The Download: inside the Vitalism movement, and why AI’s “memory” is a privacy problem

Last April, an excited crowd gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency that hosted various events to explore tools—from drug regulation to cryonics—that might be deployed in the fight against death.

One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Nathan Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents—a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do.

Although interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists’ commitment to actually making death obsolete. And the Vitalists feel that momentum is building, not just for the science of aging and the development of lifespan-extending therapies, but for the acceptance of their philosophy that defeating death should be humanity’s top concern. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This is the latest in our Big Story series, the home for MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. You can read the rest of the series here.

What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier

—Miranda Bogen, director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology, & Ruchika Joshi, fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology specializing in AI safety and governance

The ability to remember you and your preferences is rapidly becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents.

Personalized, interactive AI systems are built to act on our behalf, maintain context across conversations, and improve our ability to carry out all sorts of tasks, from booking travel to filing taxes.

But their ability to store and retrieve increasingly intimate details about their users over time introduces alarming, and all-too-familiar, privacy vulnerabilities––many of which have loomed since “big data” first teased the power of spotting and acting on user patterns. Worse, AI agents now appear poised to plow through whatever safeguards had been adopted to avoid those vulnerabilities. So what can developers do to fix this problem? Read the full story.