Business, Spoken

Two days ago, I finally gave up Windows 7. I don't dislike Windows 10, but there's just always been something special about Windows 7. It was svelte. It actually ran faster and took up less hard drive space than its predecessor, the much-maligned Windows Vista. It looked great. We Windows users could finally hold our heads a little higher around Mac users. And, well, I didn't know how well Windows...

When former Beverly Hills 90210 heartthrob Luke Perry died last year, his body was encased in a hideous black and white bodysuit. This shroud, made entirely of mushrooms and other small organisms, was designed to slowly turn him into compost. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For some time, American companies including Microsoft, Google, and IBM have established research labs in China to tap into local AI talent and to keep track of technological trends. Now, as tensions and restrictions continue to ramp up, some observers wonder if the days of those outposts may be numbered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, Helene Mickey Wilson—Dr. Mickey to those who know her—has had two main sources of income. Wilson, a licensed marriage and family therapist in California’s Orange County, owns a small private practice. She’s also contracted with a company to oversee and train therapists working toward final certification, for which they need 3,000 hours of supervised professional experience. Learn more a...

Ivanka Trump took the stage at CES Tuesday to muted reception. Forty minutes later, she left to robust applause. No surprise, maybe, given the uncontroversial theme: The US needs to prepare workers for the future. At a technology-focused show, that’s not exactly a hard sell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The idea that PCs are dying never held much weight; if anything, despite inroads by the iPad Pro, they’ve solidified their position as the device you turn to when you need to get things done. But where do they go from here? And with Moore’s Law in the rearview how will they continue to improve? At this year’s CES, Intel is laying out a vision for what PCs might look like, and how they’ll act, goin...

In December 2018, Canada and France announced plans for a new international body to study and steer the effects of artificial intelligence on the world’s people and economies. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said the International Panel on Artificial Intelligence would be established by the Group of Seven leading western economies and play a role in “addressing some of the ethical concerns...

Even as carriers around the world race to build 5G networks, some government officials are reaching for the throttle, citing fears that the new generation of wireless technology could pose health risks. Earlier this year the Portland, Oregon, city council passed a resolution asking the Federal Communications Commission to update its research into potential health risks of 5G. Learn more about your...

After San Francisco in May placed new controls, including a ban on facial recognition, on municipal surveillance, city employees began taking stock of what technology agencies already owned. They quickly learned that the city owned a lot of facial recognition technology—much of it in workers’ pockets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was 2010 and techno-optimism was surging. A whopping 75 percent of American adults were online—a big jump from the 46 percent that were logging on a decade prior—cruising through the information age largely from the comfort of their own homes for the first time en masse. Social media was relatively new and gaining traction—especially among young people—as the world’s attention appeared to shift...

If you could press a button to merge your mind with an artificial intelligence computer—expanding your brain power, your memory, and your creative capacity—would you take the leap? “I would press it in a microsecond,” says Sebastian Thrun, who previously led Stanford University’s AI Lab. Turning yourself into a cyborg might sound like pure sci-fi, but recent progress in AI, neural implants, and we...

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they were giving up their “day to day” duties at Alphabet early this month—leaving the heavy lifting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai—an era ended in more ways than one. As much as the news made history for the Mountain View search giant, it was also a fitting end to a cult of founderhood that peaked and crashed during the past 10 years. At the beginning of thi...

It was 1998 and internet mania was in full swing. Fueled by the fear of missing out on the next big e-thing, freewheeling venture capitalists and speculators poured money into companies that appeared only tangentially internet-related. Entrepreneurs responded in kind, many going so far as to add “.com” or some techy sounding prefix like “e-“ or “net-“ to their company’s name in the hopes of attrac...

At first, you didn’t even need a pickax. The earliest prospectors of the California gold rush ventured into the Sierra foothills as solo travelers, sloshing through streams in search of nuggets dislodged by the current. That, at least, is the prevailing image: The individual renegade who headed west to strike it rich by his own initiative. But soon there were too many prospectors and too little ea...

Computers have gotten pretty good at making certain decisions for themselves. Automatic spam filters block most unwanted email. Some US clinics use artificial-intelligence-powered cameras to flag diabetes patients at risk of blindness. But can a machine ever be trusted to decide whether to kill a human being? It’s a question taken up by the eighth episode of the Sleepwalkers podcast, which examine...

When MIT professor Regina Barzilay received her breast cancer diagnosis, she turned it into a science project. Learning that the disease could have been detected earlier if doctors had recognized the signs on previous mammograms, Barzilay, an expert in artificial intelligence, used a collection of 90,000 breast x-rays to create software for predicting a patient’s cancer risk. Learn more about your...

Computers have learned to see the world more clearly in recent years, thanks to some impressive leaps in artificial intelligence. But you might be surprised—and upset—to know what these AI algorithms really think of you. As a recent experiment demonstrated, the best AI vision system might see a picture of your face and spit out a racial slur, a gender stereotype, or a term that impugns your good c...

“We’re going to be hauling some grass and some alfalfa bales today,” Cole Sonne cheerfully tells the camera as he drives a tractor over the bumps of his family’s farm in South Dakota. And for the next 12 minutes, the video will show Sonne and his dad do just that, carefully moving hundreds of the bundles, each as tall as a person, across their property. The sun shines down on the farm’s lush grass...

Nearly every day, in war zones around the world, American military forces request fire support. By radioing coordinates to a howitzer miles away, infantrymen can deliver the awful ruin of a 155 mm artillery shell on opposing forces. If defense officials in Washington have their way, artificial intelligence is about to make that process a whole lot faster. The effort to speed up fire support is one...

Wally Kankowski owns a pool repair business in Florida and likes 12 creams in his McDonald’s coffee each morning. What he doesn’t like is the way the company is pushing him to place his order via a touchscreen kiosk instead of talking with counter staff, some of whom he has known for years. “The thing is knocking someone out of a job,” he says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

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 u...

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 par...

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 anythin...

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...

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-p...