Once cars can finally drive themselves, we’ll have more time to enjoy the journey and do other, much more interesting stuff instead. At least that’s the concept behind some of the designs below, developed by retail giant IKEA’s “future living lab,” SPACE10, …Continue reading
US election campaign technology from 2008 to 2018, and beyond
What a difference a decade makes. Consider: In 2008, the iPhone was less than a year old. BlackBerrys and e-mail dominated the palms of corporate and political information junkies. Television continued to be the dominant medium for political advertising and debates. Social …Continue reading
Life as a bug bounty hunter: a struggle every day, just to get paid
Evan Ricafort works from home, his office taking up a room in a house that he shares with his family along a national highway in the Philippines. While the 22-year-old’s parents go to work at a convenience store the family owns in …Continue reading
China’s use of big data might actually make it less Big Brother-ish
By 2020, China’s new system of social credit scoring is expected to give each citizen a trustworthiness rating based on anything from shopping habits to choice of friends. It may seem like an ideal tool for an authoritarian government that wants to …Continue reading
Don’t just ditch Facebook—start your own social-media site instead
Fed up with political propaganda bots and discriminatory online ads? You may think the answer is to delete your Facebook and Twitter profiles and head offline, but there might be a better way: build your own networks. “These systems are affecting billions …Continue reading
Confessions of an accidental job destroyer
I expected my summer engineering internship to include things like updating old 3-D models, creating part designs, and learning the ins and outs of how a company works. I didn’t expect it to involve learning to make my colleagues obsolete. It was …Continue reading
How to grow four tons of food a year in a metal box without sunlight
Jaime Silverstein works on a farm every day. Inside a cargo shipping container. In Boston. She is a part of a growing movement of urban farmers intent on using efficient, high-tech hydroponic setups to shorten the distance between city dwellers and their …Continue reading
A Different Story from the Middle East: Entrepreneurs Building an Arab Tech Economy
At the end of March, it was announced that the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East and North Africa, Souq.com, would be acquired by Amazon for nearly $600 million. This was unusual: when Amazon enters a new geographic market, it typically …Continue reading
Treating Addiction with an App
Using smartphone data and artificial intelligence to track and interpret behavior, a Chicago startup is attempting something extraordinary: predicting and preventing relapse into drug use. When I spoke to Tasha Hedstrom this winter, she had been sober for more than 61 days. …Continue reading
Walmart’s new robots are loved by staff—and ignored by customers
Walmart may be grabbing headlines for its embrace of cutting-edge technologies, but at the heart of those changes are companies like Bossa Nova. The San Francisco-based robotics firm created the robots now roaming the aisles in 50 Walmart locations around the US. …Continue reading