Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

The president-elect is also a former president who’s been a fixture in national politics for the last decade. But predicting what Donald Trump might have in mind for the tech industry in his second term based on that history, well, that’s a tough call. Trump has, at times, had strong words for some tech titans, cozied up to others, and pushed for — and then against — a TikTok ban. His first administration initiated several antitrust cases against tech companies, but Trump recently expressed skepticism about the potential breakup of Google after a federal judge ruled that its search business was a monopoly. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, a senior writer at Wired, about the future of tech antitrust policy and more in the second Trump term.

It has been almost two years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene and made teachers’ lives a whole lot harder. A report from Common Sense Media this fall showed that 70% of teenage students used artificial intelligence for school or fun. But a majority of those students’ parents and teachers were unaware. Leila Wheless, a seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher in North Carolina, asked her students how they use the technology.

The thing about the artificial intelligence boom is that the tech needs a lot of electricity. One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggests that largely because of AI, data centers will use 160% more electricity by 2030. It’s got Big Tech fired up about an option that’s never really been the cool kid of the clean energy class: nuclear power. Microsoft made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant, while Google and Amazon are investing in new types of reactors. It’s stirring something of a “nuclear revival” for the U.S. after decades of stagnation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anna Erickson, professor of nuclear and radiological engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about the push to revive the nuclear energy sector.

It’s Election Day and even though the campaign may be over, the battle over misinformation is not. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Derek Tisler, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, about some of the misleading online narratives voters should expect to see and how to deal with them. This conversation is part of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy.” Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.

In case you forgot, we’ve got Election Day tomorrow. But it was also a big year for elections in the rest of the world. About half of the global population is voting in national elections in 2024, and in many countries people have encountered shut down internet, blocked websites or manipulated content online, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Freedom House. Allie Funk leads Freedom House’s technology and democracy initiative, and she told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino this is the 14th consecutive year the report has documented a decline in human rights online.

An AI transcription tool used in health care has been found to frequently hallucinate things no one ever said, including making up medications. That’s just one of the topics for today’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Plus, we’ll get into what we learned from this week’s Big Tech earnings, including Google saying that it’s using AI to generate about 25% of its code. But first, it’s been a busy week for Apple. The company launched some of its new Apple Intelligence features and released its new lineup of Mac computers along with some souped-up chips. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to get her take on this week’s tech news.

For almost a century, people have been going to the movies to get freaked out by fictional depictions of artificial intelligence. Back in 1968, there was Hal 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1980s gave us Skynet in “The Terminator.” And these days, movies about rogue bots are more popular than ever. Films like 2022’s “M3GAN” and this summer’s “AfrAId” seem to be channeling our worst fears about the intelligent technology increasingly embedded in our daily lives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Shira Ovide, a tech reporter and author of The Washington Post’s “Tech Friend” newsletter, about why AI is such a compelling horror villain.

We are in the midst of the first major U.S. election of the generative AI era. The people who want to win your vote have easy access to tools that can create images, video or audio of real people doing or saying things they never did — and slap on weird appendages or other make-believe effects along with targeted slogans. But the potential to deceive has led about two dozen states to enact some form of regulation requiring political ads that use artificial intelligence to include a label. So how do voters respond when they know a campaign has used AI? That’s what Scott Brennen and his team at New York University’s Center on Technology Policy set out to answer in a recent study.

We know from various studies that young people are, unsurprisingly, using generative AI tools like chatbots and image generators, sometimes for homework, sometimes for fun and sometimes for malicious purposes. A recent survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that artificial intelligence is being used among high school students to create nonconsensual, illicit imagery — in other words, sexually explicit deepfakes. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at CDT, to learn more.

With tech now able to clone voices in minutes, many people in creative industries are worried about what this could mean for their livelihoods. The BBC’s Ben Derico looks at what this AI revolution has meant for voice actors who claim to have had their likeness copied by an AI voice-generating company.

The next big thing in Silicon Valley might just be an old-fashioned concept: humanoid robots that can mimic our physical abilities. Developments in AI are triggering renewed interest in the robotics industry. And Anthropic’s latest Claude model can control a computer on its own, which could have implications for the future of work. But first, is the “best bromance in tech” starting to sour? That’s how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once described his company’s partnership with Microsoft, but recently the alliance has shown signs of tension. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas for her take on all this for our weekly segment “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

There’s a movement to make it possible to repair our gadgets ourselves instead of having to send them back to the company that makes them or, you know, just get a new one. The “right to repair” movement in consumer electronics has made real gains in recent years. Several states, like California, New York and Oregon, have passed legislation requiring it. And it looks like Apple’s newest iPhone — the 16 — has made strides in that department. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Kyle Wiens, CEO of the online repair guide iFixit, about the iPhone 16’s improved repairability.

A content creator who goes by the username Mrs. Frazzled recently noticed something strange happening on her Instagram account. With more than 370,000 followers, her videos sometimes score millions of views. Except, it seems, when she talks about the election. Mrs. Frazzled sensed she was being shadowbanned by Instagram, so Geoffrey Fowler, a tech columnist at The Washington Post, investigated. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Fowler about what he found.

Trying to vote when your disabled can present a series of obstacles but technology can help, even if integrating technology into our election system has its risks. Back in 2020, several states changed their voting rules with more mail-in, early, and remote voting options which increased turnout among disabled voters. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams recently spoke with Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager at the National Disability Rights Network, about finding the right balance of tech integration into our elections in order to empower more disabled voters in the U.S.

Artificial intelligence, according to its boosters, could help us unlock solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, like climate change. But in the meantime, it’s become a key tool for fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron to maximize the extraction of emissions-producing oil and gas. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to freelance reporter Karen Hao, who recently wrote in The Atlantic about how Microsoft has actively courted the fossil fuel industry.

Web crawlers scan and catalog sites all over the internet and, in the AI era, use that data to train chatbots. We’ll talk about why The New York Times is trying to put a stop to crawlers from the AI company Perplexity. We’ll also discuss the record share of venture capital dollars flowing into the AI sector and the difficulty of attracting investment for startups without those two magic letters. Plus, the ups and downs of SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, for her take on all this for our weekly segment “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Vice President Kamala Harris sat for her first interview on Fox News Wednesday as the Democratic presidential candidate continued her media blitz ahead of the November election. And while it’s generating plenty of headlines, these kinds of big interviews just don’t hold the power they used to, according to Nick Quah, a podcast and culture critic at New York Magazine who’s been following the candidates’ interviews on the alternative media circuit. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Quah about how Kamala Harris’ appearance on more internet-native shows like the podcast “Call Her Daddy” or Donald Trump’s appearances on various “bro-centric” shows like Logan Paul ‘sYouTube channel represent a notable media shift compared to previous elections.

After years of hype, Tesla finally debuted a robotaxi called the Cybercab last week. CEO Elon Musk has been making and breaking promises about Tesla’s autonomous vehicle for years. So, did the debut of the Cybercab finally deliver? Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor for The Verge, tells Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino what the Cybercab unveiling means for Musk and for Tesla.

Online misinformation about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and about the relief response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have surged in recent weeks, including false narratives of aid being withheld from victims for their political beliefs and aid being stolen by undocumented immigrants. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Ethan Porter, professor of media, public affairs and political science at George Washington University, about why there’s been so much misinformation about these natural disasters and FEMA’s relief response.

TikTok has a lot going on legally these days. Last week, it saw a fresh round of lawsuits alleging the short-form video app harms children. And then there’s the federal law that could ban the app if ByteDance, its China-based owner, doesn’t divest by January. TikTok has sued to block that law. Oral arguments in TikTok Inc. v. Merrick Garland were heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in September. The company is joined by eight TikTok creators as plaintiffs in the case, and one of them is Talia Cadet. She has nearly 140,000 followers on TikTok, where she produces lifestyle videos focused on her love of books and travel. She talked with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about the case.