For most of the brief history of artificial intelligence in everyday life, the technology has been something people talk to, a clever assistant that answers questions, drafts text, and offers suggestions but ultimately hands every consequential decision back to a human, who must be the one to click the button, enter the payment, and complete…
Read MoreThe rise of ride-hailing apps transformed urban transportation with remarkable speed, summoning a car to almost any street corner with a few taps and creating flexible earning opportunities for millions of drivers, yet beneath the convenience that riders enjoy lies a persistent grievance among the people who actually do the driving. The drivers who provide…
Read MoreFor as long as professional sports have existed, the relationship between a club and its supporters has carried a peculiar imbalance, since the fans provide the passion, the atmosphere, the loyalty across generations, and a great deal of the money that sustains the enterprise, yet they almost never have any say in how the club…
Read MoreAlmost everyone who uses the internet has an email address and a handful of messaging accounts, and almost no one actually owns them, because the address that identifies a person online, along with the entire history of their correspondence, belongs not to the user but to the company that provides the service, which can suspend…
Read MorePredicting the future is one of the most valuable and difficult tasks that individuals, businesses, and societies undertake, and the methods used to do it, from expert opinion to opinion polls to statistical models, all have well-known limitations. Experts are often overconfident and prone to bias, polls capture only stated intentions at a moment in…
Read MoreAlmost everyone holds a scattered collection of loyalty rewards they will likely never fully use, points accumulated in airline programs, stars in coffee apps, store credits, and miles in credit card schemes that all sit locked inside the closed systems of the various companies that issued them. These rewards all share a common and deeply…
Read MoreScientific progress depends heavily on money, and the way that money is distributed profoundly shapes what gets studied, who gets to study it, and how quickly important discoveries are actually made. For most of modern history, the funding of research has flowed through a relatively small number of large and established channels, government agencies, private…
Read MoreWhen a person donates to a cause or a foundation awards a grant, an act of trust quietly takes place that is rarely examined but is always present. The donor trusts that the money will reach the intended purpose, that it will not simply be lost to overhead and administration along the way, that the…
Read MoreMost of what makes a person trustworthy in the real world cannot be bought or sold. A diploma represents years of study, a record of community service reflects genuine effort, and a reputation for showing up and following through is earned slowly through consistent behavior. These things matter precisely because they are tied to a…
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