Business, Spoken

The day Richard Feynman died, the blackboard in his classroom read: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” When Ian Goodfellow explains the research he’s doing at Google Brain, the central artificial intelligence lab at the internet’s most powerful company, he points to this aphorism from the iconic physicist, Caltech professor, and best-selling author. But Goodfellow isn’t referring to himself—or any other human being inside Google. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Comcast thinks it has an answer to cord-cutting: getting into the wireless mobile network business. But that alone might not be enough to stop its traditional cable customers from flocking to online video. Today the company announced that it will launch its own mobile phone and internet service called Xfinity Mobile. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

YouTube TV has arrived, and with it the potential to change how television works. Google-owned YouTube’s first foray into true cable-like television takes to the internet equivalent of the airwaves in select cities today: 40-plus channels of entertainment, news and sports for $35 per month, the so-called skinny bundle. So far, the service is still a little wonky. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For years, the humble Arduino microcontroller—a cheap, open source, midnight-blue circuit board emblazoned with a tiny white infinity loop—has been a favorite tool of the DIY electronics crowd. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Uber just released its first diversity report. For years, the ride-hailing giantshunnedthe practice adopted by most other major Silicon Valley companies. But Uber’s scandals have snowballed. Multiple claims of misogyny and sexual harassment suggest a company that doesn’t just have isolated problems but a pervasive culture of sexism. Uber’s responses have included a much-hyped conference call led by board member Arianna Huffington and this week the diversity report. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On a dreary Thursday afternoon in March, the halls of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, swelled with people who spend their lives trying to salvage the economies of America’s forgotten towns. Hailing from across the country, they hurried past Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office in their sharp suits and jewel-toned dresses, each one carrying a different proposal for how to keep their cities and states afloat. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Trump’s long-promised changes to the country’s high-skilled worker visa program may have to wait another year. The H-1B visa application process begins today, and the requirements for companies looking to hire foreign talent, have gone unchanged, despite President Trump’s repeated threats to reform a program he says undermines American workers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Trump administration may not believe that automation threatens today’s American workforce, but try telling that to a travel agent or a truck driver or a factory worker or an accountant. One recent study found that for every one robot introduced to the workforce, six related human jobs disappear. But those six humans still need to get by. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Late last year, Israel-based entrepreneur Matan Uziel saw a notification he’d never seen before pop up on YouTube’s backend—the part of the site where creators upload their videos. “I saw a yellow dollar sign. At first I didn’t understand what it was,” Uziel says. “Then I moved my cursor over it. I saw it meant my video was not advertiser-friendly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the surface, bitcoin is having a very good year. The price of the digital currency reached record highs well over $1,000 after years of stagnation following a major crash. But if you pull back the curtain, the civil war rages. The global community of companies, coders, and opportunists who control the bitcoin network is now on the verge of revolt after more than two years of infighting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You don’t need to be in government to know how slowly it moves. In business, that kind of inefficiency makes entrepreneurial mouths water. So it’s no surprise that America’s businessman-turned-president wants to speed things up. Now President Trump appears to want to pick up his predecessor’s legacy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning. Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today, while you’re not watching, the Senate could gut rules protecting your internet privacy. Last year the Federal Communications Commission passed a set of strict privacy regulations that ban broadband internet providers from selling your browsing data without your consent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Intel just unleashed a new kind of computer memory it believes will fundamentally change the way the world builds computers. But it won’t tell the world what’s inside. The company calls this new creation 3D XPoint—pronounced “three-dee cross-point”—and this week, after touting the stuff for a year-and-a-half, Intel finally pushed it into the market. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As far back as the 1880s, people stood on the curb outside the New York Stock Exchange taking bets on political elections, and newspapers would report the odds as a way of predicting the results at the polls. In the years since, economists refined the concept, and more recently, prediction markets have tapped into the wisdom of the crowds via the internet, forecasting everything from presidential races to sporting events to stock prices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The way tech companies deal with online harassment and abuse is broken. YouTube allows anti-Semitism to stay live. Twitter waffles as targeted harassment runs rampant. Facebook takes down an iconic photo that shouldn’t be banned. Now one German politician is tired of letting platforms make excuses. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hangovers are a fixture of South by Southwest. Free branded booze abounds, turning late nights into too-early mornings filled with product demos and repetitive panels. But determined marketers and wide-eyed founders pitch on through the pain, in the unbridled belief they might just be SXSW’s next breakout star. Or at the very least, its next Meerkat. But this year, the conference itself feels a lot like a hangover. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Igor Mordatch is working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He’s a roboticist who began his career as an animator. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Next month, a venture capital firm called Blockchain Capital plans to do something that could change the way companies get funded—and perhaps even the way they operate. Instead of an Initial Public Offering, in which a company sells stock via a regulated exchange like Nasdaq, the San Francisco-based VC firm is making an Initial Coin Offering, selling its own digital token as a way of raising money for its latest venture fund. Anyone who buys a token will be buying into the fund. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Have you heard? Uber is hiring. CEO Travis Kalanick wants a chief operating officer. Heapparently came to this decision in the midst of the company’s worst PR crisis yet. Accusations of a misogynistic company culture,aGoogle lawsuit, and allegations that it misled regulators with phantom rides leave the company in an almost permanent state of damage control.Hiring a COO almost certainly is Kalanick’s attempt to show that he, and his company, can grow up. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Congressional Budget Office just released its much-awaited report analyzing the possible effects of the American Health Care Act, the GOP plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. The verdict is a doozy. Twenty-four million fewer Americans would have health insurance by 2026, according to the CBO, with 14 million of them losing coverage in 2018. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Imagine a world where Comcast slows video streaming from Fox News’s website to a pixelated crawl while boosting Rachel Maddow—who happens to star on Comcast-owned MSNBC. What if Verizon, which owns the liberal Huffington Post, charged you more to visit right-wing Breitbart. Or maybe Google Fiber bans access to the alt-right social network Gab. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Here’s a math problem: Ten startup founders and CEOs hurtle down the long highway from Omaha to Lincoln, Nebraska, in a cornflower blue bus. One of the execs builds construction management software. Another runs a blog-hosting startup. A third makes medical devices used in colon surgeries. They sit facing each other on two banquettes, swapping war stories and offering each other advice on hiring and raising money. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For decades, two companies worked side by side to build the very foundation of personal computing. Microsoft built the operating system—Windows—and Intel built the chips. But Wintel is no more. Sure, Windows will continue to run on Intel chips. But Wintel as a mighty alliance has died. It’s been fading for years, and this week Microsoft snuffed out the last of it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the FCC, doesn’t like the net neutrality rules enforced by the agency President Trump named him to lead. He voted against them as a commissioner in 2015, and in a speech after Trump’s election said their days arenumbered. But until this week, Pai hasn’t explainedhow he would go about reversing the rules. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Lester Packingham Jr. registered as a sex offender in 2002 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl when he was 21. But that offense isn’t what brought Packingham to the Supreme Court of the United States on Monday. The crime this time around? A Facebook post. The post itself was benign enough. In 2010, Packingham took to Facebook to celebrate a recently dismissed parking ticket. “Praise be to GOD, WOW!” he wrote. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Within the next five years, Google will produce a viable quantum computer. That’s the stake the company has just planted. In the pages of Nature late last week, researchers from Google’s Quantum AI Laboratory told the world that a machine leveraging the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics will soon outperform traditional computers on certain tasks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After two decades of Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint ads, you know how the big telcos deliver cellular service to your smartphone. Each builds its own nationwide wireless network, boasting that its particular web of data centers, fiber lines, and antennas is faster and more reliable (or at least cheaper) than the others. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today, Snap starts its life as a publicly traded company—the buzziest tech IPO of the year and likely the most valuable in the US since Alibaba debuted in 2014. The event carries the fascination of an impending rocket launch: Is this thing actually going to take off? Or will it crash and burn in a huge, morbid spectacle (of Spectacles)? Snap has tried to sell investors on the idea that it has cachet other social platforms don’t. Invest in us, the company urges. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

No one saw the crisis coming: a coordinated vandalistic effort to insert Squidward references into articles totally unrelated to Squidward. In 2006, Wikipedia was really starting to get going, and really couldn’t afford to have any SpongeBob SquarePants-related high jinks sullying the site’s growing reputation. It was an embarrassment. Someone had to stop Squidward. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this month, in a classic late Friday afternoon news dump, the Federal Communications Commission announced a rollback of two key decisions made during theObama administration. In another era, few besidespolicy wonks and internet activists would have noticed such a thing. But these changes drew intense attention. These days, politics isn’t just what happens on the internet—it’s what happens to the internet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ascourge is killing people’s minds, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the world needs a massive campaign to stop it. Across the nation, people lament its rise, and the threat it poses to America.Opioids? ISIS? Nope. “Fake news.” Even homicidal dictators agree things have gotten out of control. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Trump claims his administration’s new and expansive executive order on undocumented immigrants is “getting really bad dudes out of this country.” But aggressive enforcement of immigration laws is also sweeping up vulnerable, far-from-bad people seeking help and care. Still, even setting aside the humanitarian issue, Trump’s anti-immigrant plan suffers from a fundamental flaw: bad math. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Affordable Care Act is far from the only Obama-era policy Republicans want to take down now that they control the government. A set of internet privacy rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission last year has also become a target. Though it’s received far less attention than healthcare or immigration, the rollback would affect millions of consumers and bring basic changes to how they use the internet—though they might not ever know it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The tech industry isn't big on dress codes, employee handbooks, or rules. The Silicon Valley management philosophy is simple: Hire talented coders, give them tools to do their jobs, and get out of their way. The best coders should be rewarded, and those who just can't hack it should be let go. The problem is that, all too often, workplace problems boil down to more than just code. Yesterday widely respected programmer Susan J. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Wall Street is a competition, a Darwinian battle for the almighty dollar. Gordon Gekko said that greed is good, that it captures “the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” A hedge fund hunts for an edge and then maniacally guards it, locking down its trading data and barring its traders from joining the company next door. The big bucks lie in finding market inefficiencies no one else can, succeeding at the expense of others. But Richard Craib wants to change that. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, President Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly met with Time Warner executives to complain about CNN’s coverage of the president. Any visit from a White House official seeking to stifle journalists is disturbing. But Time Warner, which owns CNN, has another problem that’s all tied up in presidential politics. The cable and entertainment giant is seeking to sell itself to AT&T, a mega-merger that would require federal approval. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When I ask Mark Zuckerberg if the presidential election changed the way he sees Facebook—if he made poor assumptions, if Facebook functioned in ways he didn’t intend—he pauses. I’ve interviewed Zuckerberg before, and he tends to pause like this, gathering his thoughts in complete silence, sometimes turning to face the empty space across the room. But this dead air lasts particularly long. Five seconds. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

About a decade ago, a handful of Google’s most talented engineers started building a system that seems to defy logic. Called Spanner, it was the first global database, a way of storing information across millions of machines in dozens of data centers spanning multiple continents, and it now underpins everything from Gmail to AdWords, the company’s primary moneymaker. But it’s not just the size of this creation that boggles the mind. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story is part of our special coverage, The News in Crisis. When Edward Snowden leaked the biggest collection of classified National Security Agency documents in history, he wasn’t just revealing the inner workings of a global surveil­lance machine. He was also scrambling to evade it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Even before an electrical fire burned her house down in 2014, Jennifer Sneperger had trouble affording home internet. A little more than a year after the fire, she and her young son joined a program that fast-tracked them into a spot in a Sarasota, Florida, public housing complex. But the spot came with a condition: Sneperger had to get a job or go back to school. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Working on a new product launch? Debuting a new mobile site? Announcing a new feature? If you’re not sure whether algorithmic bias could derail your plan, you should be. Algorithmic bias—when seemingly innocuous programming takes on the prejudices either of its creators or the data it is fed—causes everything from warped Google searches to barring qualified women from medical school. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In February 1975, a group of geneticists gathered in a tiny town on the central coast of California to decide if their work would bring about the end of the world. These researchers were just beginning to explore the science of genetic engineering, manipulating DNA to create organisms that didn’t exist in nature, and they were unsure how these techniques would affect the health of the planet and its people. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last month, in response to news of President Donald Trump’s controversial executive orders, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that his company, whose founder Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant, would not exist if the US didn’t have sound immigration policies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Snap Inc. is a camera company. It's very important to Snap Inc. that you understand it's not a social networking app or a messaging service. It's something else. It's a camera company. "We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way that people live and communicate," it says in an S1 filing made public today, ahead of its $3 billion public offering. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

To adapt one of our new president’s favorite aphorisms: We knew he was a troll when we elected him. Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump gleefully behaved more like a social-network scourge than a presidential candidate, combining a slash-and-burn approach to social norms with an aggressive strategy of constant provocation. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, in the not-quite-two-weeks since his inauguration, internet companies have struggled to respond to his presidency. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Neural networks are all the rage in Silicon Valley, infusing so many internet services with so many forms of artificial intelligence. But as good as they may be at recognizing cats in your online photos, AI researchers know that neural networks are still quite flawed, so much so that some wonder whether these pattern recognition systems are a viable path to more advanced—and more reliable—forms of AI. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nearly a decade ago, Comcast promised liberation from the tyranny of the cable box. But today its control seems here to stay—as does big cable’s control over how you consume the programming you pay for. This week, the Federal Communications Commission met for the first time under its new chairman, Ajit Pai, a Republican. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two robotic arms face two closed doors. Both reach forward and miss the door handles entirely. So they reach again, and this time, they hit the handles head-on, rattling the door frames. So they try again. And again. Finally, they grab the handles cleanly and pull the doors open, and after a few more hours of trial and error, they can repeat the trick every time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

During a primetime television appearance tonight, President Donald Trump announced his final pick for the man who could be the next Apprentice—er, we mean the next justice to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices