In late November, during a conversation that would have ended with a shrug in any other year, I became aware that something had changed. Almost casually, a friend who works in corporate treasury for a mid-sized European industrial group mentioned that her team had paid a cross-border supplier over the weekend. Not on Monday. Not even on Sunday evening. Half the office was watching football on a Saturday afternoon. A stablecoin was the rail. Surprisingly, the bank of the counterparty did not recoil. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t make news, which is exactly why it’s important. The sector…
A discovery that went unnoticed for almost twenty years has a subtle thrill. While the…
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The King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh doesn’t seem like the birthplace of international tech regulations. Footsteps are absorbed by the thick carpets. Besides the translation headsets are half-finished coffee cups. Attendees lean forward and pay close attention as presenters go over a topic that was previously thought to be solely Californian: the proper conduct of artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley is not the source of this conversation. In collaboration with the Islamic World Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority has started to develop an ethics charter that goes beyond governing AI in the…
Driving in Abu Dhabi these days feels like you’re being watched, but not in the oppressive way you might anticipate. If you’re driving down Sheikh Zayed Road on a Tuesday afternoon, there aren’t any noticeable changes. The traffic is moving. The signals fulfill their purpose. However, beneath that unremarkable exterior, a vast amount of machine learning is sorting through each lane change, brake tap, and instance in which a driver uses a phone for a half-second too long. These are the kinds of numbers that make traffic engineers take notice. Speaking at Gulf Traffic Week, officials said that since 2019,…
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