Marketplace Tech

The digital detox economy is estimated to grow to $20 billion by 2032. The gamification that got you addicted to your phone might be the key to putting it down.

When it comes to homebuilding, Ronda Conger, vice president of CBH Homes, wants to be like the Savannah Bananas.“We are out there trying to do things so differently,” she said. “It's one of the reasons we embraced AI so quickly.”But there are growing fears that artificial intelligence will begin to replace human employees. For Conger's team, the bots are doing the grunt work, so the real humans can shine.

2025 brought some new speed bumps for electric vehicle sales, namely the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It cut federal EV tax credits — up to $7,500 for new cars and $4,000 for used ones. Those incentives had been on the books in some form since 2008 and were expanded during the Biden administration. They expired at the end of September. Consumers rushed to take advantage before they disappeared, leading to record high sales earlier this year. But now the market faces an uncertain road ahead.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with her colleague Henry Epp about the outlook for EV sales in the U.S. now that federal tax credits are gone.

AI psychosis became a thing in 2025. That's when a chatbot leads a user into a delusional spiral.The technology's tendency to affirm what people say can result in conversations that become untethered from reality and, in the worst cases, has ended with real-world harms. Kashmir Hill has been reporting on this phenomenon for The New York Times.Content warning: This episode includes mention of self harm and suicide.

This year turned out to be a pretty big year for autonomous vehicles. Waymo is the leader in the robotaxi race and over the last year, its signature Jaguar electric vehicles have become a common sight on the streets and recently freeways of cities around the country.Companies like Uber and Zooks have expanded their fleets to several metropolitan areas. And Tesla finally rolled out its cybercab service in a limited capacity in Austin.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Kirsten Korosec, transportation editor at TechCrunch, about how the robotaxi became a common fixture on city streets this year.

About half of U.S. states now require some form of online age verification to prevent kids from accessing certain content — usually pornography. But in some cases, that also means broader categories of adult content that include social media. Drew Harwell, tech reporter at The Washington Post, has been following this.

Will Gottsegen, a staff writer at The Atlantic, tests out Meta's AI smart glasses and gives us a recap of how AI continues to get embedded in consumer tech.

Polystyrene is the chemical compound that makes up styrofoam, which is used for packaging and insulation. But it's not the most environmentally friendly.By one estimate, 40 million tons of polystyrene were produced globally in 2024, leaving millions of tons of plastic waste. The search for an earth-friendly alternative has led researchers to dig deep and come up with an unlikely solution: fungus. The BBC's Anna Holligan has this story.

In January, we saw a who's who of tech leaders front and center at President Donald Trump's inauguration.Since, the White House has advocated for the build out of AI infrastructure and put a moratorium on state-level AI regulation. But the Trump administration also added a $100,000 fee to petitions for H-1B visas, which are widely used in the tech sector. To review the year in tech and Trump we called up Suyash Pasi, a research analyst and editor at the nonprofit Human Rights Research Center, who's been following this shift.

Could AI chat bots replace human doctors? Probably not, but that won't stop people from trying.Just as they did during the emergence of Google, doctors across the country are grappling with the changing healthcare landscape thanks to artificial intelligence. Today on the show, Dr. Hassan Bencheqroun, a pulmonary and intensive care doctor in San Diego, California, talks about his approach to the intersection of patient care and AI.

Building artificial intelligence tools requires a lot of graphic processing units, and those GPUs need huge amounts of ultra-fast memory to feed them data. Micron Technology is one of a handful of memory chip makers that has been selling a whole lot of memory, thanks to the AI boom.Plus, cloud company Oracle's data center debt is coming under scrutiny. And Merriam-Webster names the word of the year for 2025: slop.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, to learn more on this week's Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

Search engines, social media, e-commerce, and mobile games all make money by selling advertising. But making ads work in AI search might not be so straight forward. Perplexity, for instance, reportedly pulled back on plans to integrate ads into their AI search engine. And internal documents showed the company made only $20,000 in ad revenue in the fourth quarter last year. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Garrett Johnson, professor of marketing at Boston University to get a sense of why jumping into the ad business is difficult.

A career in tech was once seen as a safe bet — the jobs were plentiful, the pay was ample. But this year the tech sector had another “meh” year for hiring according to the job site Indeed. Tech jobs have been declining now for several years, but this year, the losses at least seemed to stabilize, according to Indeed's latest Jobs & Hiring Trends Report. Still, job postings in the industry remain well below their pre-pandemic baseline. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Indeed senior economist Cory Stahle for a look at how this year turned out for the tech job market.

Tech giants are estimated to have spent almost $400 billion in capital expenditures this year, mostly to build data centers for artificial intelligence. A single massive facility can have a price tag in the billions of dollars.And many states want in on that spending spree. Thirty-seven states have some sort of incentive program to attract data centers with the hope of bringing a boost to their local economies. They're giving away hundreds of millions in tax exemptions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nicholas Miller, policy associate at NCSL, to learn more.

Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at NYU, explains the differences between large language models and "world models" — and why he thinks the latter are key to achieving artificial general intelligence.

There's been something of a critical mass of high-profile departures and retirement announcements at Apple in recent weeks. Plus, how will consumers be helped or hurt by a potential merger between Netflix and Warner Bros or a hostile takeover from Paramount? And McDonald's pulls an AI-generated Christmas ad because some folks on social media weren't “lovin' it.” Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal for this week's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

The AI boom is propelling a once-obscure group of state regulators into key decision-making roles for the economy. AI needs data centers, data centers need power and power is generally regulated in some way — depending on the state — by public utilities commissions.That's the topic of a new report from the Center on Technology Policy at NYU. Scott Brennen, CTP director and author of the report, said these commissions often make decisions on planning and permitting for new infrastructure and decide the rates utilities charge consumers.

The extended Black Friday sale season means a lot of people have been buying new TVs. The top sets today can display in up to 8K Ultra High Definition, they have deeper blacks, brighter highlights and are thinner and lighter-weight than ever. And yet, modern TVs have their haters — a dedicated group of purists who find them lacking, and would rather hunt down a good old fashioned used plasma.

Prosthetic limbs can be expensive, costing thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the industry seemed ripe for disruption when 3D printing came along. The technology requires little labor and uses economical materials. But the reality of 3D printing prosthetic limbs isn't that straightforward, according to writer and University of California, Berkeley, lecturer Britt Young, who uses a prosthetic arm. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Young about why 3D printing has yet to bring down prosthesis costs.

A new report from Stanford and Common Sense Media finds that more than half of U.S. teens use AI chatbots for companionship. But, according to Dr. Darja Djordjevic, an adolescent and adult psychiatrist who co-authored the research, the bots aren't equipped to provide the kind of emotional support young people need when dealing with a mental health issue.Dr. Djordjevic and her team simulated conversations involving various mental health concerns with four of the most popular consumer chatbots and identified several risks; chiefly, their tendency to be sycophantic. A note, this conversation mentions suicide and self-harm.

The Trump administration has been trying for months to ban AI regulations at the state level. And its latest gambit to roll such a measure into the congressional National Defense Authorization Act appears to have failed. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Tuesday that GOP leadership is now “looking at other places” to include that measure after reportedly facing pushback from both parties.Plus, New York recently became the first state to enforce an AI law designed to protect consumers from "algorithmic pricing." And Amazon pulled back on AI dubbing for some international content after anime fans complained.

Every day, consumers are confronted with the fragility of our personal data privacy — another data breach, another government agency accessing databases they didn't previously have access to, another consent form popping up to get permission to gather more data.It's almost too much for any one person to keep a handle on, according to Rohan Grover, professor of artificial intelligence and media at American University. He recently co-authored a piece for The Conversation about why data privacy seems to have largely fallen out of the public discourse, even though he says the topic is more urgent than ever.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once speculated that we'll soon see the first billion-dollar company run by one person and an army of AI agents. Journalist Evan Ratliff decided to put the idea to the test in the newest season of his podcast, “Shell Game,” where Ratliff and his team of synthetic co-founders, executives and workers launched their startup, HurumoAI. His AI agents designed a logo, built a website and eventually released their own agentic AI service. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ratliff about what he learned from this whole experience.

Robots are commonplace in factories, and increasingly in warehouses like those run by Amazon. But what about robots to help with household chores — so-called humanoids to load the dishwasher or fold the laundry?To find out, we checked in with Ken Goldberg, professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and co-founder of the AI and robotics company Ambi Robotics. He spoke to Marketplace's Nova Safo en route from a robotics conference in China.

Marketplace's Matt Levin visits a couple in suburban Sacramento who both use an AI-enabled pendant that acts as a personal assistant — and sometimes, a relationship therapist.

Accessibility has long been aided by the advancement of technology. When it comes to artificial intelligence, accessibility is top of mind for Taylor Arndt, Chief Operations Officer at Techopolis Online Solutions. Arndt has been blind since birth, and so accessibility has been a lifelong battle. When she was in school, she often received physical materials she was unable to read. So, she bought her own hand-held scanner and downloaded a screen reader. At 14, Arndt taught herself to code. Now as a coder working on AI, Arndt says in order for it to help others, the AI models need to be trained on data that has already incorporated accessibility measures.

Sub-Saharan Africa has a youth unemployment problem. The latest figures from the International Labour Organisation show more than one in five young people there are "NEET": Not in Employment, Education or Training. Structural issues like the lack of political stability in many countries and lagging infrastructure remain major barriers to high quality job creation. But the gig economy has been growing rapidly thanks to the proliferation of digital platforms. The The BBC's Wairimu Gitani reports.

Hannah Quay-de la Vallee, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, coauthored a recent report that recommends more transparency on what artificial intelligence education technologies can and cannot do.

In the Trump administration's efforts to shrink and realign the federal government, datasets on climate, health and demographics have disappeared. Some have been scrubbed from public view, others may not be collected anymore. This data supported apps and interactive tools many researchers relied upon.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Denice Ross, senior advisor with the Federation of American Scientists and former chief data scientist for the U.S., who recently wrote a tribute to the data that's been lost.

Dr. Carlos Chaccour, physician scientist at the University of Navarra, noticed something fishy about a letter to the editor the New England Journal of Medicine received shortly after it published a paper of his on malaria treatment in July.The letter was riddled with strange errors such as critiques supposedly based on other research Chaccour himself had written. So he and his co-author Matthew Rudd decided to dig deeper.They analyzed patterns of letters to the editor over the last decade and found a remarkable increase in what they call "prolific debutantes" — new authors who suddenly had dozens, even hundreds of letters published, starting right around the time OpenAI's ChatGPT came out.Why would academics want to do this? Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Chaccour to find out.

The holiday shopping season is here, and AI companies are pushing new chatbot retail partnerships. But, can these tools deliver on their promises to make shopping easier? Plus, the return of Vine, the beloved video app known for its ultra-short absurdist memes.But first, Meta is not a monopoly, according to a federal judge's ruling this week in the longstanding antitrust case against the social media giant, which claimed Meta had stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to discuss all of the above on this week's “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched by Elon Musk's xAI last month, promises to be an ideological alternative to Wikipedia. But the tool doesn't just have a different political flavor, argues Ryan McGrady, senior fellow at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.He recently wrote, for Tech Policy Press, that Grokipedia takes a more top-down approach to knowledge, one that harks back to less democratized eras.

China recently came out with its latest five-year plan for growth, which will guide the world's second largest economy through 2030. In it, top Communist Party leaders have pushed to boost the country's strength in manufacturing to the next level by upgrading older factories with advanced technologies for automation.The challenge, according to the Chinese ministry of education, is that the sector has tens of millions of open jobs because there aren't enough skilled workers in the labor force to fill them.One school is trying to bridge that gap. Marketplace China correspondent Jennifer Pak visited it in Nanjing city.

One thing almost everyone can agree on about Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York City: he's very good at vertical short-form video.Love it or hate it, the format has a stylistic language all its own. So, we asked Joshua Scacco, professor of communications and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to help us dissect what exactly makes a political short form video effective.

About a third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from our food systems, and livestock production is a big part of that. Experts largely agree that one of the biggest actions individuals can take to lower emissions is to eat less meat.But that's a hard sell for a lot of consumers. Americans have actually been eating more meat in recent years, and sales of plant-based meat alternatives have dropped.There are a lot of companies out there trying to innovate climate-friendly meat and alternatives for the future.For our podcast "How We Survive," Marketplace's Amy Scott visits a lab at Columbia University where researchers are figuring out how to make a more convincing and enjoyable fake meat.

This week we learned the Japanese investment firm Softbank sold all of its stake in the juggernaut chipmaker Nvidia. We'll get into why on today's “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Apple is reportedly pushing back the release of its thinnest iPhone, the Air, and Wikipedia is asking AI companies, once again, to pay for scraping its data.But first, back to that big move by Softbank and its CEO, Masayoshi Son. It cashed out its stake in Nvidia in October, the same month that the chipmaker hit a $5 trillion valuation. The $5.8 billion it netted will be redirected to OpenAI, part of a promised $30 billion to be invested in the maker of ChatGPT.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, about what all this means.SoftBank Sells Its Nvidia Stake for $5.8 Billion to Fund OpenAI Bet - The Wall Street JournalSoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion - CNBCApple Delays Release of Next iPhone Air Amid Weak Sales - The InformationiPhone Air Sales Are So Bad That Apple's Delaying the Next-Generation Version - MacRumorsWikipedia urges AI companies to use its paid API, and stop scraping - TechCrunchIn the AI era, Wikipedia has never been more valuable - the Wikimedia Foundation

Tech firms are racing to develop robot assistants that can take over our dreaded household chores. But teaching machines to perform these deceptively simple tasks is tedious. They need to observe the actions thousands, sometimes millions of times. And there's a cottage industry springing up to provide this training. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ayanna Howard, roboticist and dean of Ohio State University's college of engineering, to learn more.

Combatting climate change will likely require a multi-pronged approach to renewable energy generation. After all, it's not sunny or windy everywhere all the time. Geothermal energy, which harnesses the natural heat generated by the earth, can significantly shrink the carbon footprint of heating and cooling buildings. Those systems are currently just a small part of the HVAC market. But the Department of Energy wants to accelerate production by 10% a year. Rae Solomon at KUNC in Northern Colorado reports on how one geothermal project in the municipality of Hayden is progressing.

Some AI companies are turning to nuclear power to meet demand for electricity. But traditional nuclear plants can take decades to bring online. Now some tech companies are partnering with startups trying to build small, modular nuclear reactors, designed with speed in mind. One such company, Kairos, has a deal with Google to build a fleet of modular reactors. To do so, it's relying on a technique first developed in the mid-20th century: molten-salt cooling.

Extreme weather caused by climate change is affecting agriculture and raising the cost of foods like coffee, olive oil and chocolate. Cocoa prices have been hitting record highs due to extreme rainfall, drought and heat. And some experts say most of the land used for cocoa production won't be usable in the future. Marketplace's Amy Scott, host of our podcast "How We Survive," explores a new way tech entrepreneurs are making chocolate so that we can keep enjoying it for years to come.

On today's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we discuss federal cybersecurity cutbacks that affected this week's elections and a caucus of Midwestern states pushing to join the AI boom. Plus, Sens. Josh Hawley and Mark Warner introduced a bipartisan bill requiring some companies to report when AI replaces workers. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios tech policy reporter Maria Curi about these headlines and more.

Big tech companies have invested hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure, including data centers that are popping up all over the country. Constructing the facilities brings in jobs to local communities, but what happens once the construction is finished? Former Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Pat Harker says tech companies owe a longer-lasting benefit to the communities that host data centers.Marketplace tech host Nova Safo talked with Pat Harker about his proposal for a “digital AI land grant act.”