Late Sunday, 116 entrepreneurs including Elon Musk released a letter to the United Nations warning of the dangerous “Pandora’s Box” presented by weapons that make their own decisions about when to kill. Publications including the Guardian and Washington Post ran headlines saying Musk and his cosigners had called for a “ban” on “killer robots.” Those headlines were misleading. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 29, 2017•6 min
It’s hard to overstate Amazon’s online retail dominance. With 76 percent market share of online retail, it’s as if the 1995–96 Chicago Bulls entered your local rec league. No one can challenge Amazon today, but a newly announced partnership between Google and Walmart—allowing you to order groceries from the latter with Google Assistant, or online via Google Express, starting late September—may ultimately present a threat. Still, it's a long-term long shot. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.p...
Aug 28, 2017•6 min
It started while I was on a Hawaiian vacation in May. I thought I’d just tweaked my back lifting a poolside lounge chair. Back home, my back pain became severe, and I started noticing nerve pain in my legs. For eight days I could barely crawl around the house. My wife and two daughters nicknamed me “the worm.” At 45, I’m in pretty good shape—avid cyclist, runner, weightlifter, yoga enthusiast with a resting pulse in the 50s. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 25, 2017•15 min
President Trump’s victory caught Garrett Johnson—and the rest of humanity—by surprise. A Republican, Johnson had never been among Trump’s biggest fans. He’d worked for former Florida governor Jeb Bush and supported Bush in the primaries. The night candidate Trump addressed the Republican National Convention, Johnson retweeted the words of another Republican political operative: “There will be time for reflection. Hopefully there will be time to rebuild. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx....
Aug 24, 2017•8 min
Shortly after a rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the death of a counter-protestor, YouTube removed a video of U.S. soldiers blowing up a Nazi swastika in 1945. In place of the video, users saw a message saying it had been “removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 23, 2017•7 min
Uber on Tuesday agreed to improve its privacy and security practices and to allow outsiders to monitor its progress for 20 years. The agreement with the Federal Trade Commission would resolve complaints stemming from a 2014 incident in which a hacker gained access to the names and driver's license numbers of more than 100,000 Uber drivers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 22, 2017•5 min
Shortly after Ajit Pai was named chair of the Federal Communications Commission in February, he said he wanted the agency to be “as open and accessible as possible to the American people." Six months on, the agency is falling short of Pai’s lofty goal in some key areas. Critics are especially concerned about the FCC’s handling of complaints from the public about internet providers and the causes of a May 7 outage of the public-comments section of the agency’s website. Learn about your ad choices...
Aug 21, 2017•7 min
None of this is to say that automation and AI aren’t having an important impact on the economy. But that impact is far more nuanced and limited than the doomsday forecasts suggest. A rigorous study of the impact of robots in manufacturing, agriculture, and utilities across 17 countries, for instance, found that robots did reduce the hours of lower-skilled workers—but they didn’t decrease the total hours worked by humans, and they actually boosted wages. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx....
Aug 18, 2017•20 min
President Trump stunned the nation, members of his own party, the press, and, apparently, his staff on Tuesday with his candid remarks regarding last weekend's deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The day before, he had reluctantly condemned the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who comprised much of the rally, but just 24 hours later, standing in the lobby of Trump Tower, the president was back to to condemning groups "on both sides" of the fighting. L...
Aug 17, 2017•9 min
Google CEO Sundar Pichai Thursday abruptly cancelled a planned companywide meeting intended to air concerns raised by a former employee's broadside against Google's diversity programs. The move came just minutes before the meeting was to start, as the company that aims to organize the world's information struggles to deal with reverberations from the memo and its decision to fire the author. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 16, 2017•5 min
Tic tac toe, checkers, chess, go, poker. Artificial intelligence rolled over each of these games like a relentless tide. Now Google’s DeepMind is taking on the multiplayer space-war videogame StarCraft II. No one expects the robot to win anytime soon. But when it does, it will be a far greater achievement than DeepMind’s conquest of Go—and not just because StarCraft is a professional e-sport watched by fans for millions of hours each month. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choice...
Aug 15, 2017•5 min
James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired Monday after posting a missive criticizing the company’s diversity programs, offended fellow Harvard graduate students with an off-color skit during a 2012 retreat, prompting two professors to send an email apologizing for the performance. At the time, Damore was a doctoral student in systems biology. Along with a few dozen other students and faculty, he attended a two-day retreat at a hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Learn about your ad ...
Aug 14, 2017•6 min
Bitcoin: fad or the future? The question has dogged the digital currency since its inception nearly a decade ago, and recent developments raise it anew. Last week, a new variant of bitcoin emerged via a “fork” in its underlying code, threatening to confuse and divide the still-small world of bitcoin adherents. Meanwhile, the price of a coin has soared to record heights above $3,000, from about $1,000 at the year’s beginning. Skeptics remain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
Aug 11, 2017•8 min
In the year 2017, justice can seem in short supply. But on Friday, as news broke that pharma-bro-turned-internet-troll Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, schadenfreude circulated through the online masses; justice, for this one brief moment, had been served. It can be tough to keep a running mental list of all the reasons the good people of the internet despise Shkreli—and the bad ones adore him. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 10, 2017•7 min
On January 3, 2017, Mark Zuckerberg posted a status update to his Facebook page. “Every year I take on a personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside of my work,” the Facebook CEO wrote to his 84 million followers. “In recent years, I've run 365 miles, built a simple AI for my home, read 25 books and learned Mandarin. My personal challenge for 2017 is to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choice...
Aug 09, 2017•11 min
Late last autumn, a Russian mathematician and programmer named Alex decided he’d had enough of running his eight-year-old business. Though his St. Petersburg firm was thriving, he’d grown weary of dealing with payroll, hiring, and management headaches. He pined for the days when he could devote himself solely to tinkering with code, his primary passion. The time had come for an exit strategy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 08, 2017•25 min
Robots are coming for our jobs—but not all of our jobs. They’re coming, in ever increasing numbers, for a certain kind of work. For farm and factory labor. For construction. For haulage. In other words, blue-collar jobs traditionally done by men. This is why automation is so much more than an economic problem. It is a cultural problem, an identity problem, and—critically—a gender problem. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 07, 2017•6 min
In a public address at the White House on Wednesday, President Trump embraced a new Senate bill called the RAISE Act, which he promised would usher in a wave of high-skilled immigration, “restore our competitive edge in the 21st century,” and make the United States' vetting system more like Canada and Australia's. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 04, 2017•8 min
Ray Kurzweil has invented a few things in his time. In his teens, he built a computer that composed classical music, which won him an audience with President Lyndon B. Johnson. In his 20s, he pioneered software that could digitize printed text, and in his 30s he cofounded a synthesizer company with Stevie Wonder. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 03, 2017•9 min
By now our future is clear: We are to be cared for, entertained, and monetized by artificial intelligence. Existing industries like healthcare and manufacturing will become much more efficient; new ones like augmented reality goggles and robot taxis will become possible. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 02, 2017•7 min
It was a very good week for two of the biggest tech companies on Earth. Facebook announced it made $9.3 billion this quarter, a 45 percent increase compared with last year, while Google’s parent company, Alphabet, posted earnings of $26 billion in the same time period, a 21-percent jump from a year ago. The vast majority of all this revenue came from advertising—87 percent for Google, and a whopping 98 percent for Facebook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 01, 2017•8 min
Amazon employs 45,000 robots, but they all have something missing: hands. Squat wheeled machines carry boxes around in more than 20 of the company’s cavernous fulfillment centers across the globe. But it falls exclusively to humans to do things like pulling items from shelves or placing them into those brown boxes that bring garbage bags and pens and books to our homes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 31, 2017•7 min
Sometimes our smart phones are our friends, sometimes they seem like our lovers, and sometimes they’re our dope dealers. And no one, in the past 12 months at least, has done more than Tristan Harris to explain the complexity of this relationship. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 28, 2017•27 min
Just a few days after his 28th birthday, Steve Lacerda went to a local bar with his buddies to celebrate. Lacerda, who had graduated from UC Santa Barbara and was working as a network troubleshooter for a startup in the Bay Area, met a woman there. The two of them got to talking and, after too many drinks, Lacerda decided to take her for a ride on his motorcycle. She hopped on the back. Lacerda began driving. He crashed. She died. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 27, 2017•7 min
In June, Canada's Supreme Court came down on Google—hard. It ruled that the tech giant must take down certain Google search results for pirated products. And not just in Canada, but globally. Now, Google is going south of the Canadian border to push back on this landmark court ruling. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 26, 2017•8 min
In retrospect, there was much more at stake than a mere $1 million when IBM’s Watson computer faced off against two Jeopardy! champions back in 2011. The bot’s victory gave Big Blue a shot at conjuring up a new line of business at the perfect possible moment. A series of advances in image and speech recognition was about to trigger a frenzy of investment and excitement about the money-making potential of artificial intelligence. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 25, 2017•7 min
Back in 2000, when Donald Trump was considering a presidential run on the Reform Party ticket, he told Fortune, "It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it." And though it's hard to say whether Trump has actually managed to turn a profit (at least not without getting a look at his tax returns), according to his re-election campaign's FEC filings, Donald Trump is sure as hell trying his best. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-cho...
Jul 24, 2017•8 min
You'll find millions of apps in the Google Play store, many of them written using the powerful, stable, workhorse programming language Java. If it were a car, Java would feature a fast, reliable engine but not antilock brakes, power steering, or cup holders. Totally drivable. Not exactly a joy ride. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 21, 2017•7 min
In 1899, the world’s most powerful nations signed a treaty at The Hague that banned military use of aircraft, fearing the emerging technology’s destructive power. Five years later the moratorium was allowed to expire, and before long aircraft were helping to enable the slaughter of World War I. “Some technologies are so powerful as to be irresistible,” says Greg Allen, a fellow at the Center for New American Security, a non-partisan Washington DC think tank. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail...
Jul 20, 2017•8 min
If you believe their tweets, venture capitalists have never been more invested in making their industry hospitable to women. The flurry of good intentions did not come out of the blue. In the past few weeks, The Information and The New York Times have reported allegations of sexual harassment by well-connected tech VCs against female startup founders, many of them women of color. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 19, 2017•19 min
