Companies are developing ways to defend airports and other critical infrastructure from accidental incursions and deliberate attacks by aerial drones.
Why it matters: Drones provide cheap and easy ways to monitor land, deliver goods and simply explore. But as they proliferate, figuring out a method to prevent them from going where they shouldn't will become increasingly important.
AI companies are developing methods to interpret and synthesize voices in ads, movies and TV.
Why it matters: The advances in voice synthesis could help fix bad movie dubbing — and they come as international content is becoming increasingly important to studios and streaming platforms as part of the globalization of entertainment.
A new short film warns of the coming risks posed by the development and proliferation of lethal autonomous weapons.
Why it matters: Drones with the ability to autonomously target and kill without the assistance of a human operator are reportedly already being used on battlefields, and time is running out to craft a global ban of what could be a destabilizing and terrifying new class of weapon.
Microsoft’s head of gaming understands why Bungie, arguably the most acclaimed game studio in Xbox history, left the tech giant to go independent many years ago, but he thinks his company might have been able to retain them today.
Driving the news: Some fascinating what-if scenarios about Bungie and Xbox are top of mind going into next week, thanks to some major releases.
The largely successful U.S. effort to hobble China's Huawei has benefitted a host of other tech companies — from smartphone makers such as Apple and Xiaomi to chipmakers like Qualcomm to network vendors including Nokia and Ericsson.
Yes, but: The massive disruption to the industry furthered an industry wide mismatch between supply and demand, exacerbating the global chip shortage.
The percentage of the global population using the internet surged from 54% to 63% between 2019 and 2021, with hundreds of millions of people logging on for the first time during the pandemic, according to the UN's International Telecommunication Union.
Breaking it down: Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a big divide globally between residents of urban (76%) and rural (39%) areas. 15- to 24-year-olds (71%) are also more likely to use the internet than older people (57%).
