Science & Technology Archives - The World from PRX

As the world’s largest companies are pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, they are also scouring the planet to find spots where they can set up supercomputing data centers.

One of the latest projects from chip-making titan NVIDIA is a proposed $500 million AI factory in Armenia.

From our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, Shant Shahrigian has the story.

Click on the player to hear the full story.

The post A multi-million dollar AI data center is slated for Armenia appeared first on The World from PRX.

At this year’s Automotive World China exhibition in Shenzhen, one of the first attention-grabbing displays was the iCar, a Chinese-made electric SUV. Priced at around $19,000 dollars, the car is marketed as an affordable, rugged vehicle with retro styling, reminiscent of a 1960s Land Rover, complete with prominent circular headlights and bright chrome detailing. 

On the inside, the iCar’s buttery, heated seats and sleek digital layout give it the feel of a compact spaceship. Sales staff described the vehicle as powerful and fun. “I think [American] people would love it,” one sales representative said, though the vehicle is not available in the US due to protectionist tariffs.

While the iCar and other EV’s on display in Shenzhen were impressive, the real, cutting edge technology being developed in China could be found in smaller, more unassuming vehicles. One example is the R5 autonomous cargo van created by the self-driving technology company rino.ai, which received one of the exhibition’s top awards.

The R5 resembles a large white storage box on wheels. It has no steering wheel or driver’s seat; instead, an array of cameras, radar devices and a 3D light sensor mounted on top guides the van through traffic.

Rino representatives explained that the R5 is not just a prototype but that it’s already navigating streets in more than 150 Chinese cities.

“It has already been running on the roads of Shenzhen for a year and a half,” said Yan Ming, the company’s director of government affairs.

Rino currently partners with supermarkets, factories and delivery companies to transport groceries and packages between warehouses and distribution hubs without human drivers. The product has also been used for surveillance and security inspections on roads, Ming added.

Company officials maintain that the technology isn’t intended to take away jobs from delivery workers, arguing that it complements their work, with autonomous vans managing long-haul routes while humans continue handling shorter, last-mile trips. Labor advocates, however, warn that widespread adoption of self-driving logistics vehicles could eventually displace large sectors of the workforce.

Another machine that drew attention at the expo was an autonomous sanitation robot from the company Auto City. With bright stripes of blue, green and yellow, and fuzzy orange brushes along its underside, the device looks more whimsical than industrial. Yet it is fully capable of cleaning roads and sidewalks without human guidance. These sanitation robots are already deployed across Shenzhen and in dozens of other cities nationwide.

Local governments in China have helped accelerate the adoption of such technologies. According to Stanley Ng, president of the Asia Pacific Connected Vehicles Association, a government-supported group that works to promote self-driving technology across Asia, Chinese municipal officials are eager to test and deploy autonomous systems that promise more efficient public services.

“Local governments are very aggressive to promote new technologies to serve the public here,” he said.

Ng believes the greatest short-term impact of self-driving technology will come not from personal transportation but from logistics, sanitation and other behind-the-scenes industries where automation can yield substantial savings.

Even though robotaxi pilot programs are already operating in parts of China, the US and the Middle East, Ng argues that widespread personal use of autonomous cars remains distant. He expects people will still be driving their own vehicles for many years, even as they rely more heavily on machines for deliveries and municipal services.

Shenzhen already offers glimpses of that future. In a city park one recent evening, a young mother was teaching her daughter to ride a bike with no training wheels. As the child hopped onto the bike, a brightly colored sanitation robot began moving in her direction as it cleaned the ground beneath.

Right before colliding with the bicycle, the robot stopped and began moving in the other direction. The little girl seemed unphased — probably used to seeing these autonomous devices everywhere — and began peddling for the first time.

China’s rapid deployment of autonomous technologies — whether in cargo transport, street cleaning or surveillance — suggests that the most transformative shifts in transportation may emerge not from flashy consumer cars but from the practical robots quietly reshaping urban life.

The post In China, the future of transportation is already here appeared first on The World from PRX.

On a sweltering day just shy of winter, Wenxin — who goes by Wendy and only shared her first name — sat behind a laptop inside a small milk tea shop located within a grand shopping mall. At 20-something years old, she represents a generation of Chinese residents that have grown up entirely within Shenzhen’s experimental bubble. Her parents were migrants who went there for work opportunities. She, herself, works remotely, drifting between cafes and air-conditioned public spaces.

“I probably work from a different shop every day,” Wendy said. “It’s easy,” even in summers when Shenzhen’s heat can be unbearable.

That convenience is by design. Shenzhen has more than 800 malls, many connected directly to metro stations through underground tunnels. The metro itself is clean, expansive and climate-controlled down to temperature-categorized train cars. It only opened in 2004 but has already become the fifth-longest system in the world.

Shenzhen is constantly growing and its infrastructure is expanding along with it.

“Just here where we’re sitting, almost every building around us didn’t exist when I came here first,” said Daniel Camilo, a Portuguese expat who arrived in the city after the 2008 financial crisis.

“It was really hard to get a job back in Portugal, and I’ve been living here ever since,” he said. “I’ve been working in tech basically the whole time I’ve been here.”

Camilo’s experience is, in many ways, emblematic of the Shenzhen experience. The city is built on manufacturing, foreign investment and, more recently, homegrown technology giants.

Architect Ole Scheeren, whose work has shaped much of Shenzhen’s ultramodern skyline, calls it an “incredibly young” city — both in age and in population. That youthfulness is evident in the families crowding public parks and the abundance of green space, the highest per capita of any major Chinese city. Nearly all transportation is electric, keeping smog low and streets quieter than in many other urban centers.

Scheeren credits open-minded city planners for much of the metropolis’ distinctive look. Shenzhen’s planning department, he said, encouraged architects to “have the courage to confront the future” rather than settle for safe, conventional designs. Unlike older megacities, Shenzhen began essentially from scratch in 1980, giving designers and engineers what amounts to a blank canvas.

But the city’s advantages rest heavily on China’s political system. Beijing invested enormous resources in Shenzhen’s infrastructure, accelerating projects that would take decades elsewhere.

“That’s one of the benefits of China’s system,” said finance professor Jinfan Zhang. “The central government has this capacity to build infrastructure very quickly, very efficiently.”

Those efficiencies, however, come paired with some tradeoffs. Surveillance is ubiquitous. Cameras equipped with facial recognition systems greet riders at every metro gate, and security checks are routine.

Culturally, Shenzhen is often dismissed by Chinese peers as bland — a place where young workers, bound by the grueling “9-9-6” schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week), have little time to enjoy the city’s amenities.

“My lifestyle here is pretty … homey,” Camilo admitted. “There are a lot of things I don’t even recognize as extraordinary, as opposed to someone who comes here for the first time.”

Dan Wang, author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” notes that Shenzhen lacks the deep cultural heritage of older cities like Shanghai or Beijing. But what it does possess, he says, is an unmatched entrepreneurial energy.

“It is a place of fantastic hustle,” Wang explained. “A city where people sketch out a business plan over dinner and begin executing it the next day.”

Shenzhen’s dizzying rise has produced drones, smartphones, electric cars and entire industries at a pace few places can match. But experts caution against viewing it as a template for other fast-growing cities.

Shenzhen’s growth has been propelled by a unique confluence of state investment, political structure and the unparalleled opportunities that come from building a city from scratch. And according to Wang, its entrepreneurial spirit is unmatched.

Hustle, it turns out, is one of the few things the city can’t export.

The post Lessons from the world’s most thriving megacity appeared first on The World from PRX.

What happens when a government erases a people’s digital past?

Reporter Sean Powers, from the “Click Here” podcast, tells the story of China’s quiet purge of the Uyghur web — and the lone coder determined to bring it back to life.

Click on the player to hear the story.

An earlier version of this story appeared on the “CLICK HERE” podcast from Recorded Future News and PRX.

The post Saving the Uyghur internet appeared first on The World from PRX.

Ekpar Asat dreamed of building a digital home for his people — a place where Uyghurs could share music, stories and a sense of belonging.

Beijing saw that dream as a threat. It erased the network, and then it erased him.

But what happened in Xinjiang wasn’t only about one man or one community. It has become a blueprint for how repression spreads — far beyond China’s borders.

Click on the blue player to hear the story.

An earlier version of this story appeared on the “CLICK HERE” podcast from Recorded Future News and PRX. Additional reporting by Sean Powers.

The post The disappearance of Ekpar Asat appeared first on The World from PRX.

China’s surveillance of Uyghurs has leapt from the physical world to the digital one. No longer just QR codes on doorways, it’s now hidden in cloud services and software updates.

Dina Temple-Raston, the host of the “Click Here” podcast from Recorded Future News and PRX, investigates how digital tools meant to protect identity are being used to erase it.

Click on the blue player to hear the story.

An earlier version of this story appeared on the “CLICK HERE” podcast from Recorded Future News and PRX. Additional reporting by Sean Powers.

The post The curious case of UyghurEdit++ appeared first on The World from PRX.

With the digital age constantly evolving, there is no end to the doomsday scenarios arising from the use of AI. And while the general public opinion remains that it is an existential threat to human life, Nobel laureates and big-name celebrities have issued another red alert emphasizing just how dire the threat is. They signed a statement specifically calling for the banning of superintelligent AI systems, or ASIs, until experts reach a consensus that the technology can be developed safely. 

But what actually is superintelligent AI?

“What underlies all this is this idea that’s driven all the progress in AI, that really intelligence is all about information processing,” said Max Tegmark, head of the Future of Life Institute and a professor at MIT researching AI. “And even though our brain is very good at it, it is fundamentally a biological computer, and it’s clearly possible to build other kinds of computers that are just vastly smarter than us in every way. That’s what artificial superintelligence is.”

Tegmark joined The World’s Host Marco Werman to discuss what artificial superintelligence is.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Araya Phisutthiratanaphan sat in an idling Mercedes SUV. He was on a stakeout by the Thai-Myanmar border on a dirt path that had gone mushy with rain.

A man in his 30s, he kept a pistol in his center console and a rifle in the floorboard. Outside his windshield, he could see cornstalks, droopy trees and a coffee-brown river.

“It was like … [in the]  middle of nowhere,” Araya said.

On that dirt road, Araya and a teammate intended to intercept a van driven by human traffickers, whose destination loomed tall across that river — in Myanmar. A place that was a jungle just a few years ago, before the construction of a skyline of high-rise buildings, called KK Park. It’s an office park of sorts, only it’s run by crime syndicates. And instead of condos, the high rises are bare-bones dorms with barred windows.

Araya was summoned to the location by a plea sent to his phone by a young Chinese woman he’d never met. She’d flown to Thailand for some vague “computer job.” Two men sent by her new employers picked her up at Bangkok’s main airport. She hopped into the van, and they drove for hours. But as she neared the border with Myanmar — a notoriously lawless stretch of borderland — she panicked.

“I just stole my phone back to send this message,” she wrote to Araya, seeding her DM with key details: The van was a Mitsubishi. One of the traffickers wore a white shirt.

“Please save me!” she pleaded.

Araya intended to do just that. He carried a pistol with a bullet racked into its chamber. Araya is not a cop, however, or even a private eye. He works as an entrepreneur dealing in real estate and truck accessories. But by his count, he has assisted in nearly 50 such rescues, some directly and others by guiding men and women to escape themselves. 

He became a big deal on TikTok and Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. And although he’s a Thai citizen, Araya is ethnically Chinese and posts in the Chinese language. He likes making videos about his escapades: off-road driving, shooting boar and other “cowboy stuff.” And now, he’s also shared footage of his dramatic rescues, thrilling nearly 5 million followers.

“I just like helping people,” Araya said. “And I like adventure.”

As for the authorities, they’re usually already overwhelmed with the sheer number of foreigners, most of them men, who are lured into criminal enclaves lining the Thai-Myanmar border. People arrive from all over — Pakistan, Kenya, the Philippines — seeking around $700 a month for “computer jobs” in air-conditioned rooms.

The work usually involves posing as an attractive woman online, seducing lonely men who have fat retirement accounts, then duping them into phony investment schemes that bleed their finances dry.

An estimated 100,000 people have flocked to these hubs for work. Some go knowing they’re going to scam strangers. But others don’t.

Araya has a special distaste for the bosses who created these compounds. They belong to Chinese crime syndicates. “They’re guys who dress in brand names, expensive shirts, gold watches, Rolls Royces, but no taste.”

But when it comes to profits, their enterprises rival drug trafficking. The United Nations estimates revenues from scam centers in Southeast Asia, mostly Myanmar, at nearly $40 billion.

The bosses’ giant homes are visible from the Thai side of the river, not far from the dorms. “You’ve got what we call the villas,” said Judah Tana, a co-founder of Global Advance Projects, a Thailand-based nonprofit that monitors the syndicates and also facilitates rescues. “Three-story mansions where bosses live. And it’s like any house you could imagine in the Hollywood Hills.”

These men are ruthless. They often swipe scam workers’ passports, trapping them in the enclave, and fine them for inane violations (like eyes falling shut during a 16-hour shift) until they’re drowning in debt, essentially turning them into indentured servants. Some scam workers have been beaten, even tortured.

Meanwhile, the bosses, and certain high-performing scammers under their wing, luxuriate in brothels and night clubs where meth and ketamine are virtually legal. The women satisfying their desires are powerless to complain.

This is the plight that could’ve awaited that young woman from China — the one who had sent the desperate text message to Araya’s phone.

Luckily for her, the stakeout paid off.

Eventually, Araya spotted it: an old Mitsubishi Delica — a tin can on wheels — slowly rumbling down the dirt path. Araya was terrified. But if the van crossed the muddy river on a barge, with that woman inside, he’d have no way to get her back.

Araya and his teammate hopped out, both dressed in baseball caps and tactical gear. A third friend, filming the rescue, hung back in the Mercedes. Araya rushed to the van’s passenger side window while his friend covered the driver.

“The two guys in the van? They don’t know if we are police or something,” Araya said. “They were just stuck.” Stuck in their seats. Frozen with shock.

Within seconds, the van’s door slid open. Out bounded the young woman, in a black top and skinny jeans, dashing along the dirt path — and into the waiting Mercedes SUV.

Araya and his pal left the traffickers quivering and confused, and bounded back into the SUV. He drove the woman straight back to the airport in Bangkok.

She said little during that six hour drive. “She’s like PTSD’ed. She can’t say nothing,” he said. “I totally understand.”

Various governments from China to Thailand — as well as the United Nations — have vowed to shut down the scam compounds. Power cables and fiber-optic lines were once strung across the river into Myanmar, until Thai authorities took them down. The scam compounds didn’t miss a beat though. They switched to diesel generators and Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service. 

These scam towns, with skylines like many cities in America or Europe, still light up at night, illuminating the river. That stretch of Myanmar is run, not by the country’s military junta, but by a large militia that rents land to Chinese criminal networks. They exist beyond the law.

Some of the syndicates’ more vicious crimes have abated, according to Judah Tana, who maintains contacts with the militia’s top officials. He said that, after the compounds grew notorious, Chinese authorities issued five demands that are largely followed.

“The five things in place were: Stop scamming China. No underage children,” Tana said. “They were not allowed to kill anybody. They were not allowed to have extreme torture. Now, that’s interesting,” he added, “because it didn’t say any torture, it was just the extreme torture. And you had to let people leave for a reasonable cost. If they asked to.”

After dozens of rescues, Araya isn’t sure he wants to keep going, even though his phone dings with pleas almost every day. More and more, the messages are written by relatives demanding that he save a son or brother who’s disappeared into the compounds. 

“It’s somebody asking me, ‘Hey, you. Go save my family.’ Like ordering me. I don’t like it. It’s not my job.”

The TikToker is also convinced that truly innocent victims — such as that young woman who he rescued late last year — are becoming more rare. Lurid tales about scam centers dominate headlines in China, where most of his fans live. But by now, most people headed to the compounds are men seeking fast-money scam jobs despite the risks. 

“Chinese people now say, ‘Sure, you can make money in KK Park,’” Araya said. “But you’ll never take it out. You’ll spend everything there’” — on sumptuous meals, in brothels, on speed or ketamine, in gambling parlors. “And some think, ‘Oh, maybe the guy who gets tortured won’t be me.’”

Now, when people send a message to Araya’s Douyin account, begging for help, he responds within seconds. But the person replying isn’t Araya — or a person at all. 

He recently set up an AI chatbot to advise victims on escaping traffickers’ clutches. Depending on their situation, it might instruct them to call the cops, or wait until the van refuels at a gas station and make a scene or scream and fight back.

But the real Araya? He’s likely off on one of his adventures — making TikToks and “doing cowboy stuff.”

The post Freeing victims from criminal enclaves in Myanmar, one TikTok at a time appeared first on The World from PRX.

The president of Aix-Marseille University, Eric Berton, likes to refer to the incoming Americans to his institution as “scientific refugees.”

At a reception on campus in June, Berton welcomed eight Americans to the university. He said that during World War II, many French and European scientists fled to the United States to continue working freely.

The US, he said, extended a helping hand.

In a sad twist of history, Burton told the group, “Today, it’s the Americans who are coming to France seeking a space of freedom, thought and research.”

As federal cuts to science and research in the US continue, some research centers in Europe see an opportunity to lure over laid-off Americans.

The first to do so was the Aix-Marseille University, in southern France. In March, it announced a multi-million dollar fund to hire researchers from the US. It got hundreds of applications.

Aix-Marseille’s program is called Safe Place for Science, and its $16 million of funding is sufficient to support around 20 scientists for three years.

Among those accepted is Brian Sandberg, a historian who studies climate change during the Little Ice Age, which lasted from the 14th century to the present period of warming.

“Eighty percent of staff at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is the most important organization for research in history in the humanities, have already been fired,” Sandberg told The World. “I was actually, this spring, in the process of developing a grant proposal, working with people there, and they are not there anymore … and it’s the same thing for science and medicine.”

Since taking office, US President Donald Trump has stopped, reduced or threatened to cut funding for several federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Weather Service, the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency.

President Berton at Aix-Marseille University said he’s been monitoring the unfolding funding cuts in disbelief.

“I was shocked,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘We can’t just sit back and do nothing.’”

Within weeks, Berton launched the Safe Place for Science program, expecting only a few applications.

“But I didn’t expect 300 candidates in just 2 weeks,” he said. “If we hadn’t closed submissions, the resumes would still be landing. It shows just how bad the problem is stateside.”

At the time of the welcoming ceremony in June, the American researchers had yet to sign their contracts. Many, like one acceptee who spoke to The World at the event, asked that their name not be used, fearing retribution back in the United States.

“The research environment in the US is so difficult, practically, and it’s difficult emotionally,” the acceptee said. “Sources of funding are being cut and, emotionally, it’s just so difficult to see colleagues lose their jobs. And to see decisions taken that will have negative consequences far into the future.”

The sense that cuts to science could be long term has prompted many other European regions to plan for a possible exodus.

The president of the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia, Salvador Illa, announced his own initiative: a $32 million fund for 70 American scientists.

The European Union estimates there are now some 60 national and regional campaigns underway to attract non-European researchers. The EU itself has recently allocated more than half a billion dollars to attract the brightest minds to the continent, with a new initiative called Choose Europe for Science.

Aix-Marseille University President Eric Berton says he designed his grants to last only three years with the hope that after the next presidential elections in the United States, science funding will be restored.

“But we’re not trying to profit off this flight,” said Berton. “What we’re creating is an asylum program for scientists.”

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Think about the most frustrating aspects of international travel: navigating a new city’s transit system, dealing with language barriers, racing to catch a connecting flight or fumbling with foreign currency. All of these challenges can turn leisure into stress.

A new game has now turned the nerve-racking logistics of world travel into a competition.

“Jet Lag: The Game,” is an online video series where travel mishaps aren’t obstacles — they’re the point of the game.

The brainchild of American creators Sam Denby, Adam Chase and Ben Doyle, “Jet Lag” has built a sort of cult following by blending real-time travel with high-concept gameplay.

It’s almost a combination of “The Amazing Race” and Google Maps, but with fewer production crews and more chaos.

“We’ve played hide-and-seek across entire countries,” Denby said. “We’ve played tag across entire regions of Europe. We’ve done races from the top to bottom of countries. We’ve even done a race all around the entire world.”

Each season, the trio embarks on an elaborate, global-scale challenge — racing to visit the most countries in six days, playing tag across a whole continent, even evading capture in a sprawling game of hide-and-seek across Japan. All the while, they navigate the ups and downs of public transit and the logistical curveballs world travel inevitably throws their way.

“We sometimes say that we play board games where the world is our board,” Chase said.

The result is part strategy game, part documentary and, perhaps most interestingly, a master class in transportation logistics. According to Denby, the idea for the series was born out of the trio’s own experience dealing with the travails of international travel.

“We were thinking it would be fun to almost put us in the situation where you’re struggling to get from one place to the other for whatever reason, and you’ve sort of just got to figure it out,” he said. “And it turns out that that is decently entertaining.”

The show, which airs first on the subscription platform Nebula before wide-release on YouTube, has been a hit, receiving millions of views, and it’s now Denby, Chase and Doyle’s full-time job.

Fans don’t just watch; many of them try the games themselves, albeit on a smaller scale.

“I think one of my favorite things to hear from our audience is that they’ve taken a concept that we created, tried it themselves and, in doing so, discovered parts of the town or city that they live in and have never been to.”

According to Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor at Cornell University who studies social media and influencer culture, part of the reason “Jet Lag” connects with viewers is the show’s unpredictability. The team doesn’t chase Instagram-famous landmarks or Michelin-starred meals. By virtue of the games they’re playing, they often end up in far-flung towns, staying in random hotels, eating whatever food they happen to be near.

“They’re giving us a kind of behind-the scenes idea of what it’s really like,” she said.

Duffy argues that “Jet Lag” is a sort of double-whammy when it comes to attracting viewers. It gives them a genuine, relatable travel experience while also gamifying everyday life.

“Game content, whether we’re talking about actual games or various gamified situations, is one of these social media formats that has done well since the emergence of YouTube creators now 20 years ago,” she added.

These days, Duffy said, just about anything can be gamified — a sure shot for influencers to get a bigger audience. Where it can get dangerous, she argued, is when advertisers start paying influencers for the content they create.

“We don’t know if the meal they just had was the most fantastic thing they’ve ever eaten or if they have been paid [to promote it], and that’s all part of the mystique,” she said.

The team behind “Jet Lag,” for its part, insists that they are not paid or receive any compensation to eat at certain restaurants or stay at specific hotels. In fact, where they go and who they meet are often entirely dictated by the game itself. More often than not, their destinations aren’t planned at all, according to Chase.

“One time, during a game of tag, a guy in Slovenia offered to hide me in his house,” he said.

And that’s the core of what the “Jet Lag” team hopes to communicate to its audience — that even though travel is stressful, if you take a breath, try to have fun and go with the flow, you’ll be surprised to see where you end up — and who might even offer to hide you in their home.

The post These YouTube streamers have turned the stress of travel into a game appeared first on The World from PRX.