July 28, 2025

Meet the minds shaping AI: TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 AI Stage revealed

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, the AI Stage comes alive with the voices shaping the future of technology, creativity, and security. Top VCs reveal what it takes to win funding in a rapidly evolving landscape, as they place bets on the next wave of AI founders. Hear groundbreaking insights from leaders at visionary startups like Apptronik, […]

Technology

The Download: living for longer, and sex in the age of AI

August 27, 2024
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. Maybe you will be able to live past 122 How long can humans live? This is a good time to ask the question. The longevity scene is having a moment, thanks to a…

Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity

August 27, 2024
By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Digital scientists will have perfect memory of every research paper ever published and think a million times faster than we can. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics…

This designer creates magic from everyday materials

August 27, 2024
Around 2012, at a bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Skylar Tibbits noticed someone wearing a shirt with the logo of a 3D-printing company. Tibbits, a designer and computer scientist, approached her and posed a question: “Why can’t I print something that walks off the machine?” The idea kicked off a multiyear collaboration between the industrial 3D-printing…

What will AI mean for economic inequality?

August 27, 2024
Prominent AI researchers expect the arrival of artificial general intelligence anywhere between “the next couple of years” and “possibly never.” At the same time, leading economists disagree about the potential impact of AI: Some anticipate a future of perpetually accelerating productivity, while others project more modest gains. But most experts agree that technological advancement, however…

A skeptic’s guide to humanoid-robot videos

August 27, 2024
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. We are living in “humanoid summer” right now, if you didn’t know. Or at least it feels that way to Ken Goldberg, a roboticist extraordinaire who leads research in the field at the University of…

Readying business for the age of AI

August 26, 2024
Rapid advancements in AI technology offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance business operations, customer and employee engagement, and decision-making. Executives are eager to see the potential of AI realized. Among 100 c-suite respondents polled in WNS Analytics’ “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI” report, 76% say they are already implementing or planning to implement generative…

Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology

August 26, 2024
Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually…

Maybe you will be able to live past 122

August 26, 2024
The UK’s Office of National Statistics has an online life expectancy calculator. Enter your age and sex, and the website will, using national averages, spit out the age at which you can expect to pop your clogs. For me, that figure is coming out at 88 years old. That’s not too bad, I figure, given…

AI and the future of sex

August 26, 2024
The power of pornography doesn’t lie in arousal but in questions. What is obscene? What is ethical or safe to watch?  We don’t have to consume or even support it, but porn will still demand answers. The question now is: What is “real” porn?  Anti-porn crusades have been at the heart of the US culture…