Business, Spoken

After raising $200 million in a Series H funding round last November, the culty salad chain Sweetgreen became the first-ever restaurant unicorn. Cold-pressed upstart Joe & the Juice is reportedly plotting a $1.5 billion IPO later this year. Now kale-scarfing, ginger-quaffing consumers have VCs salivating over salad. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, President Donald Trump signed a new executive order on artificial intelligence and the Pentagon declassified part of its AI strategy. Neither was a first attempt at a national AI strategy. In 2016, the Obama administration published a comprehensive plan on the future of AI, which never had time to gain the momentum it needed in government. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Humans pricked by info-hunger pangs used to hunt and peck for scraps of trivia on the savanna of the internet. Now we sit in screen-glow-flooded caves and grunt, “Alexa!” Virtual assistants do the dirty work for us. Problem is, computers can’t really speak the language. Many of our densest, most reliable troves of knowledge, from Wikipedia to (ahem) the pages of WIRED, are encoded in an ancient technology largely opaque to machines—prose. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

To put our toxic relationship with Big Tech into perspective, critics have compared social media to a lot of bad things. Tobacco. Crystal meth. Pollution. Cars before seat belts. Chemicals before Superfund sites. But the most enduring metaphor is junk food: convenient but empty; engineered to be addictive; makes humans unhealthy and corporations rich. At first, consumers were told to change their diet and #DeleteFacebook to avoid the side effects. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Like most 12-year-old boys, Mitchell Hashimoto played a lot of videogames. But he never liked the repetitive parts of games like Neopets, where players feed and care for virtual animals. "I used a lot of bot software that other people wrote to play the more mundane parts for me, so I could do the fun stuff," he says. Those bots were often blocked by gamemakers, so Hashimoto taught himself to program and created his own bot. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Trump signed an executive order on February 11 meant to shore up our competitive position in the international race for AI supremacy, but it is short on concrete steps. As the CEO of an artificial intelligence research institute, I am calling on him to include a special visa program for AI students and experts to help us win this race for the sake of both economic vitality and national security. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Jeff Bezos went public with his accusations of blackmail against the National Enquirer on Thursday, he was hailed by many online for his courage. In a post on Medium, the Amazon CEO alleged that Enquirer representatives threatened to publish intimate photos of him unless he stopped an investigation into the tabloid’s reporting on him. Bezos refused. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2015, car-and-rocket man Elon Musk joined with influential startup backer Sam Altman to put artificial intelligence on a new, more open course. They cofounded a research institute called OpenAI to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute’s researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won’t release it to the public. The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The unveiling of a Green New Deal last week provoked a mix of enthusiasm and derision. For each voice embracing the radical vision to decarbonize the American economy within a decade, revamp capitalism, and attend to a panoply of social ills, there was another voice decrying the plan as economically unrealistic, technologically impossible, and politically untenable. WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the 1960s, the Department of Defense began shoveling money towards a small group of researchers with a then-fringe idea: making machines intelligent. Military money played a central role in establishing a new science—artificial intelligence. Sixty years later, the Pentagon believes AI has matured enough to become a central plank of America’s national security. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The US leads the world in artificial intelligence technology. Decades of federal research funding, industrial and academic research, and streams of foreign talent have put America at the forefront of the current AI boom. Yet as AI aspirations have sprouted around the globe, the US government has lacked a high-level strategy to guide American investment and prepare for the technology’s effects. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, accused The National Enquirer Thursday of engaging in “extortion and blackmail” by threatening to publish intimate images of the billionaire unless he agreed to drop his investigation into how the tabloid obtained his private communications. In an extraordinary Medium post, Bezos reproduced emails that appeared to show representatives of the Enquirer demanding he publicly state that its coverage of him isn’t “influenced by political forces. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When WIRED introduced Facebook to its online readers in 2004, four months after Mark Zuckerberg launched the site with a few friends out of his Harvard dorm room, the first order of business was explaining the poke. “On Thefacebook, poking is a way of saying ‘hi’ to would-be contacts, a method to strike up a conversation without adding the person as a friend,” went the post. “And there's quite a bit of poking going on. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Three Republican members of Congress introduced net neutrality-related bills Thursday, but Congress is still a long way from a bipartisan deal to restore rules banning broadband providers from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content. During a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Greg Walden (R-Oregon), and Bob Latta (R-Ohio) all said they had proposed net neutrality bills. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Being rich may make you an alluring target for blackmail. But being really, really rich may make you immune. In an extraordinary blog post published on Medium Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accused The National Enquirer of attempting to blackmail him by threatening to publish 10 intimate photos unless Bezos stopped an investigation into how the tabloid obtained his private messages and images. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Following more than two years of constant turbulence for Facebook, the company’s vice president of communications, Caryn Marooney, is leaving the company, Facebook has confirmed. Marooney, who previously co-founded the technology communications firm The Outcast Agency, joined Facebook in 2011 as director of technology communications, after representing the company at Outcast. Most recently, she has been responsible for all global communications. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the arrow appeared next to the birdcage, I finally understood what my partner was trying to say. The game was a clone of Pictionary—I had to guess the phrase based on a drawing. My partner had initially depicted a duck next to a cage, plus a hand, and a pond. Only after I asked for another drawing and the arrow was added did I realize the hand was “releasing” the duck, not feeding it. “You win!!!” I was told, after typing in the full answer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

More than 100,000 cryptocurrency holders have learned a hard lesson in finality, after the 30-year-old CEO of a major Canadian exchange died, effectively freezing the company’s assets. In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia last week, Jennifer Robertson, widow of QuadrigaCX CEO Gerry Cotten, wrote that the company owes its customers $190 million, but can’t access the funds to pay them back. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jace has never lived in a world without Facebook. His father already had an account by the time he was born. Even before Jace could understand the concept of Facebook, he felt its influence every time his dad had him stop what he was doing and pose for photos that were destined to be shared online. Today, the 13-year-old Virginia teenager doesn’t use the site himself, even though his dad signed him up. “It’s kinda lame,” he says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If an app on Facebook behaved the way Facebook has been behaving, Facebook would probably have shut it down by now. Tuesday’s scathing TechCrunch investigation all but guarantees it. The report found that Facebook has been paying people as young as 13 years old to download an app that grants Facebook access to users’ entire phone and web history, including encrypted activity and private messages and emails. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last April, Google cofounder Sergey Brin wrote to shareholders with a warning about the potential downsides of artificial intelligence. In June, Google CEO Sundar Pichai released a set of guiding principles for its AI projects after employee protests forced him to abandon a Pentagon contract creating algorithms to interpret drone footage. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Along America’s west coast, the world’s most valuable companies are racing to make artificial intelligence smarter. Google and Facebook have boasted of experiments using billions of photos and thousands of high-powered processors. Late last year, a project in eastern Tennessee quietly exceeded the scale of any corporate AI lab. It was run by the US government. The record-setting project involved the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Summit, at Oak Ridge National Lab. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Net neutrality advocates are heading to court Friday for what may be their best chance to restore federal regulations banning broadband providers from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content. The Federal Communications Commission passed robust net neutrality protections in 2015. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Embattled Chinese telecom giant Huawei has some new problems. The US Department of Justice Monday unsealed a 13-count indictment against Huawei and its CFO Meng Wanzhou, alleging the company misled banking partners about violations of US sanctions against Iran. The charges include bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Meng, who is also the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested in Canada last month and is awaiting extradition to the US. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Facebook announced in November that it would launch an independent oversight board, questions arose about what that might look like and how it would work. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for one, compared the would-be governing body to the Supreme Court, in its potential capacity to review the biggest issues of the day and set a sort of Facebook case law. On Monday, Facebook released a draft charter answering questions about how such an institution might function. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Chinese telecom giant Huawei could face millions in fines if convicted of all charges in two indictments unsealed by the US Department of Justice Monday. But the money is likely the least of Huawei’s worries. The first indictment accuses Huawei and its executives, including CFO Meng Wanzhou, of crimes including bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice related to alleged violations of sanctions forbidding the sale of US-made equipment to Iran. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this month, a WIRED contributor managed to subvert all the warm, fuzzy feelings produced by the “10-year challenge” meme on social media by asking the question that has haunted free thinkers throughout history: Am I doing what I want to do, or what they want me to do? The challenge, which has flourished on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, seems like harmless stuff, offering a forum for regular folks and celebrities alike to use photos to boast about getting better with age (or in the case of Mariah Carey, who posted the same photo as “before” and... Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Dave Eggers published The Circle in 2013, critics thought the novel’s hyperbolic message about an omnipotent tech company would open the world’s eyes to the harms of Silicon Valley’s growing power. Perhaps there’s as much to learn about tech culture from Family Trust, the debut novel from Kathy Wang, a former product manager for a data-storage company. Family Trust is also a zippy page-turner set in Silicon Valley, but Wang focuses on tech’s middle class. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Before they got down to business for the day, students in Devin Tatro’s social studies class were offered a quiet moment of self-reflection: On this golden fall afternoon at Nome-Beltz Junior/Senior High School, were they feeling chipper, distressed, or somewhere in between? About 20 students gazed at their laptops, an online poll open on each screen. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

YouTube is trying to reduce the spread of toxic videos on the platform by limiting how often they appear in users' recommendations. The company announced the shift in a blog post on Friday, writing that it would begin cracking down on so-called "borderline content" that comes close to violating its community standards without quite crossing the line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In London last month, a team from Alphabet’s UK-based artificial intelligence research unit DeepMind quietly laid a new marker in the contest between humans and computers. Thursday, it revealed the achievement, in a three-hour YouTube stream in which aliens and robots fought to the death. DeepMind’s broadcast showed its artificial intelligence bot, AlphaStar, defeating a professional player at the complex real-time-strategy videogame StarCraft II. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Governments and companies worldwide are investing heavily in artificial intelligence in hopes of new profits, smarter gadgets, and better health care. Financier and philanthropist George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos Thursday that the technology may also undermine free societies and create a new era of authoritarianism. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Bing is back online in China. Late Wednesday evening in the US, reports surface that Microsoft's search engine was blocked in China. Bing is now available again in the country, but it remains unclear if the outage was caused by technical issues or if the Chinese government intentionally blocked the search engine, if only temporarily. “We can confirm that Bing was inaccessible in China, but service is now restored,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The web can be an annoying and creepy place. Big animated ads try to distract you from what you’re reading, while ads for products you’ve already bought stalk you. That’s led many people to install ad blockers or other tools to inhibit websites from tracking them. According to a survey by identity management company Janrain, 71 percent of respondents use ad blockers or some other tool to control their online experience. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Pages and groups are the tools Facebook misinformation peddlers love the most. Creating a network of anonymous pages is one of the easiest ways to quickly spread fake news or propaganda on the social network. This tactic has most famously been used by Russian trolls—even long after the 2016 presidential election. Earlier this month, Facebook took down a cohort of deceptive pages linked to Russian state media. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in the 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee and his team were creating the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, they made a list of the error codes that would pop up when something went wrong. You’ve surely encountered many of them: “404 Not Found,” which pops up if you click on a dead link; “401 Unauthorized” when you hit a page that needs a password; and so on. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Airbnb’s “live like a local” fantasy can quickly morph into a nightmare when your host’s sun-dappled apartment photos turn out to conceal a roach infestation. But hotels can be so homogeneous. Now a new crop of startups is offering a hybrid alternative: apartment hotels, lodging that promises the comfort and roominess of a homestay (minus the flaky homeowner) with the consistency and in-room amenities of a hotel. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech giants are battling to position their smart speakers as the center of the digital home. But Microsoft, which lost the mobile wars to Apple and Google, is trying to ensure that it will have a place, no matter who wins. Microsoft has its own voice-based digital assistant, Cortana, that could theoretically power a challenger to the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod for countertop space. Indeed, Cortana is already core to a smart speaker from Harman Kardon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In high school, Mackenzie Leake shot a movie about being afraid to get her driver’s license. “A very millennial subject,” she jokes. It gave her a punishing lesson in editing video: Leake spent countless hours, over the course of weeks, “scrubbing” through her footage to find the best shots, then painstakingly assembling them. “It’s a ton of grunt work,” she notes. Now, seven years later, she’s trying to accelerate the process. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

New rules proposed by the Indian government to rein in tech giants and combat fake news could have a profoundly chilling effect on free speech and privacy online. The proposed changes involve Section 79 of the IT Act, a safe harbor protection for internet “intermediaries” that’s akin to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the US. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Prominent Silicon Valley companies spend liberally to protect their intellectual property. Some also shell out considerable amounts to protect their executives. Apple’s most recent proxy statement, filed earlier this month, shows the company spent $310,000 on personal security for CEO Tim Cook. But that’s a fraction of other tech giants’ expenditures. Amazon and Oracle spent about $1. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Bad news keeps piling up for Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Last week an employee was arrested in Poland on espionage charges. This week, the company's products, which include both phones and network gear, were banned from Taiwanese government systems, the South China Morning Post reported, over concerns that Huawei could build backdoors into its products on behalf of the Chinese government. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this month, I spent my last days of notification-free vacation by KonMari-ing my closets. The sun was hiding, burnout was in the air, and the winds of change shoved me toward self-optimization---pack light for the apocalypse, purge my way to an uncluttered mind. Marie Kondo’s maxim---keep only items that spark joy–promised a sense of agency. Unlike anxiety baking, bath bombs, sheet masks, it was a not retreat from the world, but a chance to prep for some inevitable fight. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Wednesday, a group of hoaxsters affiliated with the progressive non-profit group The Yes Men circulated fake versions of The Washington Post, dated May 1, 2019, imagining a world in which President Trump has suddenly left office. Throughout the morning, the activists distributed print copies of the edition in front of the White House and debuted a website called My-WashingtonPost. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2017, a poker bot called Libratus made headlines when it roundly defeated four top human players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em. Now, Libratus’s technology is being adapted to take on opponents of a different kind—in service of the US military. Libratus—Latin for balanced—was created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University to test ideas for automated decision-making based on game theory. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Diagnosing psychiatric and neurological conditions is tricky. Physicians have long reported that diagnoses are fraught with complications and subtleties. Anywhere from 35 percent to 85 percent of mental health conditions go undetected and undiagnosed, according to the World Health Organization, depending on where you live in the world. Needless to say, in order to treat depression, Alzheimer's, or autism, it must first be detected. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech workers may be new to labor organizing, but they’re learning quickly. When a November walkout by 20,000 Google employees protesting the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment claims led to small changes that fell short of the organizers’ demands, some activists inside Google decided to broaden the fight. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When award-winning novelist MacKenzie Bezos and her husband Jeff Bezos, the chief executive and founder of Amazon, announced on Twitter Wednesday they were getting divorced, public discussion over the uncoupling quickly centered on the impact it might have on Jeff’s company, and on each sides’ net worth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Federal Trade Commission thinks you're paying too much for smartphones. But it doesn’t blame handset makers like Apple and Samsung or wireless carriers. Instead, the agency blames Qualcomm, which owns key wireless-technology patents and makes chips that can be can be found in most high-end Android phones and many iPhones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The promise of digital cryptocurrencies like bitcoin is that you don't need to trust the people you send or receive money from because the software makes it technically impossible for anyone to cheat the system. Instead of relying on humans and their flawed judgment, you rely on the laws of mathematics. But a recent attack on the cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic---not to be confused with the original Ethereum project---shows once again how hard it is to remove human frailty from digital systems. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices