Month: June 2021

The deputy director of the White House science office plans to tackle algorithmic bias and start candid conversations about the past. The pandemic taught us a lesson that we needed to learn again, says Alondra Nelson: Science and technology have everything to do with issues of society, inequality, and social life. After a year in
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After its wildly successful Coinbase exit, the VC firm signals its commitment to cryptocurrencies with a third fund. In 2013, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led a funding round for a startup called Coinbase. Cryptocurrency had hardly gone mainstream, but Coinbase, just a year out of Y Combinator, positioned itself as the financial exchange
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The managers are accused of selling tech to Libya and Egypt that was used to to identify activists, read private messages, and kidnap, torture, or kill them. Earlier this week, French authorities indicted four former executives of the surveillance firm Nexa Technologies, formerly called Amesys, for complicity in torture and war crimes. Between 2007 and
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Megan offers advice for casting your net—because there’s no excuse for a hiring pool where everyone looks the same. Dear OOO, I’m a (white, male) hiring manager at a not-very-diverse company. I would like to help make us more diverse, but we only seem to get people who look like us applying for jobs, and
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As people redefine their relationship to the office, some entrepreneurs see an opportunity to reimagine everything from housing to education. For most knowledge workers, this summer spells the end of the Great Remote Work Experiment and the beginning of a return to normal. People are shuffling back into offices, dusting off desk space, and returning
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Jeffrey Fang was a ride-hailing legend, a top earner with relentless hustle. Then his minivan was carjacked—with his kids in the back seat. Jeffrey Fang, DoorDash delivery guy, knows you judge his parenting skills, and he’ll join in your condemnation in a moment. He’ll explain that bringing his kids along on his Saturday night shift
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Systems in Boston, Cleveland, Las Vegas, and the San Francisco Bay Area are offering reduced fares or free rides. Others are considering abolishing fares altogether.  Last week in Washington, DC, the board of the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority did something almost unheard of: It offered riders more service for less money. During the Covid-19 pandemic,
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Amazon’s annual sales event this year is unfolding against a backdrop of mounting pressure from labor activists. In case our homepage didn’t tip you off, today (and tomorrow) is Prime Day. For Prime members, that means deals, deals, deals. For Amazon’s warehouse workers, it usually means mandatory extra time, or MET as the company abbreviates
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Language models like GPT-3 can write poetry, but they often amplify negative stereotypes. Researchers are trying different approaches to address the problem. In July 2020, OpenAI launched GPT-3, an artificial intelligence language model that quickly stoked excitement about computers writing poetry, news articles, and programming code. Just as quickly, it was shown to sometimes be
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By employing a neural network, the company says its numbers will be more accurate—and allow it to offer to buy more homes.  Stories of people getting cash offers for their homes tens of thousands of dollars over asking price have become normal. This year, inventory in the US housing market hit a record low while
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A growing number of people are seeking a wider diversity of news sources or opinions contrary to their own to combat information silos within social media. Last October, students in Sarah Candler’s seventh-grade English class in rural Tennessee were discussing the presidential election, echoing each other’s pro-Trump sentiments. One student dared the others: “Who’s a
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Remote work generally reduces driving. But the travel behavior of telecommuters isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Before everything got weird and terrible, there were these things called rush hours. Between, say, 6 am and 10 am, many people would leave their homes to go to work or school, filling roads, buses, subway cars,
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Pinduoduo, which recently passed Alibaba as the shopping site with the most customers, connects 12 million farmers to more than 800 million users. As China locked down amid the Covid-19 pandemic early last year, Huang Honglin—who sells passion fruit grown by his parents and neighboring farmers in Jiangxi province—worried about getting their crops to traditional
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Unable to find enough workers, employers are turning to technology to perform tasks—and women are likely to be the hardest hit. Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, a fast-food chain in Ohio, hardly seems an obvious venue for cutting-edge artificial intelligence. But the company’s drive-thrus are showcasing technology that reveals how the Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating the
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The tech giant wants its core product to infer meaning from human language, answer multipart questions—and look more like Google Assistant sounds. Google often uses its annual developer conference, I/O, to showcase artificial intelligence with a wow factor. In 2016, it introduced the Google Home smart speaker with Google Assistant. In 2018, Duplex debuted to
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The promise of a crackdown is sending the country’s crypterati scrambling for the exit. The man shooting the video wears a face mask, rimless glasses, and a white hard hat. He is traipsing near the entrance of a warehouse full to the brim with stacks of internet-connected machines sitting idle in half-darkness. As the man
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