Marketplace Tech

Marketplace’s Alice Wilder has been waiting for a love letter from her boyfriend to arrive at her home since March. But it’s not just her — years of financial troubles and political turmoil mean that those still sending letters are experiencing longer delivery times. Today, Wilder explores how email has eaten into USPS’ letter traffic since 2008 and whether a romantic email could ever replace the intimacy of a handwritten letter.

A new national study from groups including Gallup and the non-profit Jobs for the Future found that relatively few employees have any influence over how new technology is adopted in the workplace. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Molly Blankenship, director of strategy and impact at Jobs for the Future, about what that means for employers and employees as technology like generative AI becomes more common in the office.

As autonomous vehicles become more common, cities are grappling with how to keep robotaxis from interfering with emergency response efforts. Julia Pickar reports on how Seattle is trying to fix this problem.

The Tea app is a place for women to share red or green flags about men, but it recently suffered a major data breach. Plus, why some members of Congress are protesting a deal with China to allow Nvidia to sell its H20 chips to the country. And YouTube is rolling out new age estimation technology to protect younger users. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to discuss all this.

Simon Johnson, Nobel-winning economist, joined Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to explain his current thinking about AI and inequality. He says the tech could bring productivity gains, but they might not benefit everyone.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks to Sayash Kapoor, a PhD candidate at Princeton and co-author of “AI Snake Oil." He says small tweaks to AI chatbots can often have big, unpredictable effects.

In Canada, road freight is part of the backbone of the economy — historically moving about four-fifths of all goods across the country, with demand growing. But trucking is changing, with digital freight-matching platforms reshaping how drivers find work and how goods get delivered. The BBC’s Sam Gruet reports.

Temperatures this summer have been hotter than usual, a trend we have come to expect with climate change as records are continually surpassed. While many of us can ride out extreme heat in the comfort of air conditioned interior spaces, outdoor workers don’t have that option and must contend with the risks of serious injury which can be acute and long lasting. A fast growing market for wearable cooling products, both in high tech and low tech varieties, is attempting to meet the challenge. Among those products is the CülCan, made by the Tennessee based small business Black Ice. “If you can pull heat away from your hand, it'll cool your whole body down. And so that's what we've done with the CülCan. It's basically a five inch cylinder that contains our special coolant,” said Mike Beavers, co-founder of Black Ice. A key selling point of the product, according to Beavers, is that the coolant inside, which is a chemical composition Beavers designed, doesn’t get as cold as ice, so it is easier to use on a person’s skin. “You put it in ice water or a freezer… and then you just hold it in the palm of your hand,” he said. “That is now our most popular product. We sell tons of those things.” Beavers said his business has been growing by about 30 percent a year over the last three years, an acceleration from its previous pace. The company has been around for about 20 years. Across the Atlantic, the Swiss company GreenTeg is also reporting growing demand for its continuous body temperature monitors, which are worn with a patch or a strap. The monitors are often employed by athletes who have to perform outdoors, said CEO and founder Wulf Glatz. “So this device can communicate then with your smartphone,” he said, “and it will estimate your core temperature and broadcast that value to that device.” Being able to monitor core temperature can help with prevention. Unlike a simple thermometer which, if put against the skin, would only tell you the temperature on your skin, GreenTeg claims its monitors can measure the temperature inside the body. It is that core temperature that is key to whether someone is developing heat-related illness. Glatz says there’s growing interest in his company’s technology. They’ve been approached by organizations representing firefighters, the military, miners and airfield workers. “If there's an airplane landing, you need to unload the baggage. You can't wait for three hours for it to get cooler, but what you can do is to measure the individuals and really have them safe,” he said, “maybe you need to exchange teams in higher frequency, maybe you need to equip them with cooling gear.” Brett Perkison, an environmental and occupational medicine specialist at UTHealth Houston, tested one of GreenTeg’s monitors in combination with cooling vests. In a small study, he found the combination approach helpful in limiting heat related illnesses among outdoor laborers. The problem with the personal cooling industry is that not all of the gadgets being sold to the public are proven to work. For example, ones that use fans to cool the body, such as ventilated helmets, are unlikely to do much in humid environments, said Fabiano Amorim of the University of New Mexico, who has studied heat stress on outdoor workers in Brazil and the U.S. “[Helmets with fans] can increase the comfort or let's say your perception to heat, but it's not reducing your temperature,” he said. Not reducing core body temperature on hot days can have serious consequences. The number of heat-related emergency room visits in the summer of 2023 totaled 120,000, according to the CDC. Heat stress can cause someone to get lightheaded and fatigued. More serious symptoms include seizures. Repeat exposure to heat stress can permanently damage people’s kidneys, Amorim said. The condition can be fatal. “We have seen people 40, 50 years old, [who are] dying from chronic kidney disease. And, they don't have any factor that's related to the...

NASA employees protest budget cuts, Google reportedly eyes licensing deals with 20 national news organizations, and President Donald Trump signed three executive orders on AI this week. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams is joined by Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at venture firm Collab Capital, to break down these stories.

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC. High-flying and high-tech, the very latest in drone technology took to the skies over an airfield near the Danish city of Odense. At the International Drone Show, 50 exhibitors showed off their wares. And because more money is flowing into military budgets, the emphasis was on defense. Danish company Quadsat makes drones with satellite reading software. Besides civilian uses, the devices can also identify enemy radar. "Over the years, we have seen an increasing interest from the defense side, no doubt about that, and that's also where we have a lot of work currently being carried out," said Klaus Aude, Quadsat’s chief commercial officer. Leaders of the NATO military alliance have agreed to ramp up defense spending to 5% of their countries' economic output by 2035, following months of pressure from President Donald Trump. Nordic countries have already committed to bigger budgets. Among them, NATO’s newest members Finland and Sweden, as well as long time members Norway and Denmark. As Europe races to re-arm, drones are a sought-after technology. One estimate suggests the global market for defense drones is already worth over $24 billion, and could double by 2032. "The Nordics have always been very strong in drone adoption, drone development," said Kay Wackwitz, chief executive of Drone Industry Insights. "You can definitely see that those countries that have borders with Russia are really stocking up on those technologies. The commercial market is now struggling for its fourth year in a row with declining venture capital,” added Wackwitz. “And on the other side, we see a huge demand on the military end of things, which means a lot of companies are refocusing from the commercial space to the military space." In June, low-cost Ukrainian drones carried out an audacious mission, destroying dozens of prized Russian fighter jets in a conflict that’s reshaped modern warfare. North of Copenhagen in a hangar, Danish firm Nordic Wing makes drones used for battlefield surveillance and combat. Its customers are NATO countries, but they are largely destined for Ukraine, where “there was a huge need and a calling to have these systems helping on the front lines,” said Jonas Münster, CEO of Nordic Wing. “And therefore, the production went into overdrive. Now we have a European Union that is looking into what we've learned in Ukraine and realizing that we don't have a drone capability in Europe." With a 2,000-square-kilometer flying zone, the drone port in Odense has grown into a hub for tech startups. Next year, military personnel will also be training there at a new $110 million army facility. "Some militaries have actually made a shift from saying ‘every soldier is a rifleman,’ to ‘everyone is going to be a drone operator at some level,’” said Major Rasmus Ros, who’s part of Denmark’s Defense Command. “We're going to have drone operators in the whole joint military of Denmark. They can come here, get their basic training, share ideas and technology development, and then go back to their units and further develop that." But not everyone is so positive about this. Outside the trade fair, protestors chanted "drones for peace, not war." New geopolitical realities are reshaping this fast-paced industry. And as this technology advances, ethical and regulatory concerns over the use of AI to pilot drones are also being raised.

ProPublica has recently discovered blueprints for an automated computer program that could potentially share millions of IRS taxpayer records with ICE, as the Trump administration continues to step up deportations and criminal investigations. When Marketplace asked for comment about the system uncovered by ProPublica, a senior DHS official cited a recent memorandum of understanding that allowed for the sharing of specific taxpayer info with appropriate safeguards and said descriptions of this system as "surveillance" were "absurd." Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with William Turton, one of the reporters on the ProPublica investigation, about how exactly this program would work.

You might have heard Meta has been on a bit of a hiring spree recently as it tries to build out its new AI Superintelligence team. The company has reportedly been offering hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to attract leading AI researchers from rivals like OpenAI, Google and Apple. And it's not just Meta doing the poaching. Tech companies big and small are jumping into the AI Wars. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, a reporter at The Information, about the AI talent wars happening behind the scenes of Silicon Valley. More on this “Meta hires two Apple AI researchers for Superintelligence push, Bloomberg News reports” - from Reuters “Anthropic Revenue Hits $4 Billion Annual Pace as Competition With Cursor Intensifies” - from The Information

With the passage of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, numerous Biden-era clean energy incentives will begin to phase out. Many of those incentives were aimed at onshoring energy and battery manufacturing. Energy demand is only expected to rise as more data centers are built to service AI and electric and autonomous vehicles become more widespread. And storage for that energy has to come from somewhere. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Jeremy Michalek, a professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, about the impacts of the Big Beautiful Bill clean energy rollbacks.

This week on Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review, leaders of tech, energy and private equity promised to invest more than $90 billion to build an AI hub Pennsylvania. Plus, the Trump Administration says chipmaker Nvidia can sell its semiconductors to China again, following a brief ban. But first, Crypto Week wraps up on Capitol Hill. Congress advanced a trio of cryptocurrency bills that could pave the way for more adoption and regulation of digital currencies like bitcoin. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at the Information, about the details of those three bills.

Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Joseph Cox, a reporter at the tech news site 404 Media, about his recent reporting on how ICE is uses ISO ClaimSearch, among other databases, to find deportation targets.

Know how some companies intentionally make it hard for customers to fix their own gadgets? In the armed forces, as military contractors consolidate and equipment becomes increasingly software-driven, it's become a problem. Now, some Pentagon leaders are talking about adding right to repair provisions into procurement contracts. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with now-retired Master Sergeant Wesley Reid, who's spoken out in favor of the military's right to repair, informed by his experiences at an Afghanistan army field hospital in the late 2000s.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Adam Aleksic, author of the new book “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language." He’s a trained linguist and also an influencer who goes by the handle "Etymology Nerd" online. True to his name, he told us what he means when he uses the term “algospeak.”

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Rebecca Lester, a professor of accounting at Stanford, about a tax provision within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that could further tech R&D and innovation.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino leaves the social media giant on the heels of antisemitic posts from AI chatbot Grok. SCOTUS rejects a challenge to a Texas law for age verification online. President Trump this week said he’ll impose a 50% tariff on copper. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to discuss all this.

For years, AI crawlers have scraped data and content from the internet for free. But last week, Cloudflare attempted to change that. With an update to its web services, the tech company keeps AI crawlers out by default. The hope? To create a new economic model that makes AI companies finally pay for the content they collect. In this episode, Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Cloudflare co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, about his vision for a fairer internet.