Business, Spoken

Garry Kasparov is perhaps the greatest chess player in history. For almost two decades after becoming world champion in 1985, he dominated the game with a ferocious style of play and an equally ferocious swagger. Outside the chess world, however, Kasparov is best known for losing to a machine. In 1997, at the height of his powers, Kasparov was crushed and cowed by an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue.

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Gabriel is a professional transcriber, and for years he earned a middle-class living. In the early 2000s he'd make up to $40 an hour transcribing corporate earnings calls. He'd sit at his desk, “knock it out” for hours using custom keystrokes, and watch the money roll in. “I sent my son to private schools and university on transcribing,” he tells me. “It was a nice life.” But in the past decade, the bottom fell out.

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Last June, at a swanky, strobe-lit event in Washington, DC, Brendan Blumer, the 33-year-old CEO of a blockchain company called Block.one, unveiled a new product with Steve Jobs-like theatrics: a social network called Voice. A year earlier, Blumer’s company had raised $4 billion selling a crypto token called EOS. It was, by far, the largest-ever initial coin offering—more money than just about any US initial public offering that year.

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The number of Airbnb listings in London has quadrupled in the last four years as more and more of the city’s housing stock has been gobbled up by short-term rental companies. As of May 2019, 80,770 properties in London were listed on Airbnb, with a staggering 23 percent, or 11,200, of these thought to be in breach of a legal 90-day limit in the capital.

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When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, many observers scratched their heads. The smaller messaging platform had annual revenues in the low tens of millions. How could it be worth so much? Soon enough, however, Facebook’s logic became clear. While little noticed in the US, WhatsApp was already a juggernaut overseas, with hundreds of millions of users. In countries where Facebook was not as popular, the acquisition gave Mark Zuckerberg’s company an immediate foothold.

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In 1997, Hiroaki Kitano, a research scientist at Sony, helped organize the first Robocup, a robot soccer tournament that attracted teams of robotics and artificial intelligence researchers to compete in the picturesque city of Nagoya, Japan. At the start of the first day, two teams of robots took to the pitch. As the machines twitched and surveyed their surroundings, a reporter asked Kitano when the match would begin. “I told him it started five minutes ago!” he says with a laugh.

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You’ll likely have one less choice for mobile service soon. Last year, nine states and the District of Columbia filed suit to block T-Mobile's $26.5 billion acquisition of Sprint. Tuesday, a federal judge ruled against the states, allowing the merger to move forward. The deal still needs approval from the California Public Utilities Commission, but it's not clear if the commission can actually block the deal.

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One evening last June, residents from the Hillesluis and Bloemhof neighborhoods on the south side of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, crowded into a community room at their local playground. Many wore headscarves and some arrived after a protest march from a local mosque. The residents had assembled to learn more about a government system called SyRI that had quietly flagged thousands of people in their low-income communities to investigators as more likely to commit benefits fraud.

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Article 13—a controversial piece of copyright legislation that is now called Article 17 but is more colloquially known as "the meme ban"—is no more, in the UK at least. Last week, the country's minister for universities and science, Chris Skidmore, confirmed that the UK will not implement the EU Copyright Directive after leaving the EU. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. The directive limits how copyrighted content is shared on online platforms.

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With the coronavirus growing more deadly in China, artificial intelligence researchers are applying machine-learning techniques to social media, web, and other data for subtle signs that the disease may be spreading elsewhere. The new virus emerged in Wuhan, China, in December, triggering a global health emergency. It remains uncertain how deadly or contagious the virus is, and how widely it might have already spread. Infections and deaths continue to rise.

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