A clearer view of a changing world.
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Markets, labor, trade and the forces behind them.
Large employers describe moving software agents from pilot projects into routine back-office tasks. The harder problems are oversight, accountability and what happens to the people who used to do the work.
The Daily Edition Illustrative Desk · 2 min read · Complete coverage
Grid operators cleared more projects than last year, in this illustrative scenario, but new applications outpaced them. The bottleneck in the energy transition is no longer building generation. It is plugging it in.
2 min read
Policymakers in this illustrative scenario kept borrowing costs unchanged while they wait for clearer data on prices and employment.
Economy
A typewriter maker bought the two most important computer start-ups in America, led the industry for a few years and then lost it. The corporate history explains a great deal about how technology businesses rise and fall.
History
Humanoid robots walk convincingly in videos and fold laundry in laboratories. The gap between demonstration and deployment is wider than the videos suggest, and the reasons are instructive.
Future Desk
Output per hour rose in sectors with heavy adoption of AI tools, according to figures described in this illustrative scenario. The same figures are consistent with several explanations that have nothing to do with AI.
2 min read
A model that answers is a reference tool. A model that acts is a colleague, a contractor or a liability. The difference between the two is smaller in code than it is in consequence.
3 min read
Before Silicon Valley there was Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia, a glider factory in St. Paul and a laboratory in Norwalk, Connecticut. The first American computers were built in places that made typewriters and aircraft parts, by companies that no longer exist, in towns that do.
4 min read
Between a result in a laboratory and a treatment in a clinic lie a decade, a billion dollars and a failure rate above ninety percent. Understanding the path explains why so many breakthroughs never arrive.
2 min read
A single employer could build a town's housing, fund its schools and set its rhythm for a century. When the industry moved or died, the town remained. Local history is largely the history of that relationship.
2 min read
A synthetic series showing how a backlog of generation projects could grow even as approvals rise. Demonstration data, clearly labeled, standing in for the real figures the production edition would draw from Berkeley Lab.
The World in Numbers
In 1956 a trucking executive loaded fifty-eight metal boxes onto a tanker in Newark. The shipping container that resulted did more to create global trade than any treaty.
The Curiosity Page
Cameras now record the position of every player and the ball dozens of times a second. The data changed how games are coached, broadcast and bet on, and raised questions about who owns an athlete's movement.
The Curiosity Page