Technology
Alex Shieh thinks his AI startup can do what Elon Musk couldn’t: Expose fraud
Brown University eliminated 103 positions months after Alex Shieh, a sophomore at the time, used a combination of AI and public data to launch Bloat@Brown, a website that listed the names and titles of each of the…
‘The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto’ investigates bitcoin’s origins
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto, journalist Benjamin Wallace's book about the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, gives you more details than you likely need if you just want an engaging, informative read on a story that savvy…
Meta removes ICE-sightings group after DOJ outreach
Meta, Facebook's parent company, is the latest tech firm the Justice Department (DOJ) has successfully pressured into removing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent-tracking content from its platforms. On…
AI ‘chatbot’ companions are nothing to panic about
One of the first feature articles I wrote for Reason was about sex robots. This was 2015, and both legacy and social media had cyclical freak-outs about the havoc that sex robots would supposedly wreak. By sex robots, I—and…
Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures are surprisingly libertarian
Who is the Antichrist, the biblical antagonist whose rise marks the beginning of the end-times? Peter Thiel recently took a stab at answering this age-old question. The billionaire and co-founder of PayPal and surveillance…
Nobel economics laureate Joel Mokyr revealed the perils of technophobia
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Northwestern University professor and Reason contributor Joel Mokyr "for having identified the prerequisites for…
Algorithmic censorship changes the way we talk
Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, by Adam Aleksic, Knopf, 256 pages, $29 The kids these days have a lot of silly euphemisms. Porn becomes corn. Sex becomes seggs. Nipples are nip nops and a…
NYC doubles down on minimum wage for delivery app workers
In 2023, New York City became the first city in America to pass a minimum wage rate for app-based restaurant delivery drivers. Several other progressive cities have followed suit, resulting in a range of issues from rising…
Supreme Court declines to address Section 230 in two cases for this term
The U.S. Supreme Court's new term began this week. In addition to the cases the court announced it would take up, it also declined many others, including two that asked the justices to consider and potentially reevaluate…
Can we please stop romanticizing pre-smartphone life?
Of course there are some downsides to smartphones. I'm not denying that. But all too often, critics of phones—or of any new technology—have a tendency to romanticize the past in an attempt to make our tech-enabled…
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