If you've taken a college entry test in the last few years, your personal information may have been used to decide which colleges can recruit you.
Why it matters: Universities and other educational organizations are buying high schoolers' personal data from SAT administrator College Board to target and recruit future students. More than 3 million students in 2018 gave up their personal information in the process of taking the SAT, ACT and PSAT, the New York Times reports.
It's one thing to play chess against a computer — you'll lose — but it's another entirely to play a collaborative word game. That stretches the limits of today's AI.
What's happening: Game geeks are trying to create bots that can play Codenames, the super-popular word guessing game.
We're seeing the beginnings of a tug-of-war at the highest levels of government over how much access people should have to AI systems that make critical decisions about them.
What's happening: Life-changing determinations, like the length of a criminal's sentence or the terms of a loan, are increasingly informed by AI programs. These can churn through oodles of data to detect patterns invisible to the human eye, potentially making more accurate predictions than before.
Some technologists look at the pileup of crises weighing down American health care — overworked doctors, overpriced treatments, wacky health record systems — and see an opportunity to overhaul the industry, which could save lives and make them money.
Yes, but: There's frequently a chasm between can-do engineers itching to rethink health care and the deliberate doctors and nurses leery of tech that can make their lives more complicated, or worse, harm their patients.
Already facing antitrust and privacy enforcement actions from governments around the globe, major tech companies are now grappling with a slew of new potential threats from individual states.
Why it matters:Local governments are more nimble and have higher levels of public trust than Congress, so they have more latitude to get laws passed quickly.
The backlash against Big Tech is on track to escalate around the world in 2020 — and with more concrete consequences.
Driving the news: Just this week The Verge published leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg's internal Facebook meetings, wherein he claimed Facebook would win the legal challenge posed by Elizabeth Warren if she were elected president.