Author: Taylor Lowery

There’s a small, easy-to-miss moment when you realize that something familiar has changed in a quiet way. When you type a question into Google, you get a polished paragraph of text answer before you even see a link. Don’t click. Do not browse. Just a reply. It makes things easier. It also feels like something is over. That something is what has been powering the internet in the background for almost 30 years. Search engines are able to crawl websites and read their content. In return, those engines send people to them. That’s the deal. Ads bring in money, and…

There is a very long stretch of time early on in Resident Evil Requiem when nothing happens. The game just lets Grace Ashcroft walk through the Wrenwood Hotel, which is a condemned building where her mother was killed eight years ago. There is no music sting. There was no shape darting through a doorway. There is only water somewhere, dust in the flashlight beam, and a hallway that never ends. Things work best when you wait. A jump scare only works if the scene before it has been loaded well, and Capcom has spent six years figuring out just how…

It’s hard to put your finger on what’s making people in corporate offices so angry…. A worker, say a woman in her mid-30s who has a decade of good reviews, is passed over for a senior position. What you say isn’t clear. It has to do with “fit” or “leadership presence.” But her manager doesn’t say that the company’s AI-driven talent platform had already given her a lower score than two male coworkers before a human looked over her file. This could be because he doesn’t fully understand himself. This is not a guess. This is the kind of situation…

Honor had a treadmill set up in its booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One worker walked on it while using a regular phone to record video. The video was a shaky mess. It looked like Honor hadn’t moved at all in the video after someone did the same thing to her Robot Phone. That thought stuck. The demo was very basic, but it got the point across better than any specs sheet. This is the Honor Robot Phone, an Android smartphone that has a robotic camera arm built right into the back of it. Built in, not clipped…

If you walk through Nairobi on a Tuesday afternoon, you’ll notice something that isn’t very interesting in a very interesting way. Street vendors looking at the prices of Androids with cracked screens. In Kampala, mothers are using a simple SMS app to send school fees to other mothers. A farmer in rural Nigeria who has a phone that costs less than a week’s worth of groceries and gets weather alerts on it. It doesn’t look like this is a revolution. That’s probably why so many people from outside Africa keep missing it. The story of smartphones in Africa doesn’t start…

There’s a quiet change going on in the design studios and labs of the biggest smartphone companies in the world. A CEO taking the stage in front of a cheering crowd or a big product launch are not part of it. There’s more to it than that. Engineers are taking a small step back, while AI-powered systems move forward to fill the gap. More seriously than ever, people are wondering if artificial intelligence will soon be able to design the devices that billions of people carry around with them every day. You could be right that most people think this…

Most people have been in the frustrating situation of being locked out of an account and seeing the “forgot your password?” link for what seems like an endless number of times. It only seems like a small problem. But that moment captures something much bigger: a system that is decades old and is way past its prime, held together mostly by habit. A few weeks ago, the European Commission made that tension very public. The European Commissioner for Technological Sovereignty and Data Security, Henna Virkkunen, gave a very serious warning: quantum computers could break even the most complex encryption systems…

There are still buzzing machines, a faint antiseptic smell, flash sheets on the walls, and someone clenching their teeth in the chair when you walk into a tattoo studio in any major city today. But something has changed behind the scenes. AI tools are being used by more and more artists and clients to come up with design ideas before the needle even touches the skin. People who get tattoos are now able to talk about it, even though it’s only a small change. At first glance, it’s easy to see why AI-made tattoo designs are appealing. These tools can…

In February 2026, a 15-second video clip went viral online and shook an entire industry. There was a fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt on a burned-out overpass over a highway. It looked like real life. They looked like real people. Neither man had shown up for work. ByteDance, the Chinese company that made TikTok, made the generative AI tool Seedance 2.0, which was used by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson to make the video. It wasn’t the idea itself that was really scary. It was the killing. This video of AI didn’t look creepy like the others that had…

The modular smartphone was laid to rest in the right way. The service was run by Motorola. When the Moto Z line first came out in 2016, it had big plans: you could add a speaker here, a camera there, or a battery pack whenever you needed one. For a moment, it seemed like the future of cell phone hardware would be something you could change by hand. Then it didn’t work out in a quiet way. Most buyers thought the modules were just a gimmick. Not even close. The ecosystem never got big enough to matter. By the early…