FREE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY BLOG FOR PROFESSIONALS

N orthwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army. I visited the institute on a rainy morning in the summer of 2019. China’s best and brightest were still shuffling in post-commute, dressed casually in basketball shorts or yoga pants, AirPods nestled in their ears. In my pocket, I had a burner phone; in my backpack, a computer wiped free of data—standard precautions for Western journalists in China. To visit China on sensitive business is to risk bei...

Pablo Delcan L ong before the coronavirus pandemic, the tech industry yearned to prove its indispensability to the world. Its executives liked to describe their companies as “utilities.” They came by their self-aggrandizement honestly: The founding fathers of Big Tech really did view their creations as essential, and essentially good. In recent years, however, our infatuation with these creations has begun to curdle. Many Americans have come to view them as wellsprings of disinformation, outrage, and manipulation—and have noticed that the most profitable companies in human history haven’t always lived by the idealism of their slogans. Now an opportunity for the tech companies to affirm their old sense of purpose has arisen. In the midst of the pandemic, Google Meet has become a delivery mechanism for school. AmazonFresh has made it possible to shop for groceries without braving the supermarket. The government has flailed in its response to the pandemic, and Big Tech has presente...

It’s hard to watch an old friend go through a midlife crisis, isn’t it? The new girlfriends , younger and wilder . The workout regimens and hair treatments . Running off to Esalen and talking about mindfulness , doing intense meditation . That particularly tragic combination of bravado and self-loathing , hanging on to past glory and seeking new space . The unquenchable desire to be understood . It’s shocking how many of the tropes of middle age have been enacted by the most visible tech titans. And now, the companies they built are also showing signs of entering an existential crisis: Despite the ideals that drove their younger selves to excellence, they’ve gone corporate, sold out, moved to the top of the power hierarchy instead of tearing it down. A new report from Pew on digital technology’s influence on democracy shows just how muddled and dark experts’ views have become. The report is based on written comments from almost 1,000 people in or close to the technology industry...