City residents and elected officials pushed back after videos showed the Boston Dynamics robot in action. The New York Police Department said Thursday it will stop using the “Digidog,” a four-legged robot occasionally deployed for recon in dangerous situations. NYPD officials confirmed in a statement it had terminated its contract and will return the dog
Month: April 2021
Workers from urban centers will continue to work from home, at least part-time. Officials and developers are planning the shops and services they’ll want. Much has been made of the pandemic-era exodus to Lake Tahoe, Martha’s Vineyard, or Aspen. White-collar workers, freed of the constraints of the office, last year decamped for more skiing- and
Founders and funders are flocking to the beach for an impromptu event that some are calling “South by Southeast.” Farhaj Mayan was just starting to raise the seed round for his cannabis-tech startup when a few investors encouraged him to travel east. “Come to Miami,” they told him. “A lot of people will be there.”
What does it mean if you don’t want to climb the ladder? Megan weighs in. Dear OOO, I like my job, mostly. The people are nice, the work is interesting, the pay is good, and I have a lot of flexibility. I’ve been here a long time, though, and sometimes I wonder: Am I an
A transmission factory shows how artificial intelligence may creep into industrial processes in gradual and often imperceptible ways. In 1913, Henry Ford revolutionized car-making with the first moving assembly line, an innovation that made piecing together new vehicles faster and more efficient. Some hundred years later, Ford is now using artificial intelligence to eke more
Major platforms’ policies aren’t actually inspired by the First Amendment. This legal scholar says that’s a good thing. American social media platforms have long sought to present themselves as venues for unfettered free expression. A decade ago, Twitter employees used to brand the startup as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” In late
Kate Crawford, who holds positions at USC and Microsoft, says in a new book that even experts working on the technology misunderstand AI. Technology companies like to portray artificial intelligence as a precise and powerful tool for good. Kate Crawford says that mythology is flawed. In her book Atlas of AI, she visits a lithium
Most scholars thought the Isaiah Scroll was copied by a single author. New handwriting analysis just revealed otherwise. Most of the scribes who copied the text contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls were anonymous, as they neglected to sign their work. That has made it challenging for scholars to determine whether a given manuscript should
Programs such as GPT-3 can compose convincing text. Some people are using the tool to automate software development and hunt for bugs. It can take years to learn how to write computer code well. SourceAI, a Paris startup, thinks programming shouldn’t be such a big deal. The company is fine-tuning a tool that uses artificial
You can’t understand the app store debate without knowing a crucial piece of antitrust jargon. Josh Hawley had some questions about how Apple came up with the money to buy back $58 billion in stock over the past year. “I just want to focus on one major source of that income,” the Republican senator
The EU released draft laws that would regulate facial recognition and uses of algorithms. If it passes, the policy will impact companies in the US and China. The European Union proposed rules that would restrict or ban some uses of artificial intelligence within its borders, including by tech giants based in the US and China.
Online office events are never going to be a blast. But Megan has a few ideas for how to make them suck less. Dear OOO, A couple of coworkers have been planning virtual events for our office—happy hours, trivia sessions, and the like. These happen at the end of the day when I’m exhausted, trying
Consider it like Shark Tank on your phone: Every week on Angelhouse, founders make a pitch to a panel of investors as hundreds of people listen in. Startup fundraising can be bloodsport, which also makes it great entertainment. Shark Tank first brought pitch decks to prime time in 2009, spawning an entire genre of investment-as-reality-TV. To name
Cameras are everywhere, and increasingly powerful software can pick an individual out of a crowd. Except sometimes algorithms get it wrong. Stepping out in public used to make a person largely anonymous. Unless you met someone you knew, nobody would know your identity. Cheap and widely available face recognition software means that’s no longer true
The company offers a feature called “Full Self-Driving Capability.” But it remains far from a self-driving car. Tesla offers a $10,000 feature called Full Self-Driving Capability. It includes futuristic goodies like the ability to summon the car via app in a parking lot, and it can detect and react to traffic lights and stop signs.
Clubhouse is the latest startup to get cloned by Facebook, as the social media giant announces a suite of new audio features. Who will use them? On Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the company’s plan to enter the social audio space. “We think that audio is also going to be a first-class medium,” Zuckerberg
Amazon defeated the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union’s bid to represent workers at one warehouse. The union claims the company fought dirty. In the matchup between Amazon and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, round one went decisively to Amazon. Workers at BHM1, the company’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, voted 1,798 to
How does a manager strike the balance between honesty and spilling too many secrets? Dear OOO, I’m the boss at a midsize workplace and I love my colleagues. I worry, though, that I tell them too much at times. I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. Am I doing the wrong thing when
The big cryptocurrency exchange goes public through a direct listing, and it could make a bigger debut than Facebook. Physicists are constantly rethinking how bubbles burst. It’s one of those nagging problems in physics, deceptively simple, like working out the forces that keep a bike upright. The problem is that while bubbles pop around us
In a record quarter for VC funding, California still takes the cake—further evidence that reports of the region’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Silicon Valley’s most valuable asset is no longer silicon, to make computer chips, or even tech talent, to code software products. Instead, it is capital, which has been accumulating in the region since
The company plans to buy Nuance, a speech-recognition firm that grasps the specialized language of medicine—tech that won’t be easy for others to replicate. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke to investors Monday about his company’s plan to acquire speech-recognition specialist Nuance for $16 billion, he emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence in health care.
During the pandemic, insurers accelerated the use of automated tools to estimate repair costs. Garage operators say the numbers can be wildly inaccurate. In the Before Times, Jerry McNee wasn’t always a fan of appraisers. McNee is the president of Ultimate Collision Repair, an auto repair shop in Edison, New Jersey. From his perspective, appraisers
The German automaker uses new software from chipmaker Nvidia to simulate train robots and human workers. German carmaker BMW plans to start making drivetrains for electric vehicles at a vast factory in Regensburg, Bavaria, later in 2021. Well before any new parts roll off the production line, the entire manufacturing process will run in stunningly
Facebook is being sued for weakening data protections. Google is being sued for strengthening them. Can that paradox be resolved? Here’s something to puzzle over. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of states filed antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, alleging that as the company grew more dominant and faced less competition, it reneged
Medtronic’s GI Genius, recently cleared by the FDA, will help doctors identify precancerous polyps. Michael Wallace has performed hundreds of colonoscopies in his 20 years as a gastroenterologist. He thinks he’s pretty good at recognizing the growths, or polyps, that can spring up along the ridges of the colon and potentially turn into cancer. But
Facebook has been criticized for failing to curb misinformation in English. But little attention has been paid to the scale of the problem in Arabic. Bill Gates is dressed as the Joker. His hair is fluorescent green, his face painted white and his elongated smile is cut into his face. In his hand is a
Union supporters face a setback in Bessemer, Alabama, but indicate the fight isn’t over yet. Deep in the aisles of a vast Amazon fulfillment center, one aggrieved young worker mounted a very tiny rebellion. A comic book fan, he would squirrel away intriguing titles as they arrived at the warehouse, stealing glances as he stocked
Why petty drama matters in the workplace, and other advice on office thievery. Dear OOO, I work in digital marketing. Several months ago a colleague, ‘Mary,’ and I worked together to develop a proposal for a monthly newsletter, which was approved. I do all the monthly work to produce it, and I have no issue
A growing number of robots are operated remotely, often by workers thousands of miles away. Could it be a job of the future? David Tejeda helps deliver food and drinks to tables at a small restaurant in Dallas. And another in Sonoma County, California. Sometimes he lends a hand at a restaurant in Los Angeles
In 2019, I made a painful decision. But to the algorithms that drive Facebook, Pinterest, and a million other apps, I’m forever getting married. I still have a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and canceled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now