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VOL. 118 NO. 6 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015 US $6.99/CAN $7.99

Business Report p. 63

The Future of Work Feature p. 54

Shocking Brain RepairsFeature p. 48

Lyft: Sell Your Car

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TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COMMIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEWVOL. 118 | NO. 6

From the Editor

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Here are some English-language tweetsfrom jihadis fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS: “I just noticed our martyred brother r.a. had a tumblr (I know, how could I have missed it). Make sure to check it out.” And: “This Syrian guy next 2 me (AbuUbayadah) is so stoked for our op he almost shot his foot o�. Come on bro—safety 1st. :p” And: “Put the chicken wings down n come to jihad bro.”

In “Fighting ISIS Online” (page 72), MIT Technology Review’s senior writer, David Talbot, describes what a Google policy director has called the “viral moment on social media” that ISIS is enjoying. Talbot reviews the early and small-scale counter-e�orts designed to “make one-on-one contact online with the people absorbing content from ISIS and other extremist groups and becom-ing radicalized.”

He writes of a “decentralized” social-media campaign by ISIS, supported by sympathizers in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, who repost ISIS’s gruesome videos or produce videos in their own languages that inflame local tribal and national grievances in an e�ort to join their regions to the self-declared caliphate.

The reason we care about ISIS’s social-media campaign is that it has been an animating force in recruiting about 25,000 people to fight in Syria and Iraq, at least 4,500 of them from Europe and North America. Social media helped create an army that estab-lished a new state.

ISIS’s viral moment recalls another recent historical moment in the Middle East when a movement was called into being by social media. In 2011, MIT Technology Review sent John Pollock to Egypt and Tunisia to report on the Arab Spring. At the time, journal-ists, new-media critics, and academ-ics were engaged in an acrimonious

debate about whether social media had been instrumental in the success-ful uprising against the dictatorships of North Africa. Pollock’s reporting in “Streetbook” (September/October 2011) showed that there would have been no Arab Spring without Facebook, because social media “connected people to each other and to the world” and those con-nections allowed people to organize and protest on the street, “where history happens.”

But Pollock’s main insight was that we shouldn’t be too surprised that a youth revolt used the preferred tools of the young: “The young make up the bulk of these movements, and inevi-tably they bring youth’s character to their fight for change … Organizing or attending protests gets fitted between flirting, studying, and holding down a job. Action for this generation is as likely to be mediated through screens … as face to face.”

So too, if less attractively, with ISIS. “In trying to understand why ISIS is so adept at [using social media to radical-ize young Muslims], one comes back to a simple explanation,” writes Talbot. “The people doing it grew up using the tools.” Talbot quotes Humera Khan, executive director of Muflehun, a think tank that opposes extremism among Muslims: “When you say ‘terrorist use of social media,’ it sounds ominous, but when you look at it as ‘youth use of social media,’ it becomes easier to under-stand … Of course they are using social media! They are doing the same thing youth are doing everywhere.”

The inescapable conclusion is that only widespread rejection of ISIS on social media by other young Muslims is likely to e�ectively counter ISIS’s own social-media campaign.

But write to me at jason.pontin@ technologyreview.com and tell me what you think.

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TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COMMIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEWVOL. 118 | NO. 6

Front2 From the Editor

8 Feedback

VIEWS

12 The Coal Conundrum India, desperate for clean energy, is stuck with coal for the foreseeable future.

12 Artificial Creativity Computers can make art, but only up to a point.

13 The Treatment Gap Too often, people su�ering from mental disorders don’t get e�ective care.

UPFRONT

15 Planting Generic GMOs Monsanto no longer controls one of agriculture’s biggest innovations.

17 Construction Drones The boss can track progress on the job site, from above.

18 Bionic Hearing Gadgets Prototype earbuds will help you tune out unwanted noise.

20 More Life, Less Death Population estimates rise even as women have fewer babies.

22 Meltdown-Proof Reactors Will molten-salt reactors make nuclear cool again?

22 Bitcoin Leader Speaks Gavin Andresen on his plans to save the digital currency.

24 Pig Hearts for People A company is genetically engineering pigs so we can use their organs in transplants.

Back

BUSINESS REPORT

63 The Future of Work Technology is changing what we do and how we do it. What does that mean for our jobs?

REVIEWS

72 Fighting ISIS Online The Islamic State is an Internet phenomenon as much as a military one. By David Talbot

78 The Hit Charade An algorithm may have created the playlist you just listened to. But humans make better ones. By Will Knight

84 Will Alphabet Become Something? Google’s new holding company will have to find a way to commercialize what it invents. By Jon Gertner

39 YEARS AGO

92 The Case for the Cab Decades before Lyft and Uber, a scholar argued for an army of less-regulated taxis.

ON THE COVER:

Contents

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26 | India’s Energy CrisisCan India bring electricity to hundreds of millions of people without destroying the climate in the process?

By Richard Martin

48 | Lyft’s Search for a New Mode of TransportUber’s archenemy thinks the world will be better o� if

we treat cars as a form of public transportation. By Ryan Bradley

54 | A Shocking Way to Fix the BrainNeurosurgeons hope implanted electrodes could treat

intractable mental disorders. But will it work? By Adam Piore

November/December 2015

The Islamic State’s mastery of social media, p. 72

Illustration by Tomer Hanuka

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TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COMMIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEWVOL. 118 | NO. 6

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Feedback

Five Most Popular StoriesMIT Technology Review Volume 118, Number 5

Tech’s Enduring Great-Man Myth

Elon Musk (born in South Africa) isn’t responsible for the Superman culture in the U.S. He’s just satisfying the local market demand for supermen.

—Miroslav Pivoda

The article paints in black and white. Because the government spon-sored a lot of fundamen-tal research, it deserves credit. But it takes a man of grand vision and convic-tion to put together all the elements required . Imag-ine the fi rst iPhone sold by anyone other than Steve Jobs. —pallavsingh

The Next Great GMO Debate

There are potentially unlimited di� erent kinds of RNA, and the nucleo-tides in a strand of RNA are the major determinant of what e� ect the RNA will have on an organism . So yes, as the article states, we’ve been eating RNA as long as we’ve been eating, but that’s like saying we’ve been eating food as long as we’ve been eating.

—fanofhawking

The 1 percent of insects that survive will be a di� er-ent strain, and if the sur-vivors are altered by RNA treatment, there is no way to predict what this shift in the insects’ genome will cause. —bubbabooboo

Paying for Solar Power

The economics of solar without subsidies is stron-ger in areas without access to cheap natu-ral gas or without strong power grids. This includes Spain, Japan and other island nations, India, China, and Africa. These markets will open up earlier for the solar cells from Bu� alo than the U.S. market will. —gametheoryman

When exactly are we going to end the billions in subsi-dies the fossil-fuel industry receives? This practice is so entrenched now that we don’t even talk about ending a ridiculous long-standing largesse.

—jcoleman

Teaching Machines to Understand Us

I get nervous when I read statements like “LeCun says systems that grasp ordinary language could get to know us well enough to understand what’s good for us.” Once it can distin-guish between “good” and “bad,” who will control the decision-making process?

—Rudolf01

Given time, software will mimic that curious fi ve-year-old, where every sen-tence is interrupted by a question. All the annoying but necessary details we adult humans need but rarely ask for.

—websco137

Inside Amazon

What a fascinating photo essay. Note the paucity of human beings in all these pictures of Amazon’s mas-sive warehouse operation. It seems as though robot-ization inevitably equals a reduction in rank-and-fi le workers with an increase in production e� ciency. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certainly something to ponder.

—UConnRon

Disgustingly beautiful.—Medhi B.

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