Business, Spoken

“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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 wer...

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 more about your ad c...

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 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 th...

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 du...

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. Lear...

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 podc...

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 enforce...

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 com...

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 admin...

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...

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 learni...

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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 s...

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 turne...

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 harbo...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 provi...

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-...