Keyboard warriors. Instagram. Finance bros. Crypto scammers (and their enablers). And most of all, financial hoarders masquerading as super-humans. Pope Leo XIV had words for all these groups and many more in that “AI-must-be-disarmed” encyclical the Vatican released this week. You’ve seen the headlines about artificial intelligence and the risks [Keep reading]
Dr. Maurice Sholas has a beautiful, challenging calling — he cares for very sick children. He takes on the saddest of cases, and works with families so kids with spina bifida or traumatic injuries can still “win” at life. For some, that means gaining the ability to visit the bathroom [Keep reading]
The most dangerous hack is a brain hack. And criminals are getting very, very good at that. Meanwhile, I fear, the rest of us have spent precious little time learning to defend against brain hacks. Hopefully today’s piece will help a little. Today I’m going to discuss an important way [Keep reading]
Once in a while, a human being does the right thing and you wonder why it took so long I’ve long held the opinion that the only real use case for cryptocurrency is fraud; we can debate that. Crypto kiosks, on the other hand, leave little room for discussion. These [Keep reading]
The parent company of Cash App, After Pay and Square laid off nearly half its staff this week. Wall Street cheered, sending the stock up nearly 20%. Get used to headlines like this. Owner Jack Dorsey — the founder of Twitter — claims AI enabled the workforce slashing. My hunch [Keep reading]
The next time you fire up your favorite streaming service, the music you hear might be made by a robot. Maybe you don’t care; you’re just looking for something to help you kill those 30 minutes on the treadmill. But you should care. The sound you might not hear is [Keep reading]
Want to cut your rent in half? There’s a new, easy way to do that! Just pay the second half in two weeks. Sound crazy? Many landlords are offering this option now, just the latest incursion of buy now, pay later into consumers’ lives. If you haven’t yet encountered the [Keep reading]
There’s been several celebrated scandals recently involving sports betting in the U.S. — pro basketball and baseball players are accused of manipulating prop bets in small but important ways. But I want to talk with you today about a much less famous, but perhaps more important, online betting scandal: addiction. [Keep reading]
By any measure you can find, fraud is soaring in the U.S. and around the world. I spent an hour on WHYY radio recently discussing the causes for this, but I can boil it down to one concept: big, uncaring companies have dehumanized customers and employees alike, creating a perfect [Keep reading]
Only an egghead inside a Big Tech company would devise a plan to fight crime that involves charging criminals more to access victims. Behavioral economics, right! When you make 10 percent of your revenue from crime, how else would you try to stop it? Reuters recently reported these stunning facts, [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan