Business, Spoken

Sitting on a stage in Wuzhen, China, a historic city up the river from Shanghai, Google chairman Eric Schmidt described what he called “the age of intelligence.” But he wasn’t talking about human intelligence. He meant machine intelligence. He trumpeted the rise of deep neural networks and other techniques that allow machines to learn tasks largely on their own, either by finding patterns in vast amounts of data or through their own trial and error. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After this weekend’s attacks in London, President Trump became embroiled in a spat with the city’s mayor, where the president criticized British authorities for not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough. In its crude way, that confrontation underscored a deeper divide between the United States and much of the rest of the world over what taking terrorism seriously means. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A couple weeks ago,during an unassuming antitrust conference at Oxford University, a German bureaucrat uttered a few words that should send a chill through Silicon Valley. In front of a crowd of nearly 200 competition law experts—including enforcement agents, scholars, and economic policy-makers from the United States and Europe—Andreas Mundt, president of Germany’s antitrust agency, Bundeskartellamt, said he was “deeply convinced privacy is a competition issue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Just past midnight on Wednesday morning, the man who gave us the word "bigly" added yet another term to the American lexicon: "covfefe." The president's since-deleted late-night tweet, which read, cryptically, "Despite the constant negative press covfefe," launched a thousand Twitter takes. Some of the jokes were great. Some were so very, very bad. (We're looking at you, Ted Cruz. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On HBO’s Silicon Valley, startups promise to “change the world” by tackling silly, often non-existent problems. But this season, the show’s characters are tackling a project that really could. In their latest pivot, Richard Hendricks and the Pied Piper gang are trying to create new internet that cuts out intermediaries like Facebook, Google, and the fictional Hooli. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The web’s favorite file format just turned 30. Yep, it turns out the GIF is a millennial, too. At the same time, 30 makes the GIF ancient in web years, which feels a bit weird, given that the proliferation of animated GIFs is a relatively recent phenomenon. Today, Twitter has a GIF button and even Apple added GIF search to its iOS messaging app. Such mainstream approval would have seemed unthinkable even a decade ago, when GIFs had the cultural cachet of blinking text and embedded MIDI files. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On February 16, Mark Zuckerberg published “Building Global Community,” a6,000-word open letter directly addressed to Facebook’susers. “To our community,” Zuckerberg begins. “On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A disembodied voice sounded over a loudspeaker. "Incoming. Take cover," it warned to anyone within earshot. Then, the sirens began to wail. Erin Delaney assumed it was a drill. She peeked down the hallway to see how other people were responding. Then she hit the deck. It was not a drill. The NATO base in Kabul where Delaney had been working for weeks was being attacked. Delaney, 24, had never had any military training. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Kathryn Minshew is a female co­founder and CEO of The Muse, a popular online job search destination for millennials. She doesn’t have a technical degree, although she was a top computer science student who aced the advanced placement exam for computer science when she was in the tenth grade at Thomas Jefferson High, a prestigious math and science magnet school in northern Virginia. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last Thursday Republicans proposed a new law that would require companies from Comcast and Verizon to Facebook and Google to get your permission before selling your internet browsing history. Sounds familiar? Probably, because last year the Federal Communications Commission passed a sweeping set of privacy rules that did much the same thing, rules that Republicans voted to scrap just two months ago. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices