Marketplace Tech
Monday through Friday, Marketplace demystifies the digital economy in less than 10 minutes. We look past the hype and ask tough questions about an industry that's constantly changing.
Episodes
The International Energy Agency projects the global market value of critical minerals could reach almost $800 billion by 2040. That's because we must have them for the electrified future. And right now, China is a dominant supplier.
The Trump administration wants to find other sources, and it's looking to U.S. and international waters to mine minerals on the ocean floor.
Marketplace contributor Daniel Ackerman has...
There’s a lawsuit right now that’s testing the question of whether AI chatbots are protected by the First Amendment. And before we get into it, a warning that our story today includes discussion of suicide. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Jane Bambauer, law professor at the University of Florida, who’s been following this case.
Yoshua Bengio, one of the so-called godfathers of AI, wants it to be less human. Plus, a federal judge temporarily blocked a law in Florida that would ban kids under 14 from getting social media accounts.
But first, Meta announced an energy deal with one of the country's biggest operators of nuclear reactors. Marketplace’s Nova Safo is joined by Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at the venture capital firm Collab C...
We've been looking at how technology is changing agriculture. Last month, we visited Central California where there's new investment in everything from electric tractors and leaf sensors to upskilling farmworkers.
Today, Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams visits our neighbor to the north. Specifically, Canada's first fully-automated greenhouse. It's cost millions to set up, and it's just in time for a trade war.
AI-generated deepfakes are everywhere on social media. Now, you can take a test developed by Northwestern University to see how well you spot them. Marketplace’s Nova Safo took the test, sifting through a bunch of real and fake images. He got five out of six right, which is the average in a study Northwestern conducted. Lead researcher Matt Groh also helped develop a litmus test, a series of things to look for to spot deep...
On this episode of “Marketplace Tech,” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Christopher Mims, a tech journalist at The Wall Street Journal, about the recent evolution of brain computer interfaces — technology that has enabled people with paralysis to move prosthetic limbs or type out communication using computer implants in their brains — and the neurotech startups trying to bring their implants to a larger market by maki...
Facial recognition systems use artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in faces, and they've come under increasing scrutiny, particularly in policing. There have been multiple instances of false positives leading to the arrest and detainment of innocent people. There's no federal regulation of this technology, but at least a dozen states have laws that limit its use. So, some law enforcement authorities have turned to ...
There's a provision tucked into the Big Beautiful Bill, among the tax cuts and Medicaid cuts, that would bar states from passing laws to regulate artificial intelligence for a decade. Plus, Meta is reshuffling its AI team again in an apparent attempt to catch up to the competition. But first, this week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a law requiring age verification for Apple and Google app stores. It also requires pare...
The New York City Administration for Children's Services, or ACS, has been using predictive artificial intelligence to flag some families for greater scrutiny, according to a recent investigation by The Markup. Colin Lecher reported the story and tells Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino, like all AI systems, it can encode historical biases.
In late April, details came to light about a covert experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Zurich on unsuspecting Reddit users on the debate forum known as r/changemyview. They used AI chatbots posing as real humans on the forum to test their powers of persuasion and invented backstories like a rape survivor or a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter. What they didn't have was consent. The experiment ...
Big Tech firms like Microsoft, Meta and Google are using stricter performance reviews to bring up productivity and weed out low performing workers. It’s a noticeable pivot away from the perks that defined Silicon Valley work culture a decade ago. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Alistair Barr, author of the Business Insider Tech Memo Newsletter, about their recent coverage of this latest shift.
Digital banking is often seen as a smoother, less costly way to deliver financial services. But where there’s tech, there are sometimes outages. Bank customers in the U.K. and other countries have seen an increasing number of banking interruptions, often with costly impacts.
On this week’s episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week In Review, President Donald Trump signed the "Take It Down" Act, which requires internet publishers to take down intimate images like revenge porn or deepfakes within 48 hours of a complaint. Google unveiled a suite of new AI products, upgrades and projects at its annual I/O developers conference. And the game Fortnite finally returns to the Apple App Store after a lon...
This week, we hit the road to check out California’s Central Valley, where the future of agricultural innovation is taking shape. We visited a farm that’s piloting next-gen tools and a university research center that’s helping develop that tech. Today, we’re at an AgTEC Workforce graduation, a community college program in this region that helps upskill farm workers.
This week, we’re heading to California’s Central Valley to see how technology is transforming this agricultural region. And we’re going straight to the innovation source: the University of California, Merced, where academics there are guiding students to research agtech innovations to potentially develop them for commercialization.
California is known for being home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley. But the Golden State also has millions of acres of farmland, and we’re exploring how technology is changing that landscape in a series this week about “Agtech Valley.”
We visited HMC Farms with its farm manager Drew Ketelsen, who took us to an orchard of Lady Erin yellow peach trees trained to grow in narrow upright pillars rather than the usual rounde...
Having a baby in the era of apps, influencers, subreddits and Facebook groups, has its ups and downs.
Journalist Amanda Hess thought she knew all about it as an internet culture writer for the New York Times, but found herself surprised when she was the one expecting.
She writes about how pregnancy magnified her relationship with technology in a new memoir, “Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age.”
It b...
President Donald Trump's visit to the Middle East has prompted a flurry of AI deals worth billions. We'll get into the details on today's “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”
Stateside, the Trump administration has rolled back a Biden-era “AI Diffusion” rule. Companies involved in the semiconductor supply chain were critical of the rule, though it's still not entirely clear how Trump plans to revamp the regulation...
President Donald Trump talks a lot about wanting to build more stuff here in the U.S. But the future of manufacturing might not even be on earth, but in orbit.
It might sound kind of out there — or way out there — but space manufacturing is already happening on a small scale. There's a mini boom of companies looking to do more of it, according to recent reporting in Wired by journalist Jonathan O'Callaghan. He says spa...
The excitement around AI has gotten a bit frothy. Those two magic letters are everywhere, promising everything. Authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna want us all to take a beat and a more critical look, per their new book "The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want."
Bender is a linguist at the University of Washington who helped popularize the term "stochastic parrots" to describe large langu...
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