Business, Spoken

Despite what Randall Stephenson thinks, the Department of Justice’s suit blocking AT&T from acquiring Time Warner’s assets in an $85 billion merger is a great moment for antitrust in America. It’s late, but it’s welcome. WIRED Opinion About Susan Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience. Stephenson, the AT&T CEO, has no one but himself to blame.

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Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of SoftBank Group, has a lot of crazy ideas. He believes robots with IQs above 10,000 will outnumber humans in 30 years. He considered taking SoftBank private in what would have been the largest leveraged buyout of all time. He raised $45 billion for an investment fund in 45 minutes. He wants to launch a second, record-breaking Vision Fund before even closing his first one.

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Bert Brautigam is sick of having conversations with his devices. Like many of us, Brautigam, who works for the design firm Ziba, uses voice assistants like Google’s phone AI or Amazon’s Alexa. The theory is that voice commands make life more convenient. But these assistants are scripted to emulate every­day conversation. And everyday conversation is filled with little pauses and filler words, the “phatic” spackle of social interactions.

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Stephen Shore was an Instagram artist way before there was Insta­gram. He shot to prominence in the ’70s with carefully composed snapshots of parking lots, pancake breakfasts, and camping trips, beautiful banalities that future Instagrammers would try to emulate. Now that Shore is actually on the platform, he averages a post a day—and a retrospective of his work, opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in November, shows off three years’ worth of his ’grams.

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In July, China’s government issued a sweeping new strategy with a striking aim: draw level with the US in artificial intelligence technology within three years, and become the world leader by 2030. A call for research projects from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology posted online last month fills in some detail on the government’s plans. And it puts Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia, the leading supplier of silicon for machine-learning projects, in the cross hairs.

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Wednesday morning, Todd Schulte stood before a podium, dressed in a grey suit and orange tie, to talk about the urgent need for legislation that protects undocumented people who came to the United States as children, also known as Dreamers.

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With a few exceptions, it's against federal regulations for your local television station to buy your local newspaper. Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on a proposal to change those rules. Since 1975, the commission has generally barred organizations from owning both a newspaper and a full-power radio or television station in the same market to protect what it calls "viewpoint diversity.

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Next month in San Francisco, Uber will stand trial in federal court for allegedly cheating in the race to commercialize self-driving cars. Google parent Alphabet accuses Uber of stealing designs for sensors called lidars that give a vehicle a 3-D view of its surroundings, an “unjust enrichment” it says will take $1.8 billion to heal. Meanwhile in Toronto, Uber has a growing artificial-intelligence lab led by a woman who’s spent years trying to make lidar technology less important.

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Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who currently runs a group at Google writing automatic responses to your emails in cooperation with the Gmail team, recently talked with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson at the Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s an edited transcript of that conversation. Nicholas Thompson: Let’s begin with you explaining the law of accelerating returns, which is one of the fundamental ideas underpinning your writing and your work.

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As Democratic wins started piling up on election night in Virginia, you probably saw the names of a few key winners circulating in social media and the press. But while the victories of Virginia governor-elect Ralph Northam, and Danica Roem, the first transgender person to ever be elected to a state legislature, rightly resonated, one key to understanding Tuesday's significance could come from a Democrat who lost: Veronica Coleman.

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