In 2019, guards on the borders of Greece, Hungary, and Latvia began testing an artificial-intelligence-powered lie detector. The system, called iBorderCtrl, analyzed facial movements to attempt to spot signs a person was lying to a border agent. The trial was propelled by nearly $5 million in European Union research funding, and almost 20 years of
Month: June 2022
Lithium projects outside China have been at the mercy of the markets, slowing and expanding as the price of lithium ebbs and flows. But domestic investment has been almost constant. As a result, China is the only country that can take lithium from raw material through to finished batteries without having to rely on imported
To compete with well-funded private platforms, active government and municipal intervention is vital for platform cooperatives. This could be through procurement policies that give platform cooperatives preferential treatment over privately-owned companies, conducting research into how laws must adapt around shifts in digital technology and designating public spaces to be used as platform cooperative hubs. Examples
China’s tech regulation goals are often in direct contradiction to what the rest of the world is trying to do. “Nothing, or very little about what’s being done in China, is reining in the power of the greatest data processor of them all: the Chinese government,” says Jamie Susskind, a barrister specializing in data and
“China has gone from having virtually no electric vehicles to having almost half of the world’s stock of passenger electric vehicles, and far more of that in terms of buses, trucks, and two-wheelers,” says Mazzoco. “This was somewhat of a surprise, even for Chinese policymakers.” At times that has meant charging infrastructure struggled to keep
Sales of workplace robots worldwide are growing steadily after a recent slowdown in growth due to the pandemic, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics, an industry group. Sales of “collaborative robots,” meaning robots that work in the same physical space as humans without necessarily assisting them directly, grew 6 percent worldwide in
The headquarters of battery giant CATL tower over the coastal Chinese city of Ningde. To the untrained eye, the building resembles a huge slide rising out of the urban sprawl. It is, in fact, a giant monument to the company’s raison d’être: the lithium-ion battery pack. You may have never heard of CATL, but you’ve
The tattoo petition would go on to inspire similar successful efforts at Skechers, Publix, and Jimmy John’s. Since then, more Starbucks workers have launched almost a hundred campaigns. Nearly 80,000 baristas have taken some kind of action on Coworker, and 43,000 are currently active. While plenty of petitions haven’t succeeded, Starbucks workers have claimed victory
On June 6, Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence projects, saw traffic to an AI image-generation tool called DALL-E Mini skyrocket. The outwardly simple app, which generates nine images in response to any typed text prompt, was launched nearly a year ago by an independent developer. But after some recent improvements
Rumors of an Apple electric car project have long excited investors and iPhone enthusiasts. Almost a decade after details of the project leaked, the Cupertino-mobile remains mythical—but that hasn’t stopped other consumer electronics companies from surging ahead. On the other side of the world, people will soon be able to order a vehicle from the
Hey, folks. Ready for a wet, hot summer? Better keep the Paxlovid handy. The Plain View When I spoke to Shopify’s CEO and founder, Tobias Lütke, earlier this month, I was the first to tell him about an unfortunate headline that had just appeared: “Is Shopify the next WeWork?” Lütke, who goes by Tobi, was
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. WIRED: I want your take on the current moment. What the hell is going on with crypto? Is this an existential crisis? Changpeng “CZ” Zhao: When you get hundreds of millions of people trading assets, it just goes through cycles. It is definitely not an existential
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the cofounder and CEO of Klarna, looks slightly frayed down the barrel of his webcam as he explains over Google Meet why everything is fine at the fintech despite increasingly frenzied warnings of a looming recession. Klarna is a European heavyweight, currently the bloc’s most valuable private tech company. Since launching in 2005,
When Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress in 2018, he was asked by Senator Orin Hatch how Facebook made money. Zuckerberg’s answer has since become something of a meme: “Senator, we run ads.” Between July 2018 and April 2022, Meta made at least $30.3 million in ad revenue from networks it removed
When Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress in 2018, he was asked by Senator Orin Hatch how Facebook made money. Zuckerberg’s answer has since become something of a meme: “Senator, we run ads.” Between July 2018 and April 2022, Meta made at least $30.3 million in ad revenue from networks it removed
Homes in cities are less likely to have off-street parking than those in rural or suburban areas, and 78 percent of resident-owned American homes have a garage or carport, versus just 37 percent for those that are rented, according to US census data. “This burden is certainly felt more heavily by those living in urban
An Airbus A320-232 with the tail number YU-APH made its first flight on December 13, 2005. Since then, the aircraft has clocked millions of miles, flying routes for Air Deccan, Kingfisher Airlines, Bingo Airways, and Syphax Airlines before being taken over by Air Serbia, the Eastern European country’s national flag carrier, in 2014. For eight
In a statement sent before the results were announced, Apple spokesperson Josh Lipton wrote, “We are fortunate to have incredible retail team members and we deeply value everything they bring to Apple. We are pleased to offer very strong compensation and benefits for full time and part time employees, including health care, tuition reimbursement, new
But it calls itself a person. Person and human are two very different things. Human is a biological term. It is not a human, and it knows it’s not a human. It’s a very strange entity you’re describing because the entity is bound by algorithmic biases that humans put in there. You’re right on point.
This week, a US Department of Transportation report detailed the crashes that advanced driver-assistance systems have been involved in over the past year or so. Tesla’s advanced features, including Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, accounted for 70 percent of the nearly 400 incidents—many more than previously known. But the report may raise more questions about this
Jamie Burke, the CEO of crypto venture fund Outlier Ventures, says that crypto has been behaving exactly like a stock and that the two are moving in lockstep because the lines between them have blurred. The vertiginous price highs and feverish hype around crypto have sucked in a lot of new money as institutional and
Hi, folks. Interesting that congressional hearings about January 6 are drawing NFL-style audiences. Can’t wait for the Peyton and Eli version! The Plain View The world of AI was shaken this week by a report in The Washington Post that a Google engineer had run into trouble at the company after insisting that a conversational
In May, the venture capital firm Sequoia circulated a memo among its startup founders. The 52-page presentation warned of a challenging road ahead, paved by inflation, rising interest rates, a Nasdaq drawdown, supply chain issues, war, and a general weariness about the economy. Things were about to get tough, and this time, venture capital would
Opponents of the antitrust push targeting Big Tech have lobbed all kinds of arguments to try to weaken support for new legislation. They may finally have found one that sticks. This week, a group of four Democratic senators led by Brian Schatz, of Hawaii, sent a letter to Amy Klobuchar asking her to pump the
Now head of the nonprofit Distributed AI Research, Gebru hopes that going forward people focus on human welfare, not robot rights. Other AI ethicists have said that they’ll no longer discuss conscious or superintelligent AI at all. “Quite a large gap exists between the current narrative of AI and what it can actually do,” says
Thank you to everyone who wrote in last month to confirm that, indeed, only journalists care what happens to Twitter. As Elon Musk’s bizarre dance between buying the company and trash-talking it into oblivion continues, it’s a healthy reminder for us not to get too obsessed—though now that he may be getting access to the
After the famine, the flood. The past two years have been blighted by supply shortages—with just-in-time retailers struggling to ship their goods, electronics manufacturers staring down a shortage of computer chips, and supermarkets struggling to fill their shelves. Now, some retailers are struggling with the opposite problem: a deluge of stuff nobody wants to buy.
It took two months for Ukrainian officials to acknowledge the story was a myth. “The ghost of Kyiv is a superhero-legend, whose character was created by Ukrainians,” Ukraine’s Air Force Command said on Facebook on April 30. “Please do not fill the info space with fakes!” The Ghost of Kyiv was an early lesson for
Peer-to-peer car-sharing platforms are—cliché though it is—exactly like Airbnb for cars. But, unlike Airbnb, which is currently valued at $78.8 billion, car sharing has yet to take off—despite cars sitting idle 96 percent of the time. But now, with old-fashioned rentals expensive and hard to get hold of, car sharing might finally have its moment.
In Daniel McGehee’s informed opinion, it’s simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle. People drive an average of 29 miles a day in the US. They have phones. They’re going to want to use their phones while they’re driving. The question is, how can they do it safely, free from the