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President Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020 by a razor-thin margin, flipping the state blue for the first time in more than 20 years. As a result, Arizona became a hotbed of election misinformation and conspiracy theories, as false claims of a stolen election led to protests outside voting centers, a GOP-backed ballot audit and threats against election workers. Now, with just over 200 days until the 2024 election, experts warn that artificial intelligence could supercharge misinformation and disinformation in this year’s race. So how are election officials in a state that has already been in the trenches preparing for another battle over facts? In this episode of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series, “Decoding Democracy,” Lily Jamali and Kimberly Adams look back at what happened in Arizona during the last presidential election and how the state became entangled in conspiracy theories. Plus, we hear from Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes about how his office plans to combat AI-charged misinformation this year.

The programming language known as COBOL turns 65 this year. We couldn’t help noticing that’s right around retirement age, but COBOL is nowhere near retirement. It remains a mainstay of IT operations at U.S. government agencies, businesses and financial institutions. Yet the programming language, which is older than the Beatles, is no longer taught at most universities. Glenn Fleishman is a freelance tech journalist who has written about this aging slab of digital infrastructure. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali asked him whether our continuing reliance on COBOL is a problem.

 

The Labor Department this week confirmed what a lot of Americans have been feeling: Inflation is kind of sticking around, and higher interest rates are likely to as well. We’ll look at what that means for venture capital, which was already slow to flow. Plus, the Joe Biden administration announced a $6.6 billion deal with Taiwan-based semiconductor maker TSMC to build a third production hub in Arizona. We take a look at the ongoing rollout of the CHIPS and Science Act, which makes it all possible. But first, Tesla has settled a lawsuit in the death of a software engineer who was killed driving a Tesla while using the company’s semiautonomous driving software, Autopilot. The suit put scrutiny on Elon Musk’s claims about the software.



Marketplace’s Lily Jamali is joined by Jewel Burks Solomon, managing director at Collab Capital, for her take on these stories.

More than 99% of all species that have lived on Earth are now extinct — something humans have certainly had a hand in. There’s now an entire scientific discipline devoted to bringing some of these species back. If you’re picturing those cloning scenes from “Jurassic Park” right now, we get it. But “de-extinction” is not quite that. Beth Shapiro is the chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences, a bioengineering startup working on de-extinction. She explained to Marketplace’s Lily Jamali how the process works.

AI models are increasingly being used by the fashion industry, as they save time and money. Some models and agencies are fans, but others want to see more protection for the image rights of models. What does it all mean for the fashion industry? The BBC’s Sam Gruet reports.

We hear words like “safety” and “transparency” thrown around in the artificial intelligence industry, but they don’t always mean the same things to a tech insider that they do to the rest of us. Luckily, tech journalist Karen Hao wrote a helpful glossary of 50 AI ethics terms to help us make sense of what tech leaders really mean by the words they use. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with her about some of the double meanings on her list.