Author: Taylor Lowery

Kenny Hirschhorn, Orange’s group director of strategy, imagineering, and futurology, pulled out his cell phone in January 2000 in London and asked a strategy consultant, “What is this?” A cell phone, the consultant said. With a sigh, Hirschhorn gave another opportunity. When the response was “Nokia,” he shook his head. “This,” he stated, “is the remote control of your life.” Then he showed a video of a California executive using a phone in a car in 2000 to check his calendar and see his wife’s ultrasound pictures. The consultant’s mouth fell open. CategoryDetailsTopicArtificial Intelligence in Mobile Devices (On-Device & Cloud…

Sitting in front of grainy satellite footage of the Peruvian desert, there is a moment when it ceases to resemble geography and begins to resemble a message. Stretching across the Nazca Pampa, lines carved into pale earth are invisible to those who haven’t been instructed where to look and are typically overlooked on maps. For many years, it took months of fieldwork, skilled vision, and a certain obstinate willingness to crouch in the dust under a harsh sun to find these marks. An algorithm now completes the task in a fraction of the time. Additionally, it’s discovering things that skilled…

If you look closely, there’s a point at which technology becomes tiresome instead of exciting. The smartphone might have arrived at that point. These days, if you walk into any busy corner café in Austin or London, you’ll see the same scene: faces glowing blue-white in the afternoon light, heads tilted down, and thumbs scrolling. It doesn’t seem to make anyone very happy. No one appears to be learning something new. They simply appear to be stuck. At one point, the smartphone was truly revolutionary. The 2007 release of the first iPhone was more than just a product; it was…

These days, you can find someone presenting a slide about artificial intelligence’s potential to save the planet at any major tech conference. The typefaces are tidy. The images are green. The optimism is as thick as a knife. However, the image of the data centers humming in the distance—massive concrete blocks drawing electricity at a scale that would have seemed ridiculous ten years ago—is more difficult to ignore when standing outside one of those locations. The conference slides don’t fully convey the tension that exists here. TopicAI and Climate Change — Promise vs. Environmental CostKey OrganizationsUNEP, WRI (World Resources Institute),…

Every technology company has a point in its history when ambition surpasses the product roadmap and becomes more difficult to identify. Meta seems to have arrived at that point. In the last few months, Mark Zuckerberg has been quietly assembling what could be the most costly and aggressive AI research operation ever created inside a consumer technology company. He has recruited researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and GitHub, offering signing bonuses that have reportedly reached $100 million. not pay. bonuses for signing. FieldDetailsCompany NameMeta Platforms, Inc.FoundedFebruary 4, 2004CEOMark ZuckerbergHeadquartersMenlo Park, California, USANew AI DivisionMeta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)Chief AI OfficerAlexandr…

There’s a moment, if you spend enough time around working artists, when the subject of AI comes up and the room gets complicated. Not angry, not dismissive — complicated. A graphic designer in Brooklyn might admit she uses Midjourney to rough out client concepts before touching her tablet. A film composer in Los Angeles will tell you, almost in a whisper, that he ran a melody through an AI arrangement tool last month and the output was genuinely good. Then both of them will go quiet, as if they’ve confessed something they’re not sure how to feel about yet. CategoryDetailsTopicArtificial…

The low-grade, ongoing drain of a workday that never quite ends is one type of exhaustion that doesn’t appear in any medical chart. The phone buzzes as you sit down to dinner after shutting down the laptop at six o’clock. Your manager is here. It’s a customer. It’s an urgent Slack notification. This has turned into the subdued background noise of contemporary work for millions of workers throughout Europe. Furthermore, European legislators are starting to acknowledge that it is not a personal discipline issue after years of treating it as such. TopicThe Right to Disconnect in EuropeConcept OriginEmerged as a…

Before a crisis was declared, the numbers were already dismal. Since the third quarter of 2017, when the market peaked at about 1.55 billion units annually, global smartphone sales have been declining. That amount dropped to 1.26 billion by 2025, an 18% decrease over almost ten years that was so gradual that many in the sector chose not to think about it. It was largely influenced by the market for used phones. Nowadays, refurbished devices are typically 30% less expensive than new models, and the majority continue to get software updates. Simply put, people no longer felt compelled to purchase…

There’s a moment, somewhere in the middle of a long day, when you realize you’ve checked your phone forty times without meaning to. Not for anything urgent. The pull of a glowing rectangle that has subtly taken over every free moment of contemporary life, simply out of habit. Silicon Valley built that habit, and now — with some apparent guilt and a great deal of financial ambition — it seems determined to undo it. OpenAI has discreetly reorganized a number of its engineering, product, and research teams under a single, audio-focused structure during the last two months. The Information reports…

Recently, the phrase “quiet at first, then louder” has become increasingly popular in economic circles. “Cortés Moment.” It alludes to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés’ choice in 1519 to burn his own ships after arriving in Mexico, leaving his men with no choice but to advance. No turning back. No second thought. Just dedication to whatever comes next. The more you sit with the comparison, the more difficult it is to disagree with Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi’s description of the current state of America’s relationship with artificial intelligence. Information CategoryDetailsNameMark ZandiTitleChief Economist, Moody’s AnalyticsInstitutionMoody’s AnalyticsFieldMacroeconomics, Labor Markets, Financial RiskKey…