Business / Tech Culture

My colleague Paresh Dave and I each spent a day in federal court in Oakland, California, this week, monitoring the latest Meta child safety trial.In case you missed it in the spring, Meta (along with YouTube) lost a landmark social media…

Tim O’Reilly’s yardstick for measuring the worth of a company, person, or society has long been create more value than you capture. It’s no surprise that O’Reilly—publisher, internet pioneer, VC, conference organizer, and dispenser of tech…

For 6 months, my husband convinced everyone that I had stolen millions from the company I built, including our own daughter. As I sat in federal court, certain I was about to lose my freedom, the doors suddenly opened. My 9-year-old son…

Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat…

Employees at Google DeepMind in London have voted to unionize as part of a bid to block the AI lab from providing its technology to the US and Israeli militaries.In a letter addressed to Google’s managing director for the UK and Ireland,…

RightsCon, the world’s largest digital rights conference, was canceled this year due to pressure from the Chinese government, according to the nonprofit organization that organizes the annual event.In a statement, Access Now says it was…

In December 2024, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, I met with a professional investigator named Tyler Maroney. He told me he was on a quest to discover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, and he felt that he had…

Sometime in the next year or two, Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, will step onto a stage and tell the world that his company has a revolutionary product. This product, he’ll say, will put the full and awesome power of AI into everyone’s…

Sportswriting legend Red Smith once said that writing a column is easy: “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In 2026, though, no blood is required. All you do is sit down at a laptop and have Claude or ChatGPT write the story…

The company isn’t exactly breaking new ground. The idea of a chatbot standing in for a human is fairly common. As is the idea of cashing in on it. For instance, Manhattan psychologist Becky Kennedy has built a parenting advice business that…