Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.
If Congress were to fail to pass a spending bill before the end of the day Friday, the government could shut down. That’s why President Trump just blinked. He shelved a plan to demand that funding for a border wall be included in that bill after both Democrats and Republicans voiced fierce opposition. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Yann LeCun once built an AI chip called ANNA. But he was 25 years ahead of his time. The year was 1992, and LeCun was a researcher at Bell Labs, the iconic R&D lab outside New York City. He and several other researchers designed this chip to run deep neural networks—complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks on their own by analyzing vast amounts of data—but ANNA never reached the mass market. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Every day across the nation, people doing work for Google log in to their computers and start watching YouTube. They look for violence in videos. They seek out hateful language in video titles.They decide whether to classify clips as “offensive” or “sensitive.” They are Google’s so-called “ads quality raters,” temporary workers hired by outside agencies to render judgments machines still can’t make all on their own. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
David Kosslyn and Ian Thompson are the founders of a virtual reality company called Angle Technologies. Two years into this stealth project, backed by $8 million in funding, they won’t say much about the virtual world they’re building—at least not publicly. But they will say that they’re building it in a way that alters the relationship between computer hardware and software. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
If Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, wins today’s special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district—a seat Republicans have held since 1979—it won’t be because he’s young. It won’t be because he’s idealistic, camera-friendly, or Star Wars-savvy. Mostly, it will be because Ossoff is lucky enough to be the first Democrat to stand a real chance of starting to claw back the ground ceded to Republicans on Capitol Hill. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Regulators are now off the backs of big internet providers. Thanks to a resolution signed by President Trump earlier this month, consumer-friendly privacy rules passed by the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission won’t take effect. Rules designed to protect net neutrality—the idea that internet providers shouldn’t be able to give certain content preferential treatment—seem likely to fall next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
In the late summer of 1954, a brilliant young psychologist was reading the newspaper when his eye fell on a strange headline on the back page: prophecy from planet clarion call to city: flee that flood. it’ll swamp us on dec 21, outer space tells suburbanite. His interest piqued, the psychologist, whose name was Leon Festinger, read on. “Lake City will be destroyed by a flood from Great Lake just before dawn, Dec. 21. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Emergency responders in northern Texas watch as an imaginary crisis takes over their social media feeds. A mass shooting has broken out at a music festival, they learn, and a terrorist organization is taking credit. The shooters livestreamed the entire grisly scene, and news outlets are already picking up the story. Word of the tragedy spreads like a virus online, riddled with misinformation and panicked confusion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Online advertising is terrible. Ads clutter your screen, slow down your computer, and drain your batteries. Publishers saddle pages with tracking technology that vacuums up your data so they can, ostensibly, serve you more relevant ads (though this practice really just leads to serious privacy concerns). Sometimes ads even try to install malware on your computer. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Ravi Gupta is standing with both hands resting on the lip of a lucite podium. Some 600 audience members, including his mother, are staring intently back at him. Few of them have ever worked in politics before, but they’re all here to hear the former Obama administration staffer tell them how they can help save the progressive cause. He just has one problem: He forgot his laptop at the airport. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
The day Richard Feynman died, the blackboard in his classroom read: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” When Ian Goodfellow explains the research he’s doing at Google Brain, the central artificial intelligence lab at the internet’s most powerful company, he points to this aphorism from the iconic physicist, Caltech professor, and best-selling author. But Goodfellow isn’t referring to himself—or any other human being inside Google. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Comcast thinks it has an answer to cord-cutting: getting into the wireless mobile network business. But that alone might not be enough to stop its traditional cable customers from flocking to online video. Today the company announced that it will launch its own mobile phone and internet service called Xfinity Mobile. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
YouTube TV has arrived, and with it the potential to change how television works. Google-owned YouTube’s first foray into true cable-like television takes to the internet equivalent of the airwaves in select cities today: 40-plus channels of entertainment, news and sports for $35 per month, the so-called skinny bundle. So far, the service is still a little wonky. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
For years, the humble Arduino microcontroller—a cheap, open source, midnight-blue circuit board emblazoned with a tiny white infinity loop—has been a favorite tool of the DIY electronics crowd. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Uber just released its first diversity report. For years, the ride-hailing giantshunnedthe practice adopted by most other major Silicon Valley companies. But Uber’s scandals have snowballed. Multiple claims of misogyny and sexual harassment suggest a company that doesn’t just have isolated problems but a pervasive culture of sexism. Uber’s responses have included a much-hyped conference call led by board member Arianna Huffington and this week the diversity report. Learn about your ad choices: d...
On a dreary Thursday afternoon in March, the halls of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, swelled with people who spend their lives trying to salvage the economies of America’s forgotten towns. Hailing from across the country, they hurried past Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office in their sharp suits and jewel-toned dresses, each one carrying a different proposal for how to keep their cities and states afloat. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
President Trump’s long-promised changes to the country’s high-skilled worker visa program may have to wait another year. The H-1B visa application process begins today, and the requirements for companies looking to hire foreign talent, have gone unchanged, despite President Trump’s repeated threats to reform a program he says undermines American workers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
The Trump administration may not believe that automation threatens today’s American workforce, but try telling that to a travel agent or a truck driver or a factory worker or an accountant. One recent study found that for every one robot introduced to the workforce, six related human jobs disappear. But those six humans still need to get by. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Late last year, Israel-based entrepreneur Matan Uziel saw a notification he’d never seen before pop up on YouTube’s backend—the part of the site where creators upload their videos. “I saw a yellow dollar sign. At first I didn’t understand what it was,” Uziel says. “Then I moved my cursor over it. I saw it meant my video was not advertiser-friendly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
On the surface, bitcoin is having a very good year. The price of the digital currency reached record highs well over $1,000 after years of stagnation following a major crash. But if you pull back the curtain, the civil war rages. The global community of companies, coders, and opportunists who control the bitcoin network is now on the verge of revolt after more than two years of infighting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
You don’t need to be in government to know how slowly it moves. In business, that kind of inefficiency makes entrepreneurial mouths water. So it’s no surprise that America’s businessman-turned-president wants to speed things up. Now President Trump appears to want to pick up his predecessor’s legacy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning. Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...
Today, while you’re not watching, the Senate could gut rules protecting your internet privacy. Last year the Federal Communications Commission passed a set of strict privacy regulations that ban broadband internet providers from selling your browsing data without your consent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Intel just unleashed a new kind of computer memory it believes will fundamentally change the way the world builds computers. But it won’t tell the world what’s inside. The company calls this new creation 3D XPoint—pronounced “three-dee cross-point”—and this week, after touting the stuff for a year-and-a-half, Intel finally pushed it into the market. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
As far back as the 1880s, people stood on the curb outside the New York Stock Exchange taking bets on political elections, and newspapers would report the odds as a way of predicting the results at the polls. In the years since, economists refined the concept, and more recently, prediction markets have tapped into the wisdom of the crowds via the internet, forecasting everything from presidential races to sporting events to stock prices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
The way tech companies deal with online harassment and abuse is broken. YouTube allows anti-Semitism to stay live. Twitter waffles as targeted harassment runs rampant. Facebook takes down an iconic photo that shouldn’t be banned. Now one German politician is tired of letting platforms make excuses. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Hangovers are a fixture of South by Southwest. Free branded booze abounds, turning late nights into too-early mornings filled with product demos and repetitive panels. But determined marketers and wide-eyed founders pitch on through the pain, in the unbridled belief they might just be SXSW’s next breakout star. Or at the very least, its next Meerkat. But this year, the conference itself feels a lot like a hangover. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Igor Mordatch is working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He’s a roboticist who began his career as an animator. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Next month, a venture capital firm called Blockchain Capital plans to do something that could change the way companies get funded—and perhaps even the way they operate. Instead of an Initial Public Offering, in which a company sells stock via a regulated exchange like Nasdaq, the San Francisco-based VC firm is making an Initial Coin Offering, selling its own digital token as a way of raising money for its latest venture fund. Anyone who buys a token will be buying into the fund. Learn about your...
Have you heard? Uber is hiring. CEO Travis Kalanick wants a chief operating officer. Heapparently came to this decision in the midst of the company’s worst PR crisis yet. Accusations of a misogynistic company culture,aGoogle lawsuit, and allegations that it misled regulators with phantom rides leave the company in an almost permanent state of damage control.Hiring a COO almost certainly is Kalanick’s attempt to show that he, and his company, can grow up. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...
