What Happens to the Economy When Artificial Intelligence Gets a Body If you knock a mug of coffee off your desk, the most advanced artificial intelligence on the planet is completely useless. A frontier neural network running across thousands of…
Aircraft became more capable, but congestion, longer taxi times and padded schedules have quietly made the journey slower. Aircraft manufacturers spent the last sixty years solving the same problem from every angle. Engines got quieter and more fuel efficient. Navigation…
Big Tech is pouring unprecedented sums into chips, data centers, and power. The technology may change everything, but the business case still has to survive the cost. The shape of the bet: Four companies will spend roughly $725 billion this…
How Apps Turned Investing, Sports, Politics, and Uncertainty Into an Endless Stream of Bets A single NFL game today can generate hundreds of separate live wagering markets: next play, next first down, whether the next field goal clears the crossbar…
How the Gig Economy Turned Job Security Into a Luxury The median gig worker earns $2.17 less per hour than minimum wage law would require of an employer, a gap that comes out to roughly $3,400 a year. Fourteen percent…
Why buying a new car is becoming harder for ordinary people, even as technology keeps getting cheaper. 1. The simple question: where did the cheap new car go? In the early 2010s, an American with about $14,000 could walk into…
Why the internet makes more money when it captures your attention and refuses to let go A thirteen year old shouts “six seven” while lifting one hand and lowering the other, for reasons nobody, including the rapper who wrote the…
The Day You Can No Longer Trust a Phone Call AI can now clone a familiar voice, fake a face and create evidence that never existed. As deepfake technology spreads, the simple act of hearing someone may no longer be…
The era of abundant, affordable food may be giving way to a more expensive and unstable future. For most of human history, a bad harvest meant hunger. Grain reserves were thin, transport was slow, and a single failed season in…
Sleep Used to Be Free. Now There’s an Industry Selling It Back to Us Sleep has never been entirely free of commerce. People have been buying mattresses, sleeping pills and blackout curtains for generations. What is new is not the…