How technology changes work and everyday life.
Follow the technologies reshaping jobs, ownership, privacy and daily routines. We examine what new tools make possible, who controls them and how their consequences reach beyond the launch announcement.
A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that men’s employment rises as jobs become more exposed to AI while women’s stays flat. For women without a bachelor’s degree, it falls.
The penalty, the largest ever against Meta, stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company says it will appeal.
YouTube Music is introducing labels that tell listeners when artificial intelligence helped create a song. A new music startup wants to go further by compensating the artists whose work trains the technology. Together, the developments expose an unresolved problem in the streaming economy: knowing how music was made is not the same as knowing who deserves to profit from it.
Imagine grading a college exam and discovering that nearly half the students earned perfect scores. For a professor, that might ordinarily be cause for celebration. But at Brown University, economics professor Roberto Serrano became suspicious when 40 students scored 100 on a take-home midterm in his advanced mathematical economics course. Some answers closely resembled responses generated by ChatGPT, prompting concerns about widespread AI-assisted cheating. According to EL PAÍS, Serrano believes at least 50 students cheated. When he required an in-person final exam, the class average plunged from 96 to 48, and 22 students who had previously earned perfect midterm scores did not show up. The results raise troubling questions about how much students are actually learning when artificial intelligence can complete increasingly sophisticated academic work.
Netflix is facing slower engagement growth and fierce competition from YouTube. Behind the streaming industry’s financial math is another measure of success: whether the people who write, film, build and produce entertainment can still make a living doing it.
The chipmaker is preparing worldwide layoffs tied to performance reviews as it pushes into AI data centers, raising a familiar question: what happens when a company’s future needs a different workforce than the one that built it?
Once a symbol of startup innovation, Foursquare has been acquired by an advertising technology company. Co-founder Dennis Crowley says the deal paid its shareholders nothing, raising uncomfortable questions about how the technology industry measures success.
Harvard Business School and Imperial College London are experimenting with digital replicas of professors that can answer questions around the clock. The technology promises greater access to education, but raises concerns about accuracy, ownership, and accountability.
An October 28 product launch could introduce Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook Pro, challenging a design philosophy the company defended for years. The bigger story is how consumer expectations are reshaping what a computer should be.
New Pew Research Center data show that smartphone ownership has reached 91% of U.S. adults. But millions still depend on their phones as their primary connection to the internet, revealing an economic divide that ownership statistics alone cannot capture.
New Pew Research Center data show how Americans are dividing across digital platforms by generation. The consequences reach beyond entertainment, shaping who encounters news, whose voices gain influence and how information travels.
OpenAI and other technology companies are training employees to recognize espionage tactics once associated with diplomats, defense contractors and intelligence agencies.
Get SSC’s briefings and analysis in your inbox, or help us bring new reporting and expert voices to the conversation.