Anyone who has shopped online in the last few years knows the drill. A chat window opens before you’ve even started browsing. A scarcity banner flashes: “only two left.” A pop-up asks for your email in exchange for a discount you didn’t request. Real people shop in fragments, preferences, half-formed ideas, and even a blend…
The Government of Canada has brought on former Google CFO and Inovia Capital partner Patrick Pichette to spearhead its newly formed digital transformation agency. The news: The feds announced the launch of Digital Transformation Canada and Pichette’s appointment as its CEO on Thursday. The organization will absorb Shared Services Canada, the Canadian Digital Service, and…
A new paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month concluded, after surveying hundreds of studies on AI in medicine, that not only is AI already an indispensable tool that supports doctors, but that it’s in many ways surpassing them, and will soon be able to care patients on its own…
Will AI supercharge the economy? Will the data centers powering it bring prosperity and provide paying jobs to the communities they’re built in? Probably not. New research shows that rapid rise of AI has instead coincided with “unusually high levels” of unemployment among college graduates in Texas, the Financial Times reports. Texas, crucially, is the…
Uber drivers and their passengers across Nigeria and Uganda were shocked on Wednesday when the platform abruptly ceased operations in the middle of the day — and, in some cases, even mid-trip. According to reporting by the Register, the “Uber rapture,” as it’s come to be known, came with little warning — an email notice…
Evolution is a blessing and a curse. The same natural phenomenon that gave humans opposable thumbs also threatens farmers’ crop outputs by giving pests better resistance to pesticides every year. “If you’re getting a flu vaccine, you don’t think about what flu strain is out there; someone has thought about it in the back end,…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM A space telescope with 100 times the sky coverage of Hubble lifted off from Florida this past Sunday. Astronomers have been waiting nearly a decade for this. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope survived two White House attempts to cancel it and is now on its way to a…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There’s a lot tangled up in choosing a fertility clinic. Some of it is practical: where is it, what does it cost, what are their numbers. Some of it is harder to put into words, like whether you feel genuinely seen and supported through a process that’s already emotionally…
While most of the vandals ripping down automatic license plate readers prefer to go incognito, an Albuquerque character named Jevon Martinez isn’t afraid to show his face. Weeks after Bernalillo county officials cancelled their contract with the controversial surveillance company Flock earlier this year, Martinez noticed the automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) were still up….
French quantum company Quandela has made its Canada-based photonic quantum computer available to users of the Quantum Computing Sandbox (QCS), Canada’s national program intended to accelerate quantum adoption across academia and businesses. The news: Quandela announced on Thursday that it signed an agreement with CMC Microsystems to join the QCS as a cloud-based computing services…
