Author: Taylor Lowery

The idea that a regular smartphone could connect directly to a satellite overhead—no dish, no special hardware, no local carrier—sounds like something from a different era on the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the closest cell tower might be two hundred kilometers away and the roads between villages are unpaved seasonal tracks. It’s not. Most people outside the telecom sector are unaware of how near it is to commercial reality, and the $12 billion market prediction that goes along with it tends to speed up timetables. The direct-to-device idea is simple in theory but difficult…

Even though AI has emerged gradually enough that many businesses haven’t fully noticed the change, the transition from AI as a tool you prompt to AI as a system that pursues goals on its own is not subtle. The predominant experience of AI in the workplace for the majority of 2023 and 2024 was transactional: you asked a query, received an answer, and then chose how to use it. AI agents that are autonomous function differently. They are given an objective, come up with a plan to accomplish it, employ outside tools and data sources to carry out the plan…

When discussing AI and labor markets, most people don’t think of IKEA. However, in a debate that often results in a lot of heat and comparatively little hard data, it might be the most helpful example. The company had to make a decision that many businesses in similar circumstances have not made when it automated a section of its customer support function with AI chatbots: instead of cutting staff, it reskilled the displaced employees as interior design consultants. According to IKEA, the outcome was a new source of income and a team of workers with truly more useful talents than…

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the economists who research labor markets and artificial intelligence are not a cohesive group. It is actually challenging to reconcile the opinions of some of the most respected researchers in the subject. That’s common for complicated economic issues, but it’s more important here than in most discussions because the current policy decisions regarding social safety nets, education systems, labor laws, and corporate incentive schemes will create outcomes that are hard to undo once they take hold. The pessimistic argument is based on a simple observation: cost reduction is the main motivation…

Midway through 2026, the AI economy appears to be very different from what most observers were characterizing eighteen months earlier. The early conception of generative AI as a productivity layer that businesses would implement consistently and methodically, increasing output across industries while labor markets gradually adjusted, has given place to something far more disorganized and challenging to map. Even the most knowledgeable observers are navigating this environment with genuine uncertainty due to the convergence of multiple factors at around the same moment and their interplay. Probably the most significant change in the technical environment is the move to agentic AI.…

Off the coast of Dominica, in the deep water east of the island where sperm whales gather in multigenerational family units, researchers float on the surface and lower hydrophones into the dark below. The water is warm. The clicking starts almost immediately — short, rhythmic sequences called codas, each lasting under a second, exchanged between animals that can weigh up to 60 tons. It has the quality of conversation. Listening to the recordings, even without any training, you get that sense — something is being communicated, passed back and forth, acknowledged. But what exactly has remained one of biology’s most…

Anyone who has traveled on a ferry, walked in the mountains, or driven on a rural section of highway is familiar with a certain frustration: the moment the signal bars vanish and the phone turns into an expensive brick. Although they cover a large area, cellular towers don’t cover it all. The regions they overlook—referred to as “dead zones” rather than “spots” or “coverage gaps”—have always been a fixed aspect of mobile connectivity. Now, the smartphone industry is discreetly trying to get rid of that capability completely. When terrestrial infrastructure is absent, the strategy involves connecting consumer phones directly to…

The sound inside a big data center is steady and tactile, like a wall of fast-moving fans; it’s the kind of noise that reaches your chest instead of simply your ears. The air is dry and chilly. Server rack rows vanish into the distance. The infrastructure is unglamorous. However, the air cooling architecture that characterized data centers for decades is no longer sufficient when you’re running the AI workloads that AWS is currently doing at scale. The chips are just too hot. The density of heat produced by an AI GPU is too high for conventional air systems. Modern AI…

It’s difficult to overlook the rotating sensor atop a Waymo robotaxi. It like a hockey puck that has been bolted to the roof, and in a sense, that is exactly what it is: a mechanical drum filled with revolving mirrors that emit laser pulses in all directions to create a three-dimensional map of the surroundings. It functions. In fact, quite well. However, it looks ridiculous on anything that needs to be sold in a showroom, costs thousands of dollars per unit, and breaks down under constant vibration. That is a serious issue. Because of this, self-driving cars are currently mostly…

Compare a smartphone from this year with one from three years ago. The hardware appears almost exactly the same, with the same camera bump on the back, the same basic size, and the same glass slab. However, the device’s actual functionality has changed, and this is more related to what’s going on inside the chip than it is to megapixels or screen refresh rates. Artificial intelligence is reinventing the smartphone from the inside out, starting with the processor. The most obvious change is in photography, yet the term “photography” is becoming less accurate to describe what these technologies accomplish. The…