Business, Spoken

Technology companies with unprecedented power to sway consumers and move markets have done the unthinkable: They’ve made trust-busting sound like a good idea again. The concentration of wealth and influence among tech giants has been building for years---90 percent of new online-ad dollars went to either Google or Facebook in 2016; Amazon is by far the largest online retailer, the third-largest streaming media company, and largest cloud-computing provider. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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In the high-stakes world of venture-backed startups, not growing is the same as dying. Historically, stalled companies sought a sympathetic acquirer or quietly shut down. Now, startups have a new potential lifeline: They pivot to blockchain. Kik kicked things off in September. The messaging app, which has struggled under competition from Facebook and Instagram, created its own cryptocurrency called Kin, which can be used to buy and sell things via the Kik app today, and other apps in the future. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“An app that converts your daily change into bail money to free black people.” That’s what Kortney Ryan Ziegler, a social engineer with a PhD in African-American studies, tweeted in July. https://twitter.com/fakerapper/status/889197985678073856The response was instantaneous—and overwhelming. Nearly 200 people replied with offers to help. That was the start of Appolition, which converts users’ spare change into bail money. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The mood around tech is dark these days. Social networks are a cesspool of harassment and lies. On-demand firms are producing a bleak economy of gig labor. AI learns to be racist. Is there anyplace where the tech news is radiant with old-fashioned optimism? Where good cheer abounds? Why, yes, there is: clean energy. It is, in effect, the new Silicon Valley—filled with giddy, breathtaking ingenuity and flat-out good news. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

​As one of the earliest, and first, female investors in Twitter, I had great hopes for its potential to improve human connectedness and relationships. Today, it’s become clear it’s done the opposite—by becoming a thunderously divisive tool weaponized by the leader of the free world. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Susan Wu (@sw) is an entrepreneur, engineer, and angel investor. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Looking back at the year's most-read WIRED business stories, one theme clearly emerges: people are very concerned with the future of work. Will the robot revolution will eradicate positions? (It's more complicated than that.) What are the right skills for future-proofing ourselves? (Learn code.) Could implementing a universal basic income really work? (A real-world case study suggests it might.) Other stories captured our readers attention too, of course. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Republicans argue that the lower taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals promised in the tax bill currently before Congress will result in new investment in businesses and more jobs. But in the age of artificial intelligence and automation, trickle-down economics won't create employment. What corporations and the US economy at large need most in this emerging era is not more free cash, but a new approach to machine-assisted human productivity and purpose. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Olaf J. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We owe a lot to 9th century Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Centuries after his death, al-Khwarizmi's works introduced Europe to decimals and algebra, laying some of the foundations for today’s techno-centric age. The latinized version of his name has become a common word: algorithm. In 2017, it took on some sinister overtones. Take this exchange from the US House Intelligence Committee last month. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last week’s repeal of net neutrality regulations by the Federal Communications Commission generated considerable controversy. Many characterized the decision as a win for telecom and cable companies at the expense of both consumers and content companies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A year ago, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi (sha-oh-me) had fallen from the world’s most valuable unicorn to a “unicorpse.” Sales plunged in 2016, pushing the company from first to fifth place among China’s smartphone makers. No firm had ever come back from a wound that severe in the trench warfare of the global smartphone business. Today, Xiaomi is being called a “Chinese phoenix. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook Friday made available a tool to allow users to see whether they had liked or followed a page linked to Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 US election. Facebook had promised to make such a tool available in November, after the company revealed in a congressional hearing that more than 140 million people may have been exposed to Russia-linked propaganda during the 2016 election cycle. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Eric Schmidt wound up at Google by compromise. In 1998, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had made a promise to the two venture-capital firms that funded them---they would hire an experienced CEO to manage the company once it began to take off. But two years later they were hedging, insisting they could scale Google to a global power by themselves. VC John Doerr convinced them to keep interviewing potential leaders. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Chat is almost as old as the internet itself. But this year, investors and big tech companies alike treated workplace messaging as the next big thing. Slack announced a $250 million investment in September from Japanese tech company SoftBank, bringing its total funding to $790 million and boosting its valuation from $3.8 billion to $5.1. In June, rumors surfaced that Amazon wanted to buy the company for as much $9 billion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For all the hype about killer robots, 2017 saw some notable strides in artificial intelligence. A bot called Libratus out-bluffed poker kingpins, for example. Out in the real world, machine learning is being put to use improving farming and widening access to healthcare. But have you talked to Siri or Alexa recently? Then you’ll know that despite the hype, and worried billionaires, there are many things that artificial intelligence still can’t do or understand. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The last time I visited Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz at the company’s secretive Florida offices, he told me about the time he met Beaker, the meeping beeping scientist on the Muppet Show. Not the character Beaker, but the real Beaker. The guy was a film director at creator Jim Henson’s studio, Abovitz explained enthusiastically. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Venture capital isn’t a monolith, but startup investors are compared to lemmings for a reason. Once a trend gets hot, every firm needs to make a play, or come up with a good excuse for missing out. (To be safe, if the firm does miss a trend, its partners should privately trash talk it to anyone who will listen.) Investors continue to aggressively pour money into startups. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook just loosened the leash a little on its facial-recognition algorithms. Starting Tuesday, any time someone uploads a photo that includes what Facebook thinks is your face, you’ll be notified even if you weren’t tagged. The new feature rolled out to most of Facebook’s more than 2 billion global users this morning. It applies only to newly posted photos, and only those with privacy settings that make an image visible to you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last week the pilot light for my water heater went out. I tried to relight it by following the instructions pasted on the side of the heater, but they were as inscrutable as hieroglyphs. So I did what everyone does when they need to learn something: I went to YouTube. Bingo. Someone had posted a video showing how to relight my exact model. I crouched down near the heater, holding my phone at arm’s length so I could follow the instructions, as if I were peeking over an expert’s shoulder. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Federal Communications Commission will no longer protect net neutrality. Now, officials in more than a dozen states are trying to take on the job. Within minutes after the FCC voted to jettison its Obama-era rules that prohibit internet providers from blocking or discriminating against lawful content, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said he would lead a multistate lawsuit against the agency to preserve the regulations. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It took less than two hours of debate for the Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality protections, a decision that could send ripple effects across the internet for years. Over the objections of the commission's two Democrats, the three Republican members, including Chair Ajit Pai, voted to overturn protections put in place in 2015—but not before fudging a few facts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The three Republican commissioners now in power at the FCC voted this week to erase the agency's legal authority over high-speed Internet providers.They claim that competition will protect consumers, that the commission shouldn't interfere in the "dynamic internet ecosystem," and that they are "protecting internet freedom." Now that the vote is done, the agency has little to do but mess around with spectrum allocations. The mega-utility of the 21st century officially has no regulator. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Federal Communications Commission will vote Thursday on a plan to dismantle its net neutrality regulations. But that won’t end the fight over rules that prohibit internet service providers from creating fast lanes for some content, while blocking or throttling others. Most immediately, the activity will move to the courts, where the advocacy group Free Press, and probably others, will challenge the FCC’s decision. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Gargantuan Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million people and tens of thousands of robots making iPhones and other electronics. It has a reputation for cost cutting, including at the expense of its workers. Now, it’s teaming up with an artificial-intelligence researcher who helped trigger Google’s reorientation around machine learning in order to make its own factories more efficient. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today the Federal Communications Commission voted to overturn its rules banning internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or discriminating against lawful content. In doing so, it effectively killed net neutrality. But not every FCC commissioner was on board. The agencies's two Democratic commissioners, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel, lashed out against the order during the FCC's open meeting today. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

From the tall windows of WIRED’s offices in San Francisco’s South-of-Market neighborhood I’ve watched almost a decade of radical change made physical in concrete and glass. The city’s forest of new skyscrapers is at least in part the legacy of Mayor Ed Lee, who died early Tuesday morning after almost seven years in office. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“To the moon!” The phrase is the battle cry of true believers in cryptocurrency bitcoin---and charts of its price in recent weeks point directly heavenward. Yet beyond a batch of newly minted crypto-millionaires, the digital asset’s recent bull run has also exposed long-standing weakness in the underlying technology that could crimp bitcoin’s long-term viability. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fitbit spent its first decade selling activity trackers. With its latest moves, the company is starting to look less like a gear maker selling pricey accessories to fitness buffs and more like a medical-device company, catering to hospitals, patients, and health insurers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nichole Williams needed a career reboot. After more than a decade as a web designer in Atlanta, she felt her career was moving backward. She knew she needed to expand her programming skills to stay relevant in the field, so she signed up for Thinkful, an online-education startup that pairs students with one-on-one mentors who work with them over video-chat connections to help them learn to code. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Instead of listening to the thousand of startups and investors who argue that ending net neutrality would damage online innovation, FCC chair Ajit Pai is pushing a vote this Thursday to dismantle two decades of open internet protections in one of the biggest corporate giveaways in history. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ryan Singel (@rsingel) is media and strategy fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and the CEO/cofounder of Contextly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Thinking In Public I’ve been CEOing Wolfram Research for more than 30 years now. But what does that actually entail? What do I end up doing on a typical day? I certainly work hard. But I think I’m not particularly typical of CEOs of tech companies our size. Because for me, a large part of my time is spent on the front lines of figuring out how our products should be designed and architected, and what they should do. Thirty years ago I mostly did this by myself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Netflix debuted the second season of Stranger Things on October 27, more than 15 million people watched the first episode in the following three days. But the strangest thing about Stranger Things? Its early audience was bigger than some of this year's World Series games. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) is a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Rockets, electric cars, solar panels, batteries---whirlwind industrialist Elon Musk has set about reinventing one after another. Thursday, he added another ambitious project to the list: Future Tesla vehicles will run their self-driving AI software on a chip designed by the automaker itself. “We are developing customized AI hardware chips,” Musk told a room of AI experts from companies such as Alphabet and Uber on the sidelines of the world’s leading AI conference. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai says the agency's net-neutrality rules are discouraging investment, leaving consumers with fewer, and less robust, choices for internet service, and potentially widening the digital divide. Broadband providers' own financial reports tell a different story. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Justin Caldbeck, whose venture firm collapsed after six women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment in June, says he’s trying to make amends. His efforts have included handwritten notes to his accusers and others to whom he now thinks he may have acted improperly, as well as emails to women who’ve been critical of him in the media. But some recipients of Caldbeck’s "apology" emails are not convinced. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

During a pair of explosive pre-trial hearings last week, the lawsuit between self-driving Alphabet spinoff Waymo and Uber over trade secrets got an unlikely, new star player. It wasn't an engineer, like Anthony Levadowski, the former Google engineer who allegedly brought reams of Waymo trade secrets to his next big gig as head of autonomous driving at Uber. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai has proposed repealing longstanding net neutrality rules. Only he has a different phrase for them: “The Obama administration’s heavy-handed regulations.” Wait a second: Did Obama really invent net neutrality? Even in a country with famously short attention spans, at least some people might have noticed that net neutrality has been around longer than that. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The history of artificial intelligence is a procession of one-trick ponies. Over decades researchers have crafted a series of super-specialized programs to beat humans at tougher and tougher games. They conquered tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess. Most recently, Alphabet’s DeepMind research group shocked the world with a program called AlphaGo that mastered the Chinese board game Go. But each of these artificial champions could play only the game it was painstakingly designed to play. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The recent outpouring of sexual harassment and assault allegations has helped expose not only high-profile predators, but the culture of secrecy that shielded them. Now lawmakers and advocates want to empower victims, and make it harder for serial harassers to hide, by restricting the use of nondisclosure agreements, the confidentiality provisions that obscured decades of complaints against Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, and Roger Ailes by muzzling their accusers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook says it built Messenger Kids, a new version of its popular communications app with parental controls, to help safeguard pre-teens who may be using unauthorized and unsupervised social-media accounts. Critics think Facebook is targeting children as young as 6 to hook them on its services. Facebook’s goal is to “push down the age” of when it’s acceptable for kids to be on social media, says Josh Golin, executive director of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

FCC chair Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal net neutrality provisions and reclassify broadband providers from “common carriers” to “information services” is an unprecedented giveaway to big broadband providers and a danger to the internet. The move would mean the FCC would have almost no oversight authority over broadband providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The notorious 404 error, “Not Found,” is often, not totally erroneously, referred to as “the last page of the internet.” It’s an obligatory heads-up with an outsize reputation; it is a meme and a punch line. Bad puns abound. The error has been printed in comics and on T-shirts, an accessible and relatable facet of what was once relegated to nerd humor and is now a fact of digital life. That the 404 should have crossover appeal seems fitting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Donald Trump isn’t known for consistency. He has even occasionally waffled on immigration, his signature issue. This tendency has been on display in recent weeks, as two federal agencies made starkly different moves on telecom policy. First, the Department of Justice sued to block AT&T's proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Executives at ascendant tech titans like Amazon and Google tend to look down on their predecessor IBM. The fading giant of Armonk, New York, once sustained itself inventing and selling cutting-edge technology, but now leans heavily on consulting. Renting out people to help other companies with tech projects is a messier and less scalable business than selling computing power on a distant cloud server, and leaving the customer to do the grunt work. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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The world is commonly divided into industrialized and emerging economies. A new study of how technology will transform demand for workers suggests we might talk of the automated and automating worlds instead. Economic think tank McKinsey Global Institute forecast changes in demand for different kinds of labor across 45 countries as technologies improve to perform physical or office tasks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Federal Communications Commission's plan to jettison its net-neutrality rules found a surprise supporter this week in respected technology industry analyst and blogger Ben Thompson. In a blog post Tuesday, Thompson argued that he supports net neutrality, but thinks the FCC is right to repeal rules that ban broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down, or otherwise discriminating against legal content. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

FRESNO, Calif. — A group of seventh- and eighth-grade girls sat around a lunch table discussing a new game-like app they use in school. Danna Rodriguez somewhat sullenly said she didn’t want to care about Strides, which tracks points students earn for attendance, grade-point average and using the app itself, among other things. But she can’t help herself. She does care. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For a year or two in the early 2010s, a certain genre of cheesy, irresistibly uplifting headline was unavoidable on Facebook. You know the trope – someone died in an inspiring way, a potentially bad situation led to an unlikely friendship, a dog saved someone’s life. Followed, almost always, by “You’ll never believe what happened next.” It was a sure bet to make content go viral, and traffic-hungry publishers flooded Facebook with curiosity-gap headlines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Dag Spicer is expecting a special package soon, but it’s not a Black Friday impulse buy. The fist-sized motor, greened by corrosion, is from a historic room-sized computer intended to ape the human brain. It may also point toward artificial intelligence's future. Spicer is senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The motor in the mail is from the Mark 1 Perceptron, built by Cornell researcher Frank Rosenblatt in 1958. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices