Business, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

An Old Technique Could Put Artificial Intelligence in Your Hearing Aid Nov 28, 2017

Show notes

Dag 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 podcastchoices.com/adchoices

FCC Prepares to Unveil Plan to Gut Net Neutrality Nov 27, 2017

Show notes

The 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' Nov 27, 2017

Show notes

Silicon 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 Nov 24, 2017

Show notes

Recently, 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 podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Government Move to Block AT&T Merger Bodes Ill for Tech Nov 24, 2017

Show notes

The 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 Nov 23, 2017

Show notes

Internet 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 podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why the Government is Right to Block the AT&T-Time Warner Merger Nov 23, 2017

Show notes

Despite 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 Nov 22, 2017

Show notes

Masayoshi 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 Nov 22, 2017

Show notes

Bert 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.com/adchoices

At MoMA, Cat Instagram Has Finally Clawed Its Way Into the Art World Nov 21, 2017

Show notes

Stephen 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 choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices