MIT Technology Review releases EmTech Future 2026 on demand; Matias, Neven and Doctorow headline

The full program of EmTech Future 2026 is now available for on-demand viewing, three days after the initial summary was published. Subscribers receive a 20 percent discount; access costs $596. The three-day event covered the intersection of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, energy systems and robotics.

Yossi Matias, vice president and head of Google Research, described how models are beginning to reshape biology, infrastructure, manufacturing and science. The most significant impact, he argued, will not come from model capabilities in isolation but from their friction with existing disciplines. The focus has shifted from "what the model knows" to "what happens when it meets a physical system."

Hartmut Neven, founder and lead of Google Quantum AI, said the meaning of quantum computing lies in its ability to integrate with the systems around it, not in isolated performance. Evelyn Wang, MIT's vice president for energy and climate, expanded on the tight coupling between computing infrastructure, power grids and climate technologies. Both pointed to the same trend: progress in a single field loses relevance without interfaces to adjacent domains.

Cory Doctorow, author and digital-rights activist, examined how these tools change the way people work and think. Unlike the technical presenters, his angle centered on cognitive and organizational consequences rather than model capabilities. The talk accompanies a series of concurrent articles arguing that recursive AI self-improvement remains far from realization, and that large language models still do not perform the kind of reasoning that enabled AlphaGo's victory a decade ago.