Marketplace Tech Marketplace
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- Technology
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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.
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Makers of electric roasters pitch carbon cutting in coffee making
Roasting coffee beans was a market worth over $1 billion globally in 2022, according to Grand View Research, which projects that figure could double by 2030. Traditional roasters, powered by the fossil fuel natural gas, still dominate the market. These machines are big and bulky and kind of look like part of a train. But the makers of more compact electric roasters are piling into the business. And they have an edge, touting themselves as high-tech alternatives that are more environmentally friendly and cheaper to run than their old-school counterparts. The BBC’s Frey Lindsay has more on the story.
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TikTok faces the hammer, Sam Altman returns to OpenAI’s board, and Waymo’s driverless taxis come to Los Angeles
We’re at the end of the week, which means we’re serving up another episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Autonomous vehicle company Waymo has launched its driverless taxi service in Los Angeles. OpenAI has given CEO Sam Altman his board seat back. And a U.S. bill passed by the House of Representatives would force TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the U.S. version of the popular social media platform or be banned from app stores. Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, joined Marketplace’s Lily Jamali to discuss why policymakers have been pushing for action on TikTok for years.
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What a TikTok ban would mean for free speech and data privacy
On Wednesday, members of the House of Representatives proved they can agree on something. In a bipartisan vote, lawmakers passed a bill that would force TikTok to split from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a nationwide ban — the first for a social media app in the U.S. President Biden has signaled he’d sign the bill into law if it passes the Senate. Advocates argue that the Chinese government could use the hugely popular app to collect Americans’ personal data and threaten U.S. security. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, about the congressional action. He pointed out that a little something called the First Amendment could complicate the crackdown.
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The Biden administration hasn’t had a CTO. Why?
When President Barack Obama took office way back in 2009, he created a new role that promised to bring some tech know-how to his administration. Chief Technology Officer, or CTO, was, of course, a title borrowed from corporate America. Early on, the job focused on things like bringing broadband access to rural parts of the country and modernizing the way the federal government keeps records. President Donald Trump also had a CTO. Well, we are now deep into President Joe Biden’s current term in office and the president has yet to appoint a CTO for the United States. For more on why, Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Cristiano Lima-Strong, tech policy reporter at The Washington Post, who’s been tracking developments on the position.
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States and schools are learning how to manage AI in education
It’s been about a year and a half since ChatGPT hit the scene and changed the world of education, leaving teachers scrambling to adjust lesson plans and grading policies. Currently, only a handful of states are providing guidance on how AI should be used in the classroom. Just five have official policies, with about a dozen more in the works. Bree Dusseault at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University has been following all this.
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AI can’t handle the truth when it comes to the law
Almost one in five lawyers are using AI, according to an American Bar Association survey. But there are a growing number of legal horror stories involving tools like ChatGPT, because chatbots have a tendency to make stuff up — such as legal precedents from cases that never happened. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Daniel Ho at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence about the group’s recent study on how frequently three of the most popular language models from ChatGPT, Meta and Google hallucinate when asked to weigh in or assist with legal cases.
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Great podcast! Ed Zitron sounds awfully negative and pessimistic though - not the best podcast guest!