ideas

Last week, Amazon announced it was integrating AI into a number of products—including smart glasses, smart home systems, and its voice assistant, Alexa—that help users navigate the world. This week, Meta will unveil its latest AI and extended reality (XR) features, and next week Google will reveal its next line …

Today, young people are becoming disabled in record numbers with all the various impacts of long Covid, which is estimated to affect between 8 and 25 percent of people who have been infected. The disabled future is coming to pass now, and we need to create inclusive and accessible environments …

Every few months we get to see a tech dude offer excruciating testimony to grumpy members of Congress. The tech dude tries, with varying degrees of arrogance, to explain his world; the congresspeople recite their questions; in the end, no one seems notably changed by the experience. There are many …

While recently reading about leg-lengthening surgery, I couldn’t help but sense a touch of absurdity in the whole enterprise. Although I’m no taller than average—I’m 5'9", thank you very much—dispensing sincere sympathy for the men featured in the article didn’t come naturally. Even when it did, my sympathy was mixed …

I don’t like to rank ethical issues in a hierarchy, but one problem sits with a weaver’s serenity at the center of a whole web of others: How do we ethically address networked harassment? Two recent articles about the ongoing battle to keep the stalking and harassment nexus of Kiwi …

“I failed two captcha tests this week. Am I still human?” —Bot or Not? Dear Bot, The comedian John Mulaney has a bit about the self-reflexive absurdity of captchas. “You spend most of your day telling a robot that you’re not a robot,” he says. “Think about that for two …

David had an addiction. Ever since he was a kid, he had spent countless hours of his life on the internet searching for naked photos of women and videos of them having sex. He wasn’t happy about how much time he spent looking for online pornography, but he couldn’t stop. …

Sometime in the summer of 2020, I noticed an occasional, searing pain shooting up my right forearm. It soon became clear this was a byproduct of a gesture that had become as commonplace as breathing or blinking that season, if not long before: scrolling. This was how I spent most …

Software engineers have joined the ranks of copy editors, translators, and others who fear that they’re about to be replaced by generative AI. But it might be surprising to learn that coders have been under threat before. New technologies have long promised to “disrupt” engineering, and these innovations have always …

Swoosh. Ping. Slow and studied scrolling. Typing with the index finger. My mother is on the prowl for a man. Not for herself, of course, but for any of her three daughters, all of whom have the great misfortune of being single in their late twenties and early thirties. “I’m …