We humans are notoriously bad at predicting the consequences of achieving our technological goals. Add seat belts to cars for safety, speeding and accidents can go up. Burn hydrocarbons for cheap energy, warm the planet. Give experts new technologies like surgical robots or predictive policing algorithms to enhance productivity, block apprentices from learning. Still, we're amazing at predicting unintended consequences compared to the intelligent technologies we're building. Learn about your ad ...
Dec 19, 2019•7 min
Juan Carlos Castillo, a state official in rural Mexico, had never received a call like this before. What looked like a giant plastic jellyfish with a blinking LED had fallen from the sky onto a farmer’s field. “It really caused panic,” he says. “I imagined that it could be espionage.” Then Castillo noticed a phone number attached to the floppy artifact. He called it and got through to Google’s parent Alphabet, in California. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 18, 2019•3 min
No one owns the internet. There’s no one stopping you from posting videos to your own web server, at least so long as you have the technical chops to set one up and the money to pay for hosting. But you’re at a disadvantage if you’re posting your video outside of YouTube or Facebook. And if Facebook or Twitter ban you from sharing it, will anyone ever find it? But allowing everyone to post anything they want to these platforms isn’t a great idea either. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx....
Dec 17, 2019•8 min
The grand promise of 5G wireless service—connection speeds 10 times as fast as the speediest home broadband service—is slowly moving closer to reality. AT&T is launching its new 5G service Friday in 10 cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose. Notably, the service is based on real 5G standards, unlike AT&T’s earlier "5G Evolution" offering, which in reality was just a variety of 4G. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 16, 2019•9 min
Holiday season may be full of cheer, but it’s also a time of intense pressure for retailers, especially in electronics. More than 20 percent of annual sales for things such as televisions, phones, cameras, and games occur between Thanksgiving and Christmas. One likely beneficiary is a company that most assumed would be long gone by now, consumed by the retail holocaust that has seen so many once-proud chains go the way of Chapter 11. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 13, 2019•7 min
“Are you in a precarious situation? … You sound like you can’t talk.” Karah Preiss’ cousin Leslie accused her of being sleepy and distracted and eventually hung up, but didn’t guess the truth. Preiss had placed the call using a software clone of her voice made to demonstrate artificial intelligence’s ability to deceive. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 12, 2019•3 min
On Friday night in an old newspaper printing plant in Austin, the future of drone automation lifted off, accelerated and flew, nearly fast enough to beat one of the best drone pilots in the world. Gabriel Kocher, known in the professional Drone Racing League as Gab707, sat behind a net, wearing video goggles and steering his drone through five square gates on a short, curvy course. Next to him were four teammates from the MavLAB of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Learn abo...
Dec 11, 2019•8 min
The everything store has an everything cloud. Amazon Web Services offers more than 160 services from disk storage to satellite control antennas. On Monday, the company said it would widen its cloud menu to include access to quantum computers—Amazon’s first big commitment to a technology rivals IBM and Google say will transform computers’ impact on businesses and society. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 10, 2019•6 min
On August 10, 2015, Google CEO Larry Page shocked the business world by announcing he was restructuring the company he cofounded into a holding company called Alphabet. Page would head the new entity, and Google itself would be one of a number of companies under Alphabet’s control—like Google X, Google Fiber, Google Ventures, and Nest—each with a separate CEO reporting to him. The idea was to make The Company Formerly Known As Google “more clean and accountable. Learn about your ad choices: dove...
Dec 09, 2019•8 min
The online political advertising wars rage on. In late September, Facebook pleased almost no one when it announced that it would exempt posts by politicians, including ads, from its fact-checking system. Almost as if on cue, a few days later the Donald Trump reelection campaign dropped an ad full of conspiratorial claims about Joe Biden. When the Biden campaign requested that Facebook take down the ad, the company declined. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 06, 2019•8 min
The day before Cyber Monday, Amazon’s largest shopping event of the year, the company faced yet another controversy over offensive items for sale on its site. On Sunday, Amazon removed Christmas tree ornaments, a bottle opener, and other products featuring pictures of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp where historians estimate over one million people, most of them Jews, were killed during the Holocaust. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 05, 2019•7 min
I found Focused by accident, while I was suffering from the very condition it wants to help people avoid. In bed and hunched over my laptop, I was scrolling through Twitter when I noticed someone I follow congratulating a woman on the launch of her new startup. Lacking any of the necessary willpower to go back to my work, I spiraled further into a procrastination hole and clicked on the link. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 04, 2019•11 min
In March 2018, an eerie portrait created by an artificial intelligence program sold at Christie's Auction House for almost half a million dollars. A few months later, a movie written and directed by an AI algorithm was released amid much hype. And this March, a record company signed an AI artist for the first time. Artificial creativity is the subject of the second episode of the Sleepwalkers podcast, an ongoing series exploring the implications of AI. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.o...
Dec 03, 2019•4 min
After months of stalled bipartisan negotiations over how the federal government should protect consumers’ private data, Senate Democrats decided to go it alone this month. On Tuesday, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) introduced the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, or COPRA, which would set up a sort of privacy bill of rights for Americans while providing some stronger mechanisms of enforcement. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 02, 2019•7 min
Earlier this week, PayPal agreed to purchase Honey, a Los Angeles-based coupon finder, for an eye-popping $4 billion. If it goes through, it will be the largest tech deal in the city’s history, and PayPal’s biggest acquisition ever. Why would any company shell out that much for a shopping tool? PayPal revolutionized online shopping with its payments system two decades ago, but lately more tech companies have been encroaching on its turf. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 29, 2019•5 min
The protesters who gathered outside Google's San Francisco office on Friday had a single, simple demand: give two employees their jobs back, immediately. But the group of 200 Googlers made clear more was at stake. It was, as one software engineer put it, "a struggle for the future of tech." The two employees at the center of the squall, Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, had been placed on administrative leave a few weeks ago. Neither have been given a formal explanation from Google. Learn abo...
Nov 28, 2019•6 min
A few years ago this month, Portland, Oregon artist Darius Kazemi watched a flood of tweets from would-be novelists. November is National Novel Writing Month, a time when people hunker down to churn out 50,000 words in a span of weeks. To Kazemi, a computational artist whose preferred medium is the Twitter bot, the idea sounded mildly tortuous. “I was thinking I would never do that,” he says. “But if a computer could do it for me, I’d give it a shot. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org...
Nov 27, 2019•8 min
Artificial intelligence has given us algorithms capable of recognizing faces, diagnosing disease, and of course, crushing computer games. But even the smartest algorithms can sometimes behave in unexpected and unwanted ways, for example picking up gender bias from the text or images they are fed. A new framework for building AI programs suggests a way to prevent aberrant behavior in machine learning by specifying guardrails in the code from the outset. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.o...
Nov 26, 2019•6 min
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Nov 25, 2019•7 min
When the global economy shifted in the late 19th century, working people were the first to adapt. They moved to cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo and worked long hours in unsafe factories. They drove the Industrial Revolution and changed the nature of work forever. When it became clear that employers were exploiting their productivity, the labor movement formed to protest abuses like sweatshops, child labor, and poverty wages. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 22, 2019•4 min
Last year, Jibo—“the world's first social robot for the home”—began to lose its mind. First came memory problems. The bot started to spend less time swiveling its head like the animated Pixar lamp and more time staring blankly at the wall. Its cognitive demise was slow, then fast. At one point, Jibo itself delivered the fatal diagnosis: “The servers out there that let me do what I do will be turned off soon,” it said in its computerized voice. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-cho...
Nov 21, 2019•8 min
The Apple credit card, launched in August, ran into major problems last week, when users noticed that it seemed to offer smaller lines of credit to women than to men. The scandal spread on Twitter, with influential techies branding the Apple Card “fucking sexist,” “beyond f’ed up,” and so on. Even Apple’s amiable cofounder, Steve “Woz” Wosniak, wondered, more politely, whether the card might harbor some misogynistic tendencies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 20, 2019•5 min
Normally, when you open Facebook, you see pictures of your friends' awesome vacations or links to maddening political stories your dad is sharing—your basic emotional goulash of FOMO and TMI. But last year, the nerds at Microsoft Research tried something different: They put bits of office work into the News Feed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 20, 2019•5 min
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Nov 19, 2019•8 min
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Nov 19, 2019•6 min
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Nov 18, 2019•7 min
What does the First Amendment have to do with Facebook? It depends on whom you ask. Mark Zuckerberg would probably say: a lot. Over the past few weeks, he has repeatedly invoked the First Amendment to justify Facebook’s controversial decision to exempt posts and paid advertisements by political candidates from its fact-checking system. In a speech to Georgetown students last month, he claimed that the company’s policies are “inspired by the First Amendment. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Nov 18, 2019•8 min
Google’s plan to buy Fitbit took chutzpah from the start. The company was already being investigated by Congress, state attorneys general, and federal antitrust regulators, a reflection of growing alarm over a conglomerate whose dominant market share is built on unrivaled access to personal data. Now it was announcing a $2. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 15, 2019•9 min
Last week, when Google gobbled up Fitbit in a $2.1 billion acquisition, the talk was mostly about what the company would do with all that wrist-jingling and power-walking data. It’s no secret that Google’s parent Alphabet—along with fellow giants Apple and Facebook—is on an aggressive hunt for health data. But it turns out there’s a cheaper way to get access to it: Teaming up with healthcare providers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 15, 2019•7 min
In a speech late last month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared blockchain “an important breakthrough,” and promised that China would “seize the opportunity.” He detailed the ways the Chinese government would support blockchain research, development, and standardization. The significance shouldn’t be underestimated. Xi is the first major world leader to issue such a strong endorsement of the much-hyped, and much-maligned, distributed ledger technology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.o...
Nov 14, 2019•8 min
