Business, Spoken

Shortly after Ajit Pai was named chair of the Federal Communications Commission in February, he said he wanted the agency to be “as open and accessible as possible to the American people." Six months on, the agency is falling short of Pai’s lofty goal in some key areas. Critics are especially concerned about the FCC’s handling of complaints from the public about internet providers and the causes of a May 7 outage of the public-comments section of the agency’s website.

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None of this is to say that automation and AI aren’t having an important impact on the economy. But that impact is far more nuanced and limited than the doomsday forecasts suggest. A rigorous study of the impact of robots in manufacturing, agriculture, and utilities across 17 countries, for instance, found that robots did reduce the hours of lower-skilled workers—but they didn’t decrease the total hours worked by humans, and they actually boosted wages.

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President Trump stunned the nation, members of his own party, the press, and, apparently, his staff on Tuesday with his candid remarks regarding last weekend's deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The day before, he had reluctantly condemned the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who comprised much of the rally, but just 24 hours later, standing in the lobby of Trump Tower, the president was back to to condemning groups "on both sides" of the fighting.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai Thursday abruptly cancelled a planned companywide meeting intended to air concerns raised by a former employee's broadside against Google's diversity programs. The move came just minutes before the meeting was to start, as the company that aims to organize the world's information struggles to deal with reverberations from the memo and its decision to fire the author.

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Tic tac toe, checkers, chess, go, poker. Artificial intelligence rolled over each of these games like a relentless tide. Now Google’s DeepMind is taking on the multiplayer space-war videogame StarCraft II. No one expects the robot to win anytime soon. But when it does, it will be a far greater achievement than DeepMind’s conquest of Go—and not just because StarCraft is a professional e-sport watched by fans for millions of hours each month.

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James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired Monday after posting a missive criticizing the company’s diversity programs, offended fellow Harvard graduate students with an off-color skit during a 2012 retreat, prompting two professors to send an email apologizing for the performance. At the time, Damore was a doctoral student in systems biology. Along with a few dozen other students and faculty, he attended a two-day retreat at a hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

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Bitcoin: fad or the future? The question has dogged the digital currency since its inception nearly a decade ago, and recent developments raise it anew. Last week, a new variant of bitcoin emerged via a “fork” in its underlying code, threatening to confuse and divide the still-small world of bitcoin adherents. Meanwhile, the price of a coin has soared to record heights above $3,000, from about $1,000 at the year’s beginning. Skeptics remain.

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In the year 2017, justice can seem in short supply. But on Friday, as news broke that pharma-bro-turned-internet-troll Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, schadenfreude circulated through the online masses; justice, for this one brief moment, had been served. It can be tough to keep a running mental list of all the reasons the good people of the internet despise Shkreli—and the bad ones adore him.

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On January 3, 2017, Mark Zuckerberg posted a status update to his Facebook page. “Every year I take on a personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside of my work,” the Facebook CEO wrote to his 84 million followers. “In recent years, I've run 365 miles, built a simple AI for my home, read 25 books and learned Mandarin. My personal challenge for 2017 is to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year.

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Late last autumn, a Russian mathematician and programmer named Alex decided he’d had enough of running his eight-year-old business. Though his St. Petersburg firm was thriving, he’d grown weary of dealing with payroll, hiring, and management headaches. He pined for the days when he could devote himself solely to tinkering with code, his primary passion. The time had come for an exit strategy.

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