The Download: the “steroid olympics” and a safer Mythos

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

A couple of weeks ago, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs.

For supporters of the event, the Enhanced Games offered a glimpse of a future in which medical advances push the human race to new heights—and they never have to get old. As I watched the games unfold, two questions bounced around my head: were they right? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

Read the full story to understand the answers .

Despite the growing hysteria over AI’s threat to white-collar jobs, there’s still scant evidence that the technology has had a large-scale impact on the labor market.

Analysis of US labor data shows that unemployment in occupations most exposed to AI is actually lower than in less-exposed jobs. There are also no signs that large numbers of workers are shifting from AI-threatened professions into supposedly safer manual-labor jobs.

It’s true that things aren’t great in the job market. But the reason isn’t simply the rise of AI .

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts . Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Anthropic has released a “safe” version of Mythos It promises it has enough guardrails and user limitations to be safe. ( BBC ) + It has a price tag twice as high as the previous flagship system. ( NYT $) + Anthropic previously claimed Mythos was too dangerous to release. ( CNBC ) + But critics suspect that was a marketing play. ( Guardian ) + Selective access has become a key strategy for AI labs. ( Axios )

2 Seattle has banned new data centers for a year It’s the largest US city to have passed such a moratorium.( Guardian ) + Its biggest tech firm, Amazon, has tried to stop the ban. ( The Verge ) + The movement to stop data centers is growing. ( NYT $)