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…
Spotlight
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,…
More Stories
Walk into any primary care office these days and you’ll likely find a waiting room…
On a Tuesday morning, open any financial news app and scroll past the headlines to…
Watch what happens when the card reader malfunctions while standing at the counter of practically…
A collection of photos had been sitting unexamined since 2017 somewhere in the enormous Mikulski…
A panel of university presidents convened in one of Abu Dhabi’s glass-and-marble conference spaces last…
Somewhere in the Sahara Desert in 2011, a fragment of Mars was sitting on the…
When you were younger, you were told that getting eight hours of sleep was the…
Researchers constructed a labyrinth at Adelaide University. It’s not big; rather, it’s made to fit…
There’s a particular kind of irony that tends to follow success in the crypto world.…
There’s a particular kind of silence that falls over financial markets when Washington finally makes…
There is something almost defiant about the Rub’ al Khali. It sits in the southeastern…
There’s a particular kind of dread that settles over trading floors on a Friday afternoon…
There’s something quietly unsettling about the idea that your body may already be carrying a…
Living in an expensive place for too long can lead to a certain kind of…
Every year, Makkah experiences a unique kind of controlled chaos as the city is asked…
When the January jobs report landed Wednesday morning, the reaction was almost immediate. Markets ticked…
A certain type of silent power exists that doesn’t make an announcement. It’s easy to…
There’s a particular kind of company that Wall Street takes for granted — the ones…
Seeing the largest health insurer in the world by revenue, ranked seventh on the Fortune…
Standing on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and gazing up at 270 Park Avenue, the…
Around the time of their fortieth birthday, most people hear someone say, usually a doctor,…
It’s 1997, and Jeff Bezos is standing before a room of skeptical investors explaining, again,…
It began as an experiment over the weekend. Six AI agents were given access to…
First-time homebuyers in America are currently experiencing a certain kind of silent desperation. The median…