Author: Taylor Lowery

Robert Chang had no intention of becoming an advocate. All he needed was functional software. While working a full-time IT job and managing a 14-acre organic vegetable and cut flower farm in northeastern Connecticut, he set out to find something straightforward: a record-keeping tool that would allow him to manage harvests, keep track of planting schedules, and maintain organization without breaking the bank. Instead, he discovered an expansive, costly tech ecosystem that was primarily designed for someone else. Over the past ten years, the farm management software market has grown so rapidly that it sometimes feels more like a toll…

It doesn’t feel all that historic to work an overnight shift at a semiconductor packaging facility in Penang, Malaysia. Wafers headed for consumer electronics in São Paulo or data centers in Virginia are handled by workers in cleanroom suits who move steadily between stations. Depending on carriers, customs, and weather over the Pacific, getting those parts there can take days or even weeks. Even though that timeline appears normal, hypersonic travel has the potential to completely change it. Mach 5 speeds, or about 3,800 miles per hour, are no longer just the stuff of defense contractors. Prototype rocket jets with…

Tetiana Aleksandrova claims that she began posing the question, “Would you personally get a BCI installed?” at neuroscience conferences. Almost everyone responded in the same way. It must have been much less intrusive. Not in the future. Right now. Repeated in research labs and hospital hallways, this response reveals a crucial aspect of where this technology has been stuck and why the current push to remove it from operating rooms feels like more than incremental advancement. For many years, brain-computer interfaces—systems that establish direct communication between brain activity and external devices—have been used in research settings. However, surgery is still…

Apple would prefer you to forget about the repair shop at the end of the block for years. The authorized-only service agreements, software locks, and proprietary screws were all intended to direct you back toward the Apple Store, where fixing a cracked back glass on a modern iPhone could cost $599. That is about half the cost of the phone. For many, the math was never difficult. They recently purchased a new one. E-waste has become the world’s fastest-growing waste stream in large part because of this calculation, which is repeated across hundreds of millions of devices. Less than 20%…

Between reading that a Ragdoll cat named Nuomi calmed down at three in the morning after her owner called her via a collar-mounted device and discovering that dogs can now start phone calls by jumping three times in six seconds, there’s a point at which everything stops feeling ridiculous and begins to feel almost inevitable. Earlier this year, Singapore-based uCloudlink’s wearable, the PetPhone, made its public debut at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It is a palm-sized gadget that fastens to a collar, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize emotions, incorporates GPS and cellular connectivity via the company’s exclusive…

The pitch sounds almost philosophical if you walk into any electronics showroom in Singapore or Tokyo right now. Not cameras that are faster. Not glass that is thinner. intelligence. Every display card, specification sheet, and breathless promotional video that plays repeatedly all have the word. Not only has marketing changed, but the silicon at the core of these devices is now capable of doing things that were not technically feasible even three years ago. The change occurring within high-end smartphones is more about the location of computation than it is about individual features. For many years, when your phone handled…

Not too long ago, Geneva experienced an unusual event. AI researchers, tech executives, and human rights attorneys were seated across from diplomats who had devoted their careers to discussing trade quotas and nuclear disarmament. They were all attempting to reach a consensus on what regulations, if any, should apply to systems that none of them fully comprehended. According to a number of accounts, it was similar to the early internet governance debates, but with much more anxiety in the room and higher stakes. The 2024 Global Digital Compact gave rise to the United Nations’ Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which…

Qualcomm engineers have been working on a problem that no one asked them to solve for the better part of ten years in a building in San Diego. In a nutshell, the issue is this: Why should the processor in your pocket be any less powerful than the one humming inside a server that is mounted on a rack? Heat, battery life, and physics were the obvious answers for the majority of the smartphone era. However, over the past 18 months, something has changed, and Qualcomm’s most recent silicon is the best proof yet that the boundaries are beginning to…

The way artificial intelligence is being incorporated into transportation has an almost anticlimactic quality. No grand opening, no ribbon-cutting ceremony in front of a brand-new, shiny terminal. Rather, it takes place in the background, buried in the traffic signal logic of a mid-sized city in North Carolina, embedded in the routing software of freight trucks traversing the Australian outback, and inside scheduling algorithms at bus depots. If you want to call it that, the revolution is quieter than anyone anticipated. The situation was exposed in a seminal study published late last year at CoMotion GLOBAL in Riyadh. The report, which…

Watching European lawmakers discuss AI ethics the same week that an American startup announces a billion-dollar funding round with no governance requirements is almost theatrical. There is a purpose behind the contrast. It is the outward manifestation of a deeper division between those who maintain that speed is the only important tactic and those who think democratic safeguards must govern artificial intelligence. One of the key geopolitical debates of this decade is the escalating conflict between AI innovation and regulation. Think about the timing. When JD Vance cautioned Europe against “excessive regulation” of AI at a podium in Paris at…