper Friedman   14 Jun, 2024

It’s game night, and I’m crossing my fingers, hoping for a hurricane.

I roll the die and it clatters across the board, tumbling to a stop to reveal a tiny icon of a tree stump. Bad news: I just triggered deforestation in the Amazon. That seals it. I failed to stop climate change—at least this board-game representation of it.

The urgent need to address climate change might seem like unlikely fodder for a fun evening. But a growing number of games are attempting to take on the topic, including a version of the bestseller Catan released this summer.

As a climate reporter, I was curious about whether games could, even abstractly, represent the challenge of the climate crisis. Perhaps more crucially, could they possibly be any fun?

My investigation started with Daybreak, a board game released in late 2023 by a team that includes the creator of Pandemic (infectious disease—another famously light topic for a game). Daybreak is a cooperative game where players work together to cut emissions and survive disasters. The group either wins or loses as a whole.

When I opened the box, it was immediately clear that this wouldn’t be for the faint of heart. There are hundreds of tiny cardboard and wooden pieces, three different card decks, and a surprisingly thick rule book. Setting it up, learning the rules, and playing for the first time took over two hours.

Daybreak, a cooperative board game about stopping climate change.

COURTESY OF CMYK

Daybreak is full of details, and I was struck by how many of them it gets right. Not only are there cards representing everything from walkable cities to methane removal, but each features a QR code players can use to learn more.

In each turn, players deploy technologies or enact policies to cut climate pollution. Just as in real life, emissions have negative effects. Winning requires slashing emissions to net zero (the point where whatever’s emitted can be soaked up by forests, oceans, or direct air capture). But there are multiple ways for the whole group to lose, including letting the global average temperature increase by 2 °C or simply running out of turns.

In an embarrassing turn of events for someone who spends most of her waking hours thinking about climate change, nearly every round of Daybreak I played ended in failure. Adding insult to injury, I’m not entirely sure that I was having fun. Sure, the abstract puzzle was engaging and challenging, and after a loss, I’d be checking the clock, seeing if there was time to play again. But once all the pieces were back in the box, I went to bed obsessing about heat waves and fossil-fuel disinformation. The game was perhaps representing climate change a little bit too well.

I wondered if a new edition of a classic would fare better. Catan, formerly Settlers of Catan, and its related games have sold over 45 million copies worldwide since the original’s release in 1995. The game’s object is to build roads and settlements, setting up a civilization.

In late 2023, Catan Studios announced that it would be releasing a version of its game called New Energies, focused on climate change. The new edition, out this summer, preserves the same central premise as the original. But this time, players will also construct power plants, generating energy with either fossil fuels or renewables. Fossil fuels are cheaper and allow for quicker expansion, but they lead to pollution, which can harm players’ societies and even end the game early.

Before I got my hands on the game, I spoke with one of its creators, Benjamin Teuber, who developed the game with his late father, Klaus Teuber, the mastermind behind the original Catan.

To Teuber, climate change is a more natural fit for a game than one might expect. “We believe that a good game is always around a dilemma,” he told me. The key is to simplify the problem sufficiently, a challenge that took the team dozens of iterations while developing New Energies. But he also thinks there’s a need to be at least somewhat encouraging. “While we have a severe topic, or maybe even especially because we have a severe topic, you can’t scare off the people by making them just have a shitty evening,” Teuber says.

In New Energies, the first to gain 10 points wins, regardless of how polluting that player’s individual energy supply is. But if players collectively build too many fossil-fuel plants and pollution gets too high, the game ends early, in which case whoever has done the most work to clean up their own energy supply is named the winner.

That’s what happened the first time I tested out the game. While I had been lagging in points, I ended up taking the win, because I had built more renewable power plants than my competitors.

This relatively rosy ending had me conflicted. On one hand, I was delighted, even if it felt like a consolation prize.

But I found myself fretting over the messages that New Energies will send to players. A simple game that crowns a winner may be more playable, but it doesn’t represent how complicated the climate crisis is, or how urgently we need to address it.

I’m glad climate change has a spot on my game shelf, and I hope these and other games find their audiences and get people thinking about the issues. But I’ll understand the impulse to reach for other options when game night rolls around, because I can’t help but dwell on the fact that in the real world, we won’t get to reset the pieces and try again.

Space

- Job title of the future: Space debris engineer

Space

Job title of the future: Space debris engineer

J. Juniper Friedman   26 Jun, 2024

Stijn Lemmens has a cleanup job like few others. A senior space debris mitigation analyst at the European Space Agency (ESA), Lemmens works on counteracting space pollution by collaborating with spacecraft designers and the wider industry to create missions less likely to clutter the orbital environment.

Although significant attention has been devoted to launching spacecraft into space, the idea of what to do with their remains has been largely ignored. Many previous missions did not have an exit strategy. Instead of being pushed into orbits where they could reenter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up, satellites were simply left in orbit at the ends of their lives, creating debris that must be monitored and, if possible, maneuvered around to avoid a collision. “For the last 60 years, we’ve been using [space] as if it were an infinite resource,” Lemmens says. “But particularly in the last 10 years, it has become rather clear that this is not the case.”

Engineering the ins and outs: Step one in reducing orbital clutter—or, colloquially, space trash—is designing spacecraft that safely leave space when their missions are complete. “I thought naïvely, as a student, ‘How hard can that be?’” says Lemmens. The answer turned out to be more complicated than he expected.

At ESA, he works with scientists and engineers on specific missions to devise good approaches. Some incorporate propulsion that works reliably even decades after launch; others involve designing systems that can move spacecraft to keep them from colliding with other satellites and with space debris. They also work on plans to get the remains through the atmosphere without large risks to aviation and infrastructure.

Standardizing space: Earth’s atmosphere exerts a drag on satellites that will eventually pull them out of orbit. National and international guidelines recommend that satellites lower their altitude at the end of their operational lives so that they will reenter the atmosphere and make this possible. Previously the goal was for this to take 25 years at most; Lemmens and his peers now suggest five years or less, a time frame that would have to be taken into account from the start of mission planning and design.

Explaining the need for this change in policy can feel a bit like preaching, Lemmens says, and it’s his least favorite part of the job. It’s a challenge, he says, to persuade people not to think of the vastness of space as “an infinite amount of orbits.” Without change, the amount of space debris may create a serious problem in the coming decades, cluttering orbits and increasing the number of collisions.

Shaping the future: Lemmens says his wish is for his job to become unnecessary in the future, but with around 11,500 satellites and over 35,000 debris objects being tracked, and more launches planned, that seems unlikely to happen.

Researchers are looking into more drastic changes to the way space missions are run. We might one day, for instance, be able to dismantle satellites and find ways to recycle their components in orbit. Such an approach isn’t likely to be used anytime soon, Lemmens says. But he is encouraged that more spacecraft designers are thinking about sustainability: “Ideally, this becomes the normal in the sense that this becomes a standard engineering practice that you just think of when you’re designing your spacecraft.”

Policy

- Inside the US government’s brilliantly boring websites

- Learning from catastrophe

Policy

Inside the US government’s brilliantly boring websites

J. Juniper Friedman   26 Jun, 2024

The United States has an official web design system and a custom typeface. This public design system aims to make government websites not only good-looking but accessible and functional for all.

Before the internet, Americans may have interacted with the federal government by stepping into grand buildings adorned with impressive stone columns and gleaming marble floors. Today, the neoclassical architecture of those physical spaces has been (at least partially) replaced by the digital architecture of website design—HTML code, tables, forms, and buttons.

While people visiting a government website to apply for student loans, research veterans’ benefits, or enroll in Medicare might not notice these digital elements, they play a crucial role. If a website is buggy or doesn’t work on a phone, taxpayers may not be able to access the services they have paid for—which can create a negative impression of the government itself.

There are about 26,000 federal websites in the US. Early on, each site had its own designs, fonts, and log-in systems, creating frustration for the public and wasting government resources. The troubled launch of Healthcare.gov in 2013 highlighted the need for a better way to build government digital services. In 2014, President Obama created two new teams to help improve government tech.

Within the General Services Administration (GSA), a new team called 18F (named for its office at 1800 F Street in Washington, DC) was created to “collaborate with other agencies to fix technical problems, build products, and improve public service through technology.” The team was built to move at the speed of tech startups rather than lumbering bureaucratic agencies.

The US Digital Service (USDS) was set up “to deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design.” In 2015, the two teams collaborated to build the US Web Design System (USWDS), a style guide and collection of user interface components and design patterns intended to ensure accessibility and a consistent user experience across government websites. “Inconsistency is felt, even if not always precisely articulated in usability research findings,” Dan Williams, the USWDS program lead, said in an email.

Today, the system defines 47 user interface components such as buttons, alerts, search boxes, and forms, each with design examples, sample code, and guidelines such as “Be polite” and “Don’t overdo it.” Now in its third iteration, it is used in 160 government websites. “As of September 2023, 94 agencies use USWDS code, and it powers about 1.1 billion page views on federal websites,” says Williams.

To ensure clear and consistent typography, the free and open-source typeface Public Sans was created for the US government in 2019. “It started as a design experiment,” says Williams, who designed the typeface. “We were interested in trying to establish an open-source solution space for a typeface, just like we had for the other design elements in the design system.”

The teams behind Public Sans and the USWDS embrace transparency and collaboration with government agencies and the public.

And to ensure that the hard-learned lessons aren’t forgotten, the projects embrace continuous improvement. One of the design principles behind Public Sans offers key guidance in this area: “Strive to be better, not necessarily perfect.”

Jon Keegan writes Beautiful Public Data, a newsletter that curates visually interesting data sets collected by local, state, and federal government agencies

(beautifulpublicdata.com).

Policy

Learning from catastrophe

J. Juniper Friedman   26 Jun, 2024

The philosopher Karl Popper once argued that there are two kinds of problems in the world: clock problems and cloud problems. As the metaphor suggests, clock problems obey a certain logic. They are orderly and can be broken down and analyzed piece by piece. When a clock stops working, you’re able to take it apart, look for what’s wrong, and fix it. The fix may not be easy, but it’s achievable. Crucially, you know when you’ve solved the issue because the clock starts telling the time again.

Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

Guru Madhavan

W.W. NORTON, 2024

Cloud problems offer no such assurances. They are inherently complex and unpredictable, and they usually have social, psychological, or political dimensions. Because of their dynamic, shape-shifting nature, trying to “fix” a cloud problem often ends up creating several new problems. For this reason, they don’t have a definitive “solved” state—only good and bad (or better and worse) outcomes. Trying to repair a broken-down car is a clock problem. Trying to solve traffic is a cloud problem.

Engineers are renowned clock-problem solvers. They’re also notorious for treating every problem like a clock. Increasing specialization and cultural expectations play a role in this tendency. But so do engineers themselves, who are typically the ones who get to frame the problems they’re trying to solve in the first place.

In his latest book, Wicked Problems, Guru Madhavan argues that the growing number of cloudy problems in our world demands a broader, more civic-minded approach to engineering. “Wickedness” is Madhavan’s way of characterizing what he calls “the cloudiest of problems.” It’s a nod to a now-famous coinage by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who used the term “wicked” to describe complex social problems that resisted the rote scientific and engineering-based (i.e., clock-like) approaches that were invading their fields of design and urban planning back in the 1970s.

Madhavan, who’s the senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering, is no stranger to wicked problems himself. He’s tackled such daunting examples as trying to make prescription drugs more affordable in the US and prioritizing development of new vaccines. But the book isn’t about his own work. Instead, Wicked Problems weaves together the story of a largely forgotten aviation engineer and inventor, Edwin A. Link, with case studies of man-made and natural disasters that Madhavan uses to explain how wicked problems take shape in society and how they might be tamed.

Link’s story, for those who don’t know it, is fascinating—he was responsible for building the first mechanical flight trainer, using parts from his family’s organ factory—and Madhavan gives a rich and detailed accounting. The challenges this inventor faced in the 1920s and ’30s—which included figuring out how tens of thousands of pilots could quickly and effectively be trained to fly without putting all of them up in the air (and in danger), as well as how to instill trust in “instrument flying” when pilots’ instincts frequently told them their instruments were wrong—were among the quintessential wicked problems of his time.

To address a world full of wicked problems, we’re going to need a more expansive and inclusive idea of what engineering is and who gets to participate in it.

Unfortunately, while Link’s biography and many of the interstitial chapters on disasters, like Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919, are interesting and deeply researched, Wicked Problems suffers from some wicked structural choices.

The book’s elaborate conceptual framework and hodgepodge of narratives feel both fussy and unnecessary, making a complex and nuanced topic even more difficult to grasp at times. In the prologue alone, readers must bounce from the concept of cloud problems to that of wicked problems, which get broken down into hard, soft, and messy problems, which are then reconstituted in different ways and linked to six attributes—efficiency, vagueness, vulnerability, safety, maintenance, and resilience—that, together, form what Madhavan calls a “concept of operations,” which is the primary organizational tool he uses to examine wicked problems.

It’s a lot—or at least enough to make you wonder whether a “systems engineering” approach was the correct lens through which to examine wickedness. It’s also unfortunate because Madhavan’s ultimate argument is an important one, particularly in an age of rampant solutionism and “one neat trick” approaches to complex problems. To effectively address a world full of wicked problems, he says, we’re going to need a more expansive and inclusive idea of what engineering is and who gets to participate in it.

Rational Accidents: Reckoning with Catastrophic Technologies

John Downer

MIT PRESS, 2024

While John Downer would likely agree with that sentiment, his new book, Rational Accidents, makes a strong argument that there are hard limits to even the best and broadest engineering approaches. Similarly set in the world of aviation, Downer’s book explores a fundamental paradox at the heart of today’s civil aviation industry: the fact that flying is safer and more reliable than should technically be possible.

Jetliners are an example of what Downer calls a “catastrophic technology.” These are “complex technological systems that require extraordinary, and historically unprecedented, failure rates—of the order of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of operational hours between catastrophic failures.”

Take the average modern jetliner, with its 7 million components and 170 miles’ worth of wiring—an immensely complex system in and of itself. There were over 25,000 jetliners in regular service in 2014, according to Downer. Together, they averaged 100,000 flights every single day. Now consider that in 2017, no passenger-carrying commercial jetliner was involved in a fatal accident. Zero. That year, passenger totals reached 4 billion on close to 37 million flights. Yes, it was a record-setting year for the airline industry, safety-wise, but flying remains an almost unfathomably safe and reliable mode of transportation—even with Boeing’s deadly 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 and the company’s ongoing troubles.

Downer, a professor of science and technology studies at the University of Bristol, does an excellent job in the first half of the book dismantling the idea that we can objectively recognize, understand, and therefore control all risk involved in such complex technologies. Using examples from well-known jetliner crashes, as well as from the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, he shows why there are simply too many scenarios and permutations of failure for us to assess or foresee such risks, even with today’s sophisticated modeling techniques and algorithmic assistance.

So how does the airline industry achieve its seemingly unachievable record of safety and reliability? It’s not regulation, Downer says. Instead, he points to three unique factors. First is the massive service experience the industry has amassed. Over the course of 70 years, manufacturers have built tens of thousands of jetliners, which have failed (and continue to fail) in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

This deep and constantly growing data set, combined with the industry’s commitment to thoroughly investigating each and every failure, lets it generalize the lessons learned across the entire industry—the second key to understanding jetliner reliability.

Finally is what might be the most interesting and counterintuitive factor: Downer argues that the lack of innovation in jetliner design is an essential but overlooked part of the reliability record. The fact that the industry has been building what are essentially iterations of the same jetliner for 70 years ensures that lessons learned from failures are perpetually relevant as well as generalizable, he says.

That extremely cautious relationship to change flies in the face of the innovate-or-die ethos that drives most technology companies today. And yet it allows the airline industry to learn from decades of failures and continue to chip away at the future “failure performance” of jetliners.

The bad news is that the lessons in jetliner reliability aren’t transferable to other catastrophic technologies. “It is an irony of modernity that the only catastrophic technology with which we have real experience, the jetliner, is highly unrepresentative, and yet it reifies a misleading perception of mastery over catastrophic technologies in general,” writes Downer.

For instance, to make nuclear reactors as reliable as jetliners, that industry would need to commit to one common reactor design, build tens of thousands of reactors, operate them for decades, suffer through thousands of catastrophes, slowly accumulate lessons and insights from those catastrophes, and then use them to refine that common reactor design.

This obviously won’t happen. And yet “because we remain entranced by the promise of implausible reliability, and implausible certainty about that reliability, our appetite for innovation has outpaced our insight and humility,” writes Downer. With the age of catastrophic technologies still in its infancy, our continued survival may very well hinge not on innovating our way out of cloudy or wicked problems, but rather on recognizing, and respecting, what we don’t know and can probably never understand.

If Wicked Problems and Rational Accidents are about the challenges and limits of trying to understand complex systems using objective science- and engineering-based methods, Georgina Voss’s new book, Systems Ultra, provides a refreshing alternative. Rather than dispassionately trying to map out or make sense of complex systems from the outside, Voss—a writer, artist, and researcher—uses her book to grapple with what they feel like, and ultimately what they mean, from the inside.

Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World

Georgina Voss

VERSO, 2024

“There is something rather wonderful about simply feeling our way through these enormous structures,” she writes before taking readers on a whirlwind tour of systems visible and unseen, corrupt and benign, ancient and new. Stops include the halls of hype at Las Vegas’s annual Consumer Electronics Show (“a hot mess of a Friday casual hellscape”), the “memetic gold mine” that was the container ship Ever Given and the global supply chain it broke when it got stuck in the Suez Canal, and the payment systems that undergird the porn industry.

For Voss, systems are both structure and behavior. They are relational technologies that are “defined by their ability to scale and, perhaps more importantly, their peculiar relationship to scale.” She’s also keenly aware of the pitfalls of using an “experiential” approach to make sense of these large-scale systems. “Verbal attempts to neatly encapsulate what a system is can feel like a stoner monologue with pointed hand gestures (‘Have you ever thought about how electricity is, like, really big?’),” she writes.

Nevertheless, her written attempts are a delight to read. Voss manages to skillfully unpack the power structures that make up, and reinforce, the large-scale systems we live in. Along the way, she also dispels many of the stories we’re told about their inscrutability and inevitability. That she does all this with humor, intelligence, and a boundless sense of curiosity makes Systems Ultra both a shining example of the “civic engagement as engineering” approach that Madhavan argues for in Wicked Problems, and proof that his argument is spot on.

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.

Profile

- Meet the architect creating wood structures that shape themselves

Business

Meet the architect creating wood structures that shape themselves

J. Juniper Friedman   24 Jun, 2024

Menges sees the natural and often unpredictable tendencies of wood not as a liability but as an asset.

Humanity has long sought to tame wood into something more predictable. Sawmills manufacture lumber from trees selected for consistency. Wood is then sawed into standard sizes and dried in kilns to prevent twisting, cupping, or cracking. Generations of craftsmen have employed sophisticated techniques like dovetail joinery, breadboard ends, and pocket flooring to keep wood from distorting in their finished pieces.

But wood is inherently imprecise. Its grain reverses and swirls. Trauma and disease manifest in scars and knots.

Instead of viewing these natural tendencies as liabilities, Achim Menges, an architect and professor at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, sees them as wood’s greatest assets. Menges and his team at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction are uncovering new ways to build with the material by using computational design—which relies on algorithms and data to simulate and predict how wood will behave within a structure long before it is built. He hopes this work will enable architects to create more sustainable and affordable timber buildings by reducing the amount of wood required.

Menges’s recent work has focused on creating “self-shaping” timber structures like the HygroShell, which debuted at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2023. Constructed from prefabricated panels of a common building material known as cross-laminated timber, HygroShell morphed over a span of five days, unfurling into a series of interlaced sheets clad with wooden scale-like shingles that stretched to cover the structure as it expanded. Its final form, designed as a proof of concept, is a delicately arched canopy that rises to nearly 33 feet (10 meters) but is only an inch thick. In a time-lapse video, the evolving structure resembles a bird stretching its wings.

HygroShell takes its name from hygroscopicity, a property of wood that causes it to absorb or lose moisture with humidity changes. As the material dries, it contracts and tends to twist and curve. Traditionally, lumber manufacturers have sought to minimize these movements. But through computational design, Menges’s team can predict the changes and structure the material to guide it into the shape they want.

“From the start, I was motivated to understand computation not as something that divides the physical and the digital world but, instead, that deeply connects them.”

Achim Menges, architect and professor, University of Stuttgart in Germany

The result is a predictable and repeatable process that creates tighter curves with less material than what can be attained through traditional construction techniques. Existing curved structures made from cross-laminated timber (also known as mass timber) are limited to custom applications and carry premium prices, Menges says. Self-shaping, in contrast, could offer industrial-scale production of curved mass timber structures for far less cost.

To build HygroShell, the team created digital profiles of hundreds of freshly sawed boards using data about moisture content, grain orientation, and more. Those parameters were fed into modeling software that predicted how the boards were likely to distort as they dried and simulated how to arrange them to achieve the desired structure. Then the team used robotic milling machines to create the joints that held the panels together as the piece unfolded.

“What we’re trying to do is develop design methods that are so sophisticated they meet or match the sophistication of the material we deal with,” Menges says.

Menges views “self-shaping,” as he calls his technique, as a low-energy way of creating complex curved architectures that would otherwise be too difficult to build on most construction sites. Typically, making curves requires extensive machining and a lot more materials, at considerable cost. By letting the wood’s natural properties do the heavy lifting, and using robotic machinery to prefabricate the structures, Menges’s process allows for thin-walled timber construction that saves material and money.

The shape, structure, and construction process of Menges’s HygroShell pavilion are all based on data that shows how different materials change over time.

If they were self-shaped, curved elements could halve the material requirements for certain structural features in a multistory timber building, Menges says. “You would save a lot of material simply because curvature adds stiffness. That’s why we see everything is curved in nature.”

Menges began his career in the late 1990s, at a time when architects had just begun to use powerful new software to design buildings. This shift opened new possibilities, but often those digital designs ran afoul of the material’s physical constraints, he says. It was the tension between the physical and the digital that inspired Menges to pursue computational design.

“From the start, I was motivated to understand computation not as something that divides the physical and the digital world but, instead, that deeply connects them,” he says.

His interest in self-shaping structures was inspired by pinecones, which—long after falling from trees—retain the biological programming to open and expose their seeds as temperatures rise. “That’s a plant motion that does not require any motors, nor does it require any muscles,” Menges says. “It is programmed into the material.”

Pinecones made him realize that just as robots are programmed to perform certain actions, materials like wood can be manipulated to carry out specific behaviors that are hard-coded in their DNA as a response to a stimulus.

Apart from the HygroShell, Menges has used self-shaping techniques to create proof-of-concept projects like the Urbach Tower, a 45-foot spiraling wood structure overlooking the fields of the Rems Valley near Urbach, Germany. Instead of using energy-intensive mechanical processes that require heavy machinery, the team prefabricated a dozen curved, self-shaped wood panels and assembled them on site, reducing the time it would otherwise take to build such a structure.

And in 2023, his team worked with researchers from Germany’s University of Freiburg to create the livMatS Biomimetic Shell, a structure made from 127 wooden cassettes, each resembling the shape of a honeycomb. Menges used self-shaping to design a system of 3D-printed wooden window blinds that opened and closed in response to changes in relative humidity. Embedded in the wood shell is a solar gate that closes in warm weather, shading the space, and opens during colder months to provide passive solar heating. Compared with a conventional timber building, this structure has half the environmental impact over its life cycle.

Menges’s work is coming at a time when the sustainability of mass timber buildings—those with structural components made from engineered wood instead of steel or concrete—is under scrutiny. Concerns range from where the timber is sourced to whether preserving forests sequesters more carbon than harvesting them for building material, even if building with wood reduces carbon emissions relative to producing concrete and steel. There are also worries about what happens to all the wood left behind during the logging process. Trees may be a renewable resource, but they require decades to mature and are already threatened by climate change. That’s what led Menges and others to advocate for more efficient building practices that don’t waste wood.

The design of the Urbach Tower, a proof-of-concept project, emerged from a new self-shaping process for its curved wood components.

ITECH/ICD/ITKE UNIVERSITY OF STUTTGART

Architects face a dilemma, however. Mass-timber buildings could be built using less wood, but the less material is used, the more susceptible the structure is to fire, says Michael Green, principal of Michael Green Architecture in Vancouver.

“The way we protect wood is by overbuilding it to create a thickness that can resist a certain amount of time under fire,” Green says. The standards depend on the type of building and the variety of wood used, but Green generally adds around 3.6 centimeters (1.4 inches) of extra material to his structures for each hour of required burn time. The more people occupy a building, the longer it is required to resist fire and, in the case of mass-timber buildings, the thicker the wood structure.

Green sees Menges’s work as important foundational research that may lead to breakthroughs influencing wood architecture in decades to come. But he doesn’t see self-shaped architecture being widely deployed outside the towers and pavilions Menges has already designed.

The livMatS Biomimetic Shell features 3D-printed wooden window blinds that open and close in response to changes in relative humidity.

“It’s teaching us less about what we are actually going to build in the next five years and more about what we need to learn so we can develop other products that support that,” he says.

Even without widespread adoption of self-shaping techniques, Menges believes, computational design will continue to unlock new ways of building with wood. He sees a future where the knots, crooks, and branches of trees are viewed not as defects but as construction tools, each with its own unique properties.

“A tree does not have a defect,” he says. “It’s an anatomical feature. What we need to learn is what kind of building systems we develop that integrate these features, and not strive for the homogeneity that is simply not there.”

Business

- The return of pneumatic tubes

Business

The return of pneumatic tubes

J. Juniper Friedman   19 Jun, 2024

In 1947, pneumatic tubes facilitated

transactions between departments at Marshall

Field’s department store in Chicago.

Pneumatic tubes were touted as something that would revolutionize the world. In science fiction, they were envisioned as a fundamental part of the future—even in dystopias like George Orwell’s 1984, where the main character, Winston Smith, sits in a room peppered with pneumatic tubes that spit out orders for him to alter previously published news stories and historical records to fit the ruling party’s changing narrative.

Abandoned by most industries at midcentury, pneumatic tube systems have become ubiquitous in hospitals.

ALAMY

In real life, the tubes were expected to transform several industries in the late 19th century through the mid-20th. “The possibilities of compressed air are not fully realized in this country,” declared an 1890 article in the New York Tribune. “The pneumatic tube system of communication is, of course, in use in many of the downtown stores, in newspaper offices […] but there exists a great deal of ignorance about the use of compressed air, even among engineering experts.”

Pneumatic tube technology involves moving a cylindrical carrier or capsule through a series of tubes with the aid of a blower that pushes or pulls it into motion. For a while, the United States took up the systems with gusto. Retail stores and banks were especially interested in their potential to move money more efficiently: “Besides this saving of time to the customer the store is relieved of all the annoying bustle and confusion of boys running for cash on the various retail floors,” one 1882 article in the Boston Globe reported. The benefit to the owner, of course, was reduced labor costs, with tube manufacturers claiming that stores would see a return on their investment within a year.

“The motto of the company is to substitute machines for men and for children as carriers, in every possible way,” a 1914 Boston Globe article said about Lamson Service, one of the largest proprietors of tubes at the time, adding, “[President] Emeritus Charles W. Eliot of Harvard says: ‘No man should be employed at a task which a machine can perform,’ and the Lamson Company supplements that statement by this: ‘Because it doesn’t pay.’”

By 1912, Lamson had over 60,000 customers globally in sectors including retail, banks, insurance offices, courtrooms, libraries, hotels, and industrial plants. The postal service in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York also used tubes to deliver the mail, with at least 45 miles of Lamson tubing in place by 1912.

On the transportation front, New York City’s first attempt at a subway system, in 1870, also ran on a pneumatic system, and the idea of using tubes to move people continues to beguile innovators to this day. (See Elon Musk’s largely abandoned Hyperloop concept of the 2010s.)

But by the mid to late 20th century, use of the technology had largely fallen by the wayside. It had become cheaper to transport mail by truck than by tube, and as transactions moved to credit cards, there was less demand to make change for cash payments. Electrical rail won out over compressed air, paper records and files disappeared in the wake of digitization, and tubes at bank drive-throughs started being replaced by ATMs, while only a fraction of pharmacies used them for their own such services. Pneumatic tube technology became virtually obsolete.

Except in hospitals.

“A pneumatic tube system today for a new hospital that’s being built is ubiquitous. It’s like putting a washing machine or a central AC system in a new home. It just makes too much sense to not do it,” says Cory Kwarta, CEO of Swisslog Healthcare, a corporation that—under its TransLogic company—has provided pneumatic tube systems in health-care facilities for over 50 years. And while the sophistication of these systems has changed over time, the fundamental technology of using pneumatic force to move a capsule from one destination to another has remained the same.

By the turn of the 20th century, health care had become a more scientific endeavor, and different spaces within a hospital were designated for new technologies (like x-rays) or specific procedures (like surgeries). “Instead of having patients in one place, with the doctors and the nurses and everything coming to them, and it’s all happening in the ward, [hospitals] became a bunch of different parts that each had a role,” explains Jeanne Kisacky, an architectural historian who wrote Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940.

Designating different parts of a building for different medical specialties and services, like specimen analysis, also increased the physical footprint of health-care facilities. The result was that nurses and doctors had to spend much of their days moving from one department to another, which was an inefficient use of their time. Pneumatic tube technology provided a solution.

By the 1920s, more and more hospitals started installing tube systems. At first, the capsules primarily moved medical records, prescription orders, and items like money and receipts—similar cargo to what was moved around in banks and retail stores at the time. As early as 1927, however, the systems were also marketed to hospitals as a way to transfer specimens to a central laboratory for analysis.

Two men stand among the 2,000 pneumatic tube canisters in the basement of the Lexington Avenue Post Office in New York City, circa 1915.

In 1955, clubbers at the Reni Ballroom in Berlin exchanged requests for dances via pneumatic tube in a sort of precursor to texting.

In the late 1940s and ’50s, canisters like this one, traveling at around 35 miles an hour, carried as many as 600 letters daily throughout New York City.

The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania traffics nearly 4,000 specimens daily through its pneumatic tubes.

By the 1960s, pneumatic tubes were becoming standard in health care. As a hospital administrator explained in the January 1960 issue of Modern Hospital, “We are now getting eight hours’ worth of service per day from each nurse, where previously we had been getting about six hours of nursing plus two hours of errand running.”

As computers and credit cards started to become more prevalent in the 1980s, reducing paperwork significantly, the systems shifted to mostly carrying lab specimens, pharmaceuticals, and blood products. Today, lab specimens are roughly 60% of what hospital tube systems carry; pharmaceuticals account for 30%, and blood products for phlebotomy make up 5%.

The carriers or capsules, which can hold up to five pounds, move through piping six inches in diameter—just big enough to hold a 2,000-milliliter IV bag—at speeds of 18 to 24 feet per second, or roughly 12 to 16 miles per hour. The carriers are limited to those speeds to maintain specimen integrity. If blood samples move faster, for example, blood cells can be destroyed.

The pneumatic systems have also gone through major changes in structure in recent years, evolving from fixed routes to networked systems. “It’s like a train system, and you’re on one track and now you have to go to another track,” says Steve Dahl, an executive vice president at Pevco, a manufacturer of these systems.

Exhibition-goers wait to ride the first pneumatic passenger railway in the US at the Exhibition of the American Institute at the New York City Armory in 1867.

GETTY IMAGES

Manufacturers try to get involved early in the hospital design process, says Swisslog’s Kwarta, so “we can talk to the clinical users and say, ‘Hey, what kind of contents do you anticipate sending through this pneumatic tube system, based on your bed count, based on your patient census, and from where and to where do these specimens or materials need to go?’”

Penn Medicine’s University City Medical District in Philadelphia opened up the state-of-the-art Pavilion in 2021. It has three pneumatic systems: the main one is for items directly related to health care, like specimens, and two separate ones handle linen and trash. The main system runs over 12 miles of pipe and completes more than 6,000 transactions on an average day. Sending a capsule between the two farthest points of the system—a distance of multiple city blocks—takes just under five minutes. Walking that distance would take around 20 minutes, not including getting to the floor where the item needs to go.

Michigan Medicine has a system dedicated solely for use in nuclear medicine, which relies on radioactive materials for treatment. Getting the materials where they need to go is a five- to eight-minute walk—too long given their short shelf life. With the tubes, it gets there—in a lead-lined capsule—in less than a minute.

Steven Fox, who leads the electrical engineering team for the pneumatic tubes at Michigan Medicine, describes the scale of the materials his system moves in terms of African elephants, which weigh about six tons. “We try to keep [a carrier’s] load to five pounds apiece,” he says. “So we could probably transport about 30,000 pounds per day. That’s two and a half African elephants that we transport from one side of the hospital to the other every day.”

The equipment to maintain these labyrinthian highways is vast. Michigan and Penn have between 150 and 200 stations where doctors, nurses, and technicians can pick up a capsule or send one off. Keeping those systems moving also requires around 30 blowers and over 150 transfer units to shift carriers to different tube lines as needed. At Michigan Medicine, moving an item from one end of the system to another requires 20 to 25 pieces of equipment.

Before the turn of the century, triggering the blower to move a capsule from point A to point B would be accomplished by someone turning or pressing an electronic or magnetic switch. In the 2000s, technicians managed the systems on DOS; these days, the latest systems run on programs that monitor every capsule in real time and allow adjustments based on the level of traffic, the priority level of a capsule, and the demand for additional carriers. The systems run 24 hours a day, every day.

“We treat [the tube system] no different than electricity, steam, water, gas. It’s a utility,” says Frank Connelly, an assistant hospital director at Penn. “Without that, you can’t provide services to people that need it in a hospital.”

“You’re nervous—you just got blood taken,” he continues. “‘How long is it going to be before I get my results back?’ Imagine if they had to wait all that extra time because you’re not sending one person for every vial—they’re going to wait awhile until they get a basket full and then walk to the lab. Nowadays they fill up the tube and send it to the lab. And I think that helps patient care.”

Vanessa Armstrong is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlas Obscura, Travel + Leisure, and elsewhere.

Biotechnology and health

- Is this the end of animal testing?

Biotechnology and health

Is this the end of animal testing?

J. Juniper Friedman   21 Jun, 2024

Organs on chips are microfluidic devices that can create conditions similar to those found in the human body.

In a clean room in his lab, Sean Moore peers through a microscope at a bit of intestine, its dark squiggles and rounded structures standing out against a light gray background. This sample is not part of an actual intestine; rather, it’s human intestinal cells on a tiny plastic rectangle, one of 24 so-called “organs on chips” his lab bought three years ago.

Moore, a pediatric gastroenterologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, hopes the chips will offer answers to a particularly thorny research problem. He studies rotavirus, a common infection that causes severe diarrhea, vomiting, dehydration, and even death in young children. In the US and other rich nations, up to 98% of the children who are vaccinated against rotavirus develop lifelong immunity. But in low-income countries, only about a third of vaccinated children become immune. Moore wants to know why.

His lab uses mice for some protocols, but animal studies are notoriously bad at identifying human treatments. Around 95% of the drugs developed through animal research fail in people. Researchers have documented this translation gap since at least 1962. “All these pharmaceutical companies know the animal models stink,” says Don Ingber, founder of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard and a leading advocate for organs on chips. “The FDA knows they stink.”

But until recently there was no other option. Research questions like Moore’s can’t ethically or practically be addressed with a randomized, double-blinded study in humans. Now these organs on chips, also known as microphysiological systems, may offer a truly viable alternative. They look remarkably prosaic: flexible polymer rectangles about the size of a thumb drive. In reality they’re triumphs of bioengineering, intricate constructions furrowed with tiny channels that are lined with living human tissues. These tissues expand and contract with the flow of fluid and air, mimicking key organ functions like breathing, blood flow, and peristalsis, the muscular contractions of the digestive system.

More than 60 companies now produce organs on chips commercially, focusing on five major organs: liver, kidney, lung, intestines, and brain. They’re already being used to understand diseases, discover and test new drugs, and explore personalized approaches to treatment.

As they continue to be refined, they could solve one of the biggest problems in medicine today. “You need to do three things when you’re making a drug,” says Lorna Ewart, a pharmacologist and chief scientific officer of Emulate, a biotech company based in Boston. “You need to show it’s safe. You need to show it works. You need to be able to make it.”

All new compounds have to pass through a preclinical phase, where they’re tested for safety and effectiveness before moving to clinical trials in humans. Until recently, those tests had to run in at least two animal species—usually rats and dogs—before the drugs were tried on people.

But in December 2022, President Biden signed the FDA Modernization Act, which amended the original FDA Act of 1938. With a few small word changes, the act opened the door for non-animal-based testing in preclinical trials. Anything that makes it faster and easier for pharmaceutical companies to identify safe and effective drugs means better, potentially cheaper treatments for all of us.

Moore, for one, is banking on it, hoping the chips help him and his colleagues shed light on the rotavirus vaccine responses that confound them. “If you could figure out the answer,” he says, “you could save a lot of kids’ lives.”

While many teams have worked on organ chips over the last 30 years, the OG in the field is generally acknowledged to be Michael Shuler, a professor emeritus of chemical engineering at Cornell. In the 1980s, Shuler was a math and engineering guy who imagined an “animal on a chip,” a cell culture base seeded with a variety of human cells that could be used for testing drugs. He wanted to position a handful of different organ cells on the same chip, linked to one another, which could mimic the chemical communication between organs and the way drugs move through the body. “This was science fiction,” says Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University whose lab works with cardiac tissue on chips. “There was no body on a chip. There is still no body on a chip. God knows if there will ever be a body on a chip.”

Shuler had hoped to develop a computer model of a multi-organ system, but there were too many unknowns. The living cell culture system he dreamed up was his bid to fill in the blanks. For a while he played with the concept, but the materials simply weren’t good enough to build what he imagined.

“You can force mice to menstruate, but it’s not really menstruation. You need the human being.”

Linda Griffith, founding professor of biological engineering at MIT and a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant”

He wasn’t the only one working on the problem. Linda Griffith, a founding professor of biological engineering at MIT and a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant,” designed a crude early version of a liver chip in the late 1990s: a flat silicon chip, just a few hundred micrometers tall, with endothelial cells, oxygen and liquid flowing in and out via pumps, silicone tubing, and a polymer membrane with microscopic holes. She put liver cells from rats on the chip, and those cells organized themselves into three-dimensional tissue. It wasn’t a liver, but it modeled a few of the things a functioning human liver could do. It was a start.

Griffith, who rides a motorcycle for fun and speaks with a soft Southern accent, suffers from endometriosis, an inflammatory condition where cells from the lining of the uterus grow throughout the abdomen. She’s endured decades of nausea, pain, blood loss, and repeated surgeries. She never took medical leaves, instead loading up on Percocet, Advil, and margaritas, keeping a heating pad and couch in her office—a strategy of necessity, as she saw no other choice for a working scientist. Especially a woman.

And as a scientist, Griffith understood that the chronic diseases affecting women tend to be under-researched, underfunded, and poorly treated. She realized that decades of work with animals hadn’t done a damn thing to make life better for women like her. “We’ve got all this data, but most of that data does not lead to treatments for human diseases,” she says. “You can force mice to menstruate, but it’s not really menstruation. You need the human being.”

Or, at least, the human cells. Shuler and Griffith, and other scientists in Europe, worked on some of those early chips, but things really kicked off around 2009, when Don Ingber’s lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created the first fully functioning organ on a chip. That “lung on a chip” was made from flexible silicone rubber, lined with human lung cells and capillary blood vessel cells that “breathed” like the alveoli—tiny air sacs—in a human lung. A few years later Ingber, an MD-PhD with the tidy good looks of a younger Michael Douglas, founded Emulate, one of the earliest biotech companies making microphysiological systems. Since then he’s become a kind of unofficial ambassador for in vitro technologies in general and organs on chips in particular, giving hundreds of talks, scoring millions in grant money, repping the field with scientists and laypeople. Stephen Colbert once ragged on him after the New York Times quoted him as describing a chip that “walks, talks, and quacks like a human vagina,” a quote Ingber says was taken out of context.

Ingber began his career working on cancer. But he struggled with the required animal research. “I really didn’t want to work with them anymore, because I love animals,” he says. “It was a conscious decision to focus on in vitro models.” He’s not alone; a growing number of young scientists are speaking up about the distress they feel when research protocols cause pain, trauma, injury, and death to lab animals. “I’m a master’s degree student in neuroscience and I think about this constantly. I’ve done such unspeakable, horrible things to mice all in the name of scientific progress, and I feel guilty about this every day,” wrote one anonymous student on Reddit. (Full disclosure: I switched out of a psychology major in college because I didn’t want to cause harm to animals.)

Emulate is one of the companies building organ-on-a-chip technology. The devices combine live human cells with a microenvironment designed to emulate specific tissues.

EMULATE

Taking an undergraduate art class led Ingber to an epiphany: mechanical forces are just as important as chemicals and genes in determining the way living creatures work. On a shelf in his office he still displays a model he built in that art class, a simple construction of sticks and fishing line, which helped him realize that cells pull and twist against each other. That realization foreshadowed his current work and helped him design dynamic microfluidic devices that incorporated shear and flow.

Ingber coauthored a 2022 paper that’s sometimes cited as a watershed in the world of organs on chips. Researchers used Emulate’s liver chips to reevaluate 27 drugs that had previously made it through animal testing and had then gone on to kill 242 people and necessitate more than 60 liver transplants. The liver chips correctly flagged problems with 22 of the 27 drugs, an 87% success rate compared with a 0% success rate for animal testing. It was the first time organs on chips had been directly pitted against animal models, and the results got a lot of attention from the pharmaceutical industry. Dan Tagle, director of the Office of Special Initiatives for the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), estimates that drug failures cost around $2.6 billion globally each year. The earlier in the process failing compounds can be weeded out, the more room there is for other drugs to succeed.

“The capacity we have to test drugs is more or less fixed in this country,” says Shuler, whose company, Hesperos, also manufactures organs on chips. “There are only so many clinical trials you can do. So if you put a loser into the system, that means something that could have won didn’t get into the system. We want to change the success rate from clinical trials to a much higher number.”

In 2011, the National Institutes of Health established NCATS and started investing in organs on chips and other in vitro technologies. Other government funders, like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, have followed suit. For instance, NIH recently funded NASA scientists to send heart tissue on chips into space. Six months in low gravity ages the cardiovascular system 10 years, so this experiment lets researchers study some of the effects of aging without harming animals or humans.

Scientists have made liver chips, brain chips, heart chips, kidney chips, intestine chips, and even a female reproductive system on a chip (with cells from ovaries, fallopian tubes, and uteruses that release hormones and mimic an actual 28-day menstrual cycle). Each of these chips exhibits some of the specific functions of the organs in question. Cardiac chips, for instance, contain heart cells that beat just like heart muscle, making it possible for researchers to model disorders like cardiomyopathy.

Shuler thinks organs on chips will revolutionize the world of research for rare diseases. “It is a very good model when you don’t have enough patients for normal clinical trials and you don’t have a good animal model,” he says. “So it’s a way to get drugs to people that couldn’t be developed in our current pharmaceutical model.” Shuler’s own biotech company used organs on chips to test a potential drug for myasthenia gravis, a rare neurological disorder. In 2022,the FDA approved the drug for clinical trials based on that data—one of six Hesperos drugs that have so far made it to that stage.

Each chip starts with a physiologically based pharmacokinetic model, known as a PBPK model—a mathematical expression of how a chemical compound behaves in a human body. “We try and build a physical replica of the mathematical model of what really occurs in the body,” explains Shuler. That model guides the way the chip is designed, re-creating the amount of time a fluid or chemical stays in that particular organ—what’s known as the residence time. “As long as you have the same residence time, you should get the same response in terms of chemical conversion,” he says.

Tiny channels on each chip, each between 10 and 100 microns in diameter, help bring fluids and oxygen to the cells. “When you get down to less than one micron, you can’t use normal fluid dynamics,” says Shuler. And fluid dynamics matters, because if the fluid moves through the device too quickly, the cells might die; too slowly, and the cells won’t react normally.

Chip technology, while sophisticated, has some downsides. One of them is user friendliness. “We need to get rid of all this tubing and pumps and make something that’s as simple as a well plate for culturing cells,” says Vunjak-Novakovic. Her lab and others are working on simplifying the design and function of such chips so they’re easier to operate and are compatible with robots, which do repetitive tasks like pipetting in many labs.

Cost and sourcing can also be challenging. Emulate’s base model, which looks like a simple rectangular box from the outside,starts at around $100,000 and rises steeply from there. Most human cells come from commercial suppliers that arrange for donations from hospital patients. During the pandemic, when people had fewer elective surgeries, many of those sources dried up. As microphysiological systems become more mainstream, finding reliable sources of human cells will be critical.

“As your confidence in using the chips grows, you might say, Okay, we don’t need two animals anymore— we could go with chip plus one animal.”

Lorna Ewart, Chief Scientific Officer, Emulate

Another challenge is that every company producing organs on chips uses its own proprietary methods and technologies. Ingber compares the landscape to the early days of personal computing, when every company developed its own hardware and software, and none of them meshed well. For instance, the microfluidic systems in Emulate’s intestine chips are fueled by micropumps, while those made by Mimetas, another biotech company, use an electronic rocker and gravity to circulate fluids and air. “This is not an academic lab type of challenge,” emphasizes Ingber. “It’s a commercial challenge. There’s no way you can get the same results anywhere in the world with individual academics making [organs on chips], so you have to have commercialization.”

Namandje Bumpus, the FDA’s chief scientist, agrees. “You can find differences [in outcomes] depending even on what types of reagents you’re using,” she says. Those differences mean research can’t be easily reproduced, which diminishes its validity and usefulness. “It would be great to have some standardization,” she adds.

On the plus side, the chip technology could help researchers address some of the most deeply entrenched health inequities in science. Clinical trials have historically recruited white men, underrepresenting people of color, women (especially pregnant and lactating women), the elderly, and other groups. And treatments derived from those trials all too often fail in members of those underrepresented groups, as in Moore’s rotavirus vaccine mystery. “With organs on a chip, you may be able to create systems by which you are very, very thoughtful—where you spread the net wider than has ever been done before,” says Moore.

This microfluidic platform, designed by MIT engineers, connects engineered tissue from up to 10 organs.

FELICE FRANKEL

Another advantage is that chips will eventually reduce the need for animals in the lab even as they lead to better human outcomes. “There are aspects of animal research that make all of us uncomfortable, even people that do it,” acknowledges Moore. “The same values that make us uncomfortable about animal research are also the same values that make us uncomfortable with seeing human beings suffer with diseases that we don’t have cures for yet. So we always sort of balance that desire to reduce suffering in all the forms that we see it.”

Lorna Ewart, who spent 20 years at the pharma giant AstraZeneca before joining Emulate, thinks we’re entering a kind of transition time in research, in which scientists use in vitro technologies like organs on chips alongside traditional cell culture methods and animals. “As your confidence in using the chips grows, you might say, Okay, we don’t need two animals anymore—we could go with chip plus one animal,” she says.

In the meantime, Sean Moore is excited about incorporating intestine chips more and more deeply into his research. His lab has been funded by the Gates Foundation to do what he laughingly describes as a bake-off between intestine chips made by Emulate and Mimetas. They’re infecting the chips with different strains of rotavirus to try to identify the pros and cons of each company’s design. It’s too early for any substantive results, but Moore says he does have data showing that organ chips are a viable model for studying rotavirus infection. That could ultimately be a real game-changer in his lab and in labs around the world.

“There’s more players in the space right now,” says Moore. “And that competition is going to be a healthy thing.”

Harriet Brown writes about health, medicine, and science. Her most recent book is Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement. She’s a professor of magazine, news, and digital journalism at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.

Field Notes

- Lego bricks are making science more accessible

Business

Lego bricks are making science more accessible

J. Juniper Friedman   25 Jun, 2024

Etienne Boulter walked into his lab at the Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, one morning with a Lego Technic excavator set tucked under his arm. His plan was simple yet ambitious: to use the pieces of the set to build a mechanical cell stretcher.

Boulter and his colleagues study mechanobiology—the way mechanical forces, such as stretching and compression, affect cells—and this piece of equipment is essential for his research. Commercial cell stretchers cost over $50,000. But one day, after playing with the Lego set, Boulter and his colleagues found a way to build one out of its components for only a little over $200. Their Lego system stretches a silicone plate where cells are growing. This process causes the cells to deform and mimics how our own skin cells stretch.

Sets like these are ideal to repurpose, says Boulter: “If you go to Lego Technic, you have the motors, you have the wheels, you have the axles—you have everything you need to build such a system.” Their model was so successful that 10 different labs around the world contacted him for the plans to build their own low-cost Lego stretchers.

Boulter is one of many researchers turning to Lego components to build inexpensive yet extremely effective lab equipment. The bricks themselves are durable and manufactured with tight tolerances. Lego’s offerings include sensors that can detect various colors, perceive rotational motion, and measure the distance to an object. These DIY tools are a creative and affordable solution for working scientists who are trying to keep costs down.

ETIENNE BOULTER

Take, for example, the Lego chromatographer designed by Cassandra Quave and her husband, Marco Caputo, both at Emory University. Quave is an ethnobotanist who leads a research group dedicated to documenting traditional medicines. Her team travels deep into forests and jungles around the world, collecting samples of leaves, berries, and seeds that they evaluate for their potential pharmaceutical value. To isolate chemical compounds from the plant samples, Quave makes use of a meticulous process called chromatography, in which liquid distilled from the plant is passed over a tube filled with a material such as a silica gel.

Timing in chromatography needs to be very exact, with small amounts of liquid being added at precise moments. Waiting for these moments is not the best use of a graduate student’s time. This is exactly what Quave thought when she walked into the lab one day and saw her PhD student Huaqiao Tang holding a test tube and watching the clock. “This is crazy!” Quave said, laughing. “We can come up with a better solution!”

When Quave told Caputo of her problem, he brought in Legos culled from their four children’s massive collection and had his students see what they could do with them. They came up with a robotic arm that could make repeated precise movements, gradually adding small fractions of liquid to test tubes in order to isolate compounds within the plant tissue. The device was so accurate in its movements, Quave says, that spontaneous crystals formed, something that occurs only in very pure substances.

Ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave distills molecules from plants using a Lego chromatographer that she designed with her husband, researcher Marco Caputo.

At Cardiff University in Wales, Christopher Thomas, Oliver Castell, and Sion Coulman had similar success building an instrument capable of printing cells. The researchers study skin diseases, lipids (fatty compounds) in the body, and wound healing. Ethically obtained samples are hard to find, so they created a 3D bioprinter out of Lego pieces that is capable of “printing” a human skin analogue, laying down layers of bio-ink that contains living cells. These printers normally cost over a quarter of a million dollars, but they built their version for a mere $550. At first, their colleagues were skeptical that components typically treated as toys could be used in such a professional setting, but after seeing the printer at work, they were quickly convinced. The team made national news, and other groups replicated the model in their own labs.

At Cardiff University, Christopher Thomas, Oliver Castell, and Sion Coulman built an instrument capable of printing cells. Groups around the world have already replicated their design.

COURTESY OF CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

Some scientists are devising tools to take into the classroom. Timo Betz of the University of Göttingen in Germany came up with the idea of building a Lego microscope one day while watching his son, Emil, then eight, play. Betz was scheduled to speak about science at a local school that afternoon but was reluctant to take his own lab-grade microscope into the classroom. His son was immediately on board. “Let’s do this!” he told his dad. Together with Bart Vos, a colleague at the university, they built a microscope that consisted entirely of Lego pieces, with the exception of two optical lenses. Their plans, which they’ve made available to the public, can be used by students as young as 12 to learn the basic concepts of optics.

Timo Betz of the University of Göttingen designed and built a working microscope entirely from Lego pieces.

COURTESY OF TIMO BETZ

Many of these scientists make their models open source, providing them to interested groups or publishing the plans on GitHub or in papers or so that other labs can make their own versions. This is great for researchers the world over, especially those with limited funding—whether they’re new faculty members, scientists at smaller universities, or people working in low-income countries. It’s how a small plastic brick is making science more accessible to all.

Elizabeth Fernandez is a freelance science writer.

Archive

- Toys can change your life

Culture

Toys can change your life

J. Juniper Friedman   26 Jun, 2024

In a November 1984 story for Technology Review, Carolyn Sumners, curator of astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, described how toys, games, and even amusement park rides could change how young minds view science and math. “The Slinky,” Sumners noted, “has long served teachers as a medium for demonstrating longitudinal (soundlike) waves and transverse (lightlike) waves.” A yo-yo can be used as a gauge (a “yo-yo meter”) to observe the forces on a roller coaster. Marbles employ mass and velocity. Even a simple ball offers insights into the laws of gravity.

While Sumners focused on physics, she was onto something bigger. Over the last several decades, evidence has emerged that childhood play can shape our future selves: the skills we develop, the professions we choose, our sense of self-worth, and even our relationships.

That doesn’t mean we should foist “educational” toys like telescopes or tiny toolboxes on kids to turn them into astronomers or carpenters. As Sumners explained, even “fun” toys offer opportunities to discover the basic principles of physics.

According to Jacqueline Harding, a child development expert and author of The Brain That Loves to Play, “If you invest time in play, which helps with executive functioning, decision-making, resilience—all those things—then it’s going to propel you into a much more safe, secure space in the future.”

Sumners was focused mostly on hard skills, the scientific knowledge that toys and games can foster. But there are soft skills, too, like creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, and empathy. According to Harding, the less structure there is to such play—the fewer rules and goals—the more these soft skills emerge.

“The kinds of playthings, or play activities, that really produce creative thought,” she says, “are natural materials, with no defined end to them—like clay, paint, water, and mud—so that there is no right or wrong way of playing with it.”

Playing is by definition voluntary, spontaneous, and goal-free; it involves taking risks, testing boundaries, and experimenting. The best kind of play results in joyful discovery, and along the way, the building blocks of innovation and personal development take shape. But in the decades since Sumners wrote her story, the landscape of play has shifted considerably. Recent research by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Early Childhood suggests that digital games and virtual play don’t appear to confer the same developmental benefits as physical games and outdoor play.

“The brain loves the rewards that are coming from digital media,” says Harding. But in screen-based play, “you’re not getting that autonomy.” The lack of physical interaction also concerns her: “It is the quality of human face-to-face interaction, body proximity, eye-to-eye gaze, and mutual engagement in a play activity that really makes a difference.”

Bill Gourgey is a science writer based in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

MIT Technology Review Magazine: July/August 2024

Computing

How gamification took over the world

Culture

Supershoes are reshaping distance running

Artificial intelligence

How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play

Why does AI hallucinate?

An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

Climate change and energy

The cost of building the perfect wave

These board games want you to beat climate change

Space

Job title of the future: Space debris engineer

Policy

Inside the US government’s brilliantly boring websites

Learning from catastrophe

Profile

Meet the architect creating wood structures that shape themselves

Business

The return of pneumatic tubes

Biotechnology and health

Is this the end of animal testing?

Field Notes

Lego bricks are making science more accessible

Archive

Toys can change your life