We often take the internet for granted. It’s an ocean of information at our fingertips—and it simply works. But this system relies on swarms of “crawlers”—bots that roam the web, visit millions of websites every day, and report what they see. This is how Google powers its search engines, how Amazon sets competitive prices, and…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few words in a search box and in return…
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Every day, we are tracked hundreds or even thousands of times across the digital world. Cookies and web trackers capture every website link that we click,…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The start of a new year, and maybe especially this one, feels like a good time for a gut check: How optimistic are you feeling about the future of technology? Our…
The average lifespan of companies has drastically declined over the decades, raising urgent questions about what it takes to build a business that endures. Here is what I’ve learned from my 100+ year-old business.