Business, Spoken
2,340 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★ - 16 ratingsGet in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.
Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Musk Says Tesla Is Building Its Own Chip for Autopilot
December 11, 2017 07:10 - 8 minutesRockets, 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 more about your ad ch...
The FCC Says Net Neutrality Cripples Investment. That's Not True
December 08, 2017 16:30 - 9 minutesFederal 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Accused VC Sends Same Sorry Sexual Harassment Email to Critics
December 08, 2017 07:10 - 9 minutesJustin 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Uber's Not the Only One That Should Be Wary of Disappearing Messaging Apps
December 07, 2017 16:30 - 8 minutesDuring 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How the FCC's Net Neutrality Plan Breaks With 50 Years of History
December 07, 2017 07:10 - 22 minutesFederal 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Alphabet's Latest AI Show Pony Has More Than One Trick
December 06, 2017 16:57 - 5 minutesThe 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 mo...
How to Pierce the Secrecy Around Sexual Harassment Cases
December 06, 2017 07:10 - 11 minutesThe 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 more about your ad c...
Facebook for 6-Year-Olds? Welcome to Messenger Kids
December 05, 2017 16:30 - 8 minutesFacebook 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 more about you...
FCC Wants to Kill Net Neutrality. Congress Will Pay the Price
December 05, 2017 07:10 - 10 minutesFCC 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Page Not Found: A Brief History of the 404 Error
December 04, 2017 16:30 - 6 minutesThe 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...
How to Make Sense of Net Neutrality and Telecom Under Trump
December 04, 2017 07:10 - 7 minutesPresident 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Google, Amazon Find Not Everyone Is Ready for AI
December 01, 2017 16:30 - 9 minutesExecutives 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podca...
Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload A Clear Photo of Your Face'
December 01, 2017 07:10 - 4 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Robots Threaten Bigger Slice of Jobs in US, Other Rich Nations
November 30, 2017 16:30 - 8 minutesThe 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What an Internet Analyst Got Wrong About Net Neutrality
November 30, 2017 07:10 - 9 minutesThe 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/a...
Can This Game-Like App Help Students Do Better in School?
November 29, 2017 16:30 - 17 minutesFRESNO, 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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How Bored Panda Survived Facebook's Clickbait Purge
November 29, 2017 07:10 - 10 minutesFor 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 more about your ad choices. Vis...
An Old Technique Could Put Artificial Intelligence in Your Hearing Aid
November 28, 2017 07:10 - 8 minutesDag 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 more about your ad choices. Visit ...
FCC Prepares to Unveil Plan to Gut Net Neutrality
November 27, 2017 17:02 - 6 minutesThe Federal Communications Commission this week is widely expected to release its plan to reverse Obama-era net neutrality rules that banned internet service providers from blocking or slowing down content or creating so-called "fast lanes" for companies willing to pay extra to deliver their content more quickly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Archivist Leslie Berlin Tackles Silicon Valley's Past in 'Troublemakers'
November 27, 2017 07:10 - 4 minutesSilicon Valley job perks are mythic. Self-replenishing snacks. Unlimited vacation. A pile of stock options. But as much as these professional entrapments might seem like dotcom-era phenomena, the practice of sweetening the deal for tech employees dates back to the ’70s as a way to ward off labor unions. Happy workers, explains Stanford historian Leslie Berlin, are less likely to agitate for better conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This Stripped-Down Blogging Tool Exemplifies Antisocial Media
November 24, 2017 16:30 - 5 minutesRecently, Rob Beschizza—a coder and the managing editor of Boing Boing—released a stripped-down blogging tool called txt.fyi. Write something, hit Publish, and voilà: your deathless prose, online. But here’s the thing: txt.fyi has no social mechanics. None. No Like button, no Share button, no comments. No feed showing which posts are most popular. Each post has a tag telling search engines not to index it, so it won’t even show up on Google. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...
Government Move to Block AT&T Merger Bodes Ill for Tech
November 24, 2017 07:10 - 6 minutesThe Justice Department filed a lawsuit Monday to block AT&T's planned $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, in a move that could signal tougher scrutiny for tech companies. The lawsuit breaks with the recent DOJ tradition of approving mergers between companies that don't directly compete, such as AT&T and Time Warner. The government followed that traditional thinking in allowing Comcast to acquire NBCUniversal in 2011. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Here's How the End of Net Neutrality Will Change the Internet
November 23, 2017 16:30 - 9 minutesInternet service providers like Comcast and Verizon may soon be free to block content, slow video-streaming services from rivals, and offer “fast lanes” to preferred partners. For a glimpse of how the internet experience may change, look at what broadband providers are doing under the existing “net neutrality” rules. When AT&T customers access its DirecTV Now video-streaming service, the data doesn’t count against their plan’s data limits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...
Why the Government is Right to Block the AT&T-Time Warner Merger
November 23, 2017 08:22 - 14 minutesDespite what Randall Stephenson thinks, the Department of Justice’s suit blocking AT&T from acquiring Time Warner’s assets in an $85 billion merger is a great moment for antitrust in America. It’s late, but it’s welcome. WIRED Opinion About Susan Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience. Stephenson, the AT&T CEO, has no one but himself to blame. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Phone-Chip Designer Tackles 'Industrial' Internet of Things
November 22, 2017 16:30 - 5 minutesMasayoshi Son, founder and CEO of SoftBank Group, has a lot of crazy ideas. He believes robots with IQs above 10,000 will outnumber humans in 30 years. He considered taking SoftBank private in what would have been the largest leveraged buyout of all time. He raised $45 billion for an investment fund in 45 minutes. He wants to launch a second, record-breaking Vision Fund before even closing his first one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Stop the Chitchat. Bots Don’t Need to Sound Like Us
November 22, 2017 07:10 - 6 minutesBert Brautigam is sick of having conversations with his devices. Like many of us, Brautigam, who works for the design firm Ziba, uses voice assistants like Google’s phone AI or Amazon’s Alexa. The theory is that voice commands make life more convenient. But these assistants are scripted to emulate everyday conversation. And everyday conversation is filled with little pauses and filler words, the “phatic” spackle of social interactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...
At MoMA, Cat Instagram Has Finally Clawed Its Way Into the Art World
November 21, 2017 16:30 - 3 minutesStephen Shore was an Instagram artist way before there was Instagram. He shot to prominence in the ’70s with carefully composed snapshots of parking lots, pancake breakfasts, and camping trips, beautiful banalities that future Instagrammers would try to emulate. Now that Shore is actually on the platform, he averages a post a day—and a retrospective of his work, opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in November, shows off three years’ worth of his ’grams. Learn more about your ad choice...
China Challenges Nvidia's Hold on Artificial Intelligence Chips
November 21, 2017 07:10 - 9 minutesIn July, China’s government issued a sweeping new strategy with a striking aim: draw level with the US in artificial intelligence technology within three years, and become the world leader by 2030. A call for research projects from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology posted online last month fills in some detail on the government’s plans. And it puts Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia, the leading supplier of silicon for machine-learning projects, in the cross hairs. Learn more about your...
The Movement to Protect Dreamers Is Still Divided on the Details
November 20, 2017 07:10 - 10 minutesWednesday morning, Todd Schulte stood before a podium, dressed in a grey suit and orange tie, to talk about the urgent need for legislation that protects undocumented people who came to the United States as children, also known as Dreamers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The FCC Says Local Media is Thriving. That's Not So Clear.
November 17, 2017 07:10 - 8 minutesWith a few exceptions, it's against federal regulations for your local television station to buy your local newspaper. Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on a proposal to change those rules. Since 1975, the commission has generally barred organizations from owning both a newspaper and a full-power radio or television station in the same market to protect what it calls "viewpoint diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Meet the Woman Making Uber's Self-Driving Cars Smarter, Cheaper
November 16, 2017 16:12 - 8 minutesNext month in San Francisco, Uber will stand trial in federal court for allegedly cheating in the race to commercialize self-driving cars. Google parent Alphabet accuses Uber of stealing designs for sensors called lidars that give a vehicle a 3-D view of its surroundings, an “unjust enrichment” it says will take $1.8 billion to heal. Meanwhile in Toronto, Uber has a growing artificial-intelligence lab led by a woman who’s spent years trying to make lidar technology less important. Learn more ...
Ray Kurzweil on Turing Tests, Brain Extenders, and AI Ethics
November 15, 2017 07:10 - 25 minutesInventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who currently runs a group at Google writing automatic responses to your emails in cooperation with the Gmail team, recently talked with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson at the Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s an edited transcript of that conversation. Nicholas Thompson: Let’s begin with you explaining the law of accelerating returns, which is one of the fundamental ideas underpinning your writing and your work. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...
Expect Bigger Risks from Democrats After Blockbuster Virginia Results
November 14, 2017 07:10 - 8 minutesAs Democratic wins started piling up on election night in Virginia, you probably saw the names of a few key winners circulating in social media and the press. But while the victories of Virginia governor-elect Ralph Northam, and Danica Roem, the first transgender person to ever be elected to a state legislature, rightly resonated, one key to understanding Tuesday's significance could come from a Democrat who lost: Veronica Coleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/ad...
Facebook Posts Aren’t Going to Help the Rohingya Refugees
November 13, 2017 07:10 - 12 minutes“Never in my life have I seen so many frightened people, huddled together, in such a small space,” my friend posted on Facebook in October. A resident at a local hospital, she is working unpaid hours at Ukhia, responding to the arrival of over half a million persecuted Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh since late August. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Cryptocurrency Mania Fuels Hype and Fear at Venture Firms
November 10, 2017 10:34 - 15 minutesBart Stephens has found himself in high demand lately. After four years of investing in cryptocurrency and preaching its gospel, his venture-capital peers are finally listening. During a recent briefing at a storied Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, the young analysts in the room nodded along to his words in excitement, Stephens says. But not everyone was sold. In the middle of his presentation, a gray-haired senior partner stood up, yelled “PONZI SCHEME!” and stormed out. Learn more about...
Win or Lose, the Virginia Election Will Boost Data-Driven Progressives
November 09, 2017 07:10 - 9 minutesCatherine Vaughan doesn't let herself get excited on election night anymore. She learned that lesson the hard way a year ago, over too many glasses of whiskey at a Cleveland bar, where she and the rest of Hillary Clinton's Ohio field team were supposed to be celebrating. Instead, they were mourning. Now, as CEO of the progressive startup Flippable, which she co-founded to raise funding for Democratic state house races, Vaughan faces yet another test of a year's worth of work. Learn more about...
How Uber's 'Invisible' Workforce Could Affect Your Taxes
November 08, 2017 07:10 - 9 minutesThe “gig economy” is hardly new, but there’s still a yawning gap between the attention it receives and our understanding of how it is---or isn’t---altering the nature of work in America. It may be a Bay Area joke that everyone is either working in the valley or for Task Rabbit, and Uber may be the world’s most valuable startup, but there may be dozens of Apple executives who are personally worth more than Ikea paid to acquire TaskRabbit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....
Trump's Twitter Takedown Reveals Another Tech Blind Spot
November 07, 2017 07:10 - 9 minutesIt only took one click. And then, for 11 startling minutes---or blissful ones, depending on your politics---the constant drumbeat that is the @realdonaldtrump Twitter handle was muted, taken offline Thursday evening by a Twitter customer-service worker on his or her last day. The President, for one, seems to have taken the bold move as a compliment. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/926401530013642765But for Twitter, the worker’s final act couldn’t come at a worse time. Learn more ab...
Digital Solutions Can Help Even the Poorest Nations Prosper
November 06, 2017 07:10 - 9 minutesAmong the spending choices for governments of poorer nations, kick-starting the technological revolution may at first seem like a low priority. Compared with critical infrastructure, healthcare, or schools, improved digital access and less waiting times for birth certificates feel like luxuries that should come further down the road, or perhaps be left to private enterprise. But there is reason to rethink this. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Six Revealing Moments From the Second Day of Russia Hearings
November 03, 2017 08:10 - 15 minutesOn their second day in Capitol Hill, lawyers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google took a bipartisan beating as they faced tough questions about the role their platforms played in Russian attempts to divide the American electorate. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee grilled the tech executives about their responses to Russian interference in the 2016 election, arguing that the companies are not taking seriously what Congress considers a kind of cyberwarfare. Learn more about your ad ch...
What Congress Should Ask Tech Executives About Russia
November 02, 2017 08:10 - 14 minutesAs special counsel Robert Mueller issues the first indictments in his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, executives of three technology titans will face questioning by Congress this week about Russian use of their platforms. Representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google are set to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday, then the Senate and House intelligence committees on Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...
Supreme Court's Cell Phone Tracking Case Could Hurt Privacy
November 01, 2017 08:10 - 9 minutesOne of the biggest cases for the US Supreme Court’s current term could mark a watershed moment for the Fourth Amendment. InCarpenter v. United States, the court will consider whether police need probable cause to get a search warrant to access cell site location information (CSLI), data that's automatically generated whenever a mobile phone connects to a cell tower. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Solution to Facebook Overload Isn't More Facebook
October 31, 2017 08:10 - 10 minutesThe moment I first realized that everything had changed for Facebook was right after the 2016 US presidential election with one of the first of many Zuckerbergian mea culpas. Not that first post-election post, his horribly disingenuous dodge that improbably asserted that Facebook could not have influenced the election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What Did Cambridge Analytica Really Do for Trump's Campaign?
October 30, 2017 08:10 - 12 minutesNews that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix approached Wikileaks founder Julian Assange last year to exploit Hillary Clinton’s private emails has amplified questions about Cambridge's role in President Trump's 2016 campaign. Shortly after The Daily Beast reported Nix’s contact with Assange Wednesday, the Trump campaign’s executive director sought to downplay Cambridge's role. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Facebook's Aggressive Moves on Startups Threaten Innovation
October 27, 2017 08:10 - 9 minutesIn 2010, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai believed that his company, and several other social-media upstarts---Twitter, Tumblr, Path---could carve out successful niches against Facebook. But Facebook had other plans. That year the company introduced a feature that allowed users to “check in” at any location, a copy of the main feature of Foursquare’s app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Captains of Finance Dismiss Bitcoin at Their Peril
October 26, 2017 08:10 - 10 minutesThe financial industry today looks stable and boring, with a few megabanks ever-more entrenched and markets that may not offer the same risks and rewards as before the 2008-2009 financial crisis but which remain highly profitable for incumbents. That stasis, however, masks looming challenges to the sclerotic incumbents. Two such challenges were much in evidence this past week: Bitcoin and China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In Camden, Bridging the Skills Gap Means More than Tech Training
October 25, 2017 08:10 - 9 minutesCaloua Lowe bounds up the rickety, worn staircase of a three-story, red brick building in Camden, New Jersey on a sunny September morning, the wooden steps creaking under the pressure of her red-sandaled feet. The walls display framed, Photoshopped images: a mockup of Vogue, album covers featuring young men standing shoulder to shoulder with rap legends like Jay-Z. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How Big Tech Became a Bipartisan Whipping Boy
October 24, 2017 08:10 - 16 minutesSilicon Valley oligarchs have plenty of reason to lose sleep these days, but the looming prospect of Nov. 1 has to be high on the list. That’s the day that executives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter are scheduled to testify in back-to-back hearings before Senate and House committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Congress's New Bill Can't Eliminate Russian Influence Online
October 23, 2017 19:32 - 13 minutesA bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill Thursday that would require online political advertisers to provide additional disclosures about who’s paying for their ads, but the measure may prove a half-step toward preventing foreign adversaries from influencing US elections online. During a press conference Thursday, Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar introduced the much-anticipated Honest Ads Act, co-sponsored by Republican Sen. John McCain. Learn more about your ad choices....
Tony Fadell’s Next Act? Taking on Silicon Valley—From Paris
October 20, 2017 08:10 - 42 minutesTony Fadell is at the Grove, a spectacularly beautiful country estate outside of London. The event is Founders Forum: the ultra exclusive invite-only tech conference. Prince William is in the house. The guest list is lousy with knights and lesser officers of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Marissa Mayer, the now ex-CEO of Yahoo, and Biz Stone, recently returned to Twitter, are mingling with the other hundred or so invitees. But this is really Fadell’s moment. Learn more about...