Already the metaverse is increasingly part of companies’ merger and acquisitions (M&A) strategies. In December 2021, Nike announced its acquisition of digital design studio RTFKT, which the sportswear company says it hopes will help it explore the possibilities presented by the metaverse. In January 2022, Microsoft announced its plans to acquire game developer and interactive […]

Truly smart cities recognize the ambiguity of lives and livelihoods, and they are driven by outcomes beyond the implementation of “solutions.” They are defined by their residents’ talents, relationships, and sense of ownership—not by the technology that is deployed there.  This more expansive concept of what a smart city is encompasses a wide range of […]

That’s still a huge and rich market, but it cuts out dozens of nations in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, where Israeli cyber firms had been making a killing selling cutting-edge surveillance tools to customers with deep pockets and a willingness to spend. It’s also where NSO Group kept getting in trouble for […]

Access to legal abortion is now subject to state laws, allowing each state to decide whether to ban, restrict, or allow the procedure. Some parts of the country are much stricter than others—Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky are among the 13 states with trigger laws that immediately made abortion illegal in the aftermath of the ruling. […]

“We’re addicted to being on Facebook.” —Jordi Berbera, who runs a pizza stand in Mexico City, tells Rest of World why he has turned to selling his wares through the social network instead of through more conventional food delivery apps. The big story “Am I going crazy or am I being stalked?” Inside the disturbing […]

Melanie Mitchell, an AI researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, is also excited to see a whole new approach. “We really haven’t seen this coming out of the deep-learning community so much,” she says. She also agrees with LeCun that large language models cannot be the whole story. “They lack memory and internal models of […]

What is interesting about both early and current visions of urban sensing networks and the use that could be made of the data they produced is how close to and yet how far away they are from Constant’s concept of what such technologies would bring about. New Babylon’s technological imagery was a vision of a […]

The scars and pockmarks of the aging apartments and housing units under the purview of the New York City Housing Authority don’t immediately communicate the idea of innovation. The largest landlord in the city, housing nearly 1 in 16 New Yorkers, NYCHA has seen its buildings literally crumble after decades of deferred maintenance and poor […]

Katerra’s all-encompassing vision of reforming the construction world, using billions of dollars in investment to build an entirely new production system from the ground up, showcased stereotypical Silicon Valley arrogance. It also has had a fraction of the impact of European models that seek to retrofit using a simple, straightforward, and standard set of parts.  […]