All posts tagged: little evidence

Robots Have Not Revolutionized Caregiving

Robots Have Not Revolutionized Caregiving

The first thing Pepper told me was that he was running out of battery. “He’s got about 15 minutes before he dies,” Emanuel Nunez Sardinha, a Ph.D. candidate in robotics at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, told me. That turned out to be plenty. Sardinha greeted Pepper; then I did. I asked Pepper how he was doing, to which he replied, “How are you doing?” Then Sardinha resumed telling me about the sorts of things Pepper, a friendly, wide-eyed robot designed to assist humans through social interaction, can do, such as talking through an exercise routine while demonstrating upper-body movements (he doesn’t have legs). But Pepper can get “nervous” in crowds—that is, his voice recognition short-circuits in an environment with multiple people talking—which is what seemed to happen at the lab that day. He kept piping up unprompted as we chatted, flustering Sardinha, who, with a gentle apology to Pepper, put him to sleep. For such an underwhelming little robot, Pepper has managed to inspire remarkable faith in his potential over the years. He wasn’t designed for …

On Fear of a Senile President

On Fear of a Senile President

At the height of the Iran-Contra affair in 1986, Saturday Night Live featured a now-classic skit in which Ronald Reagan (played by Phil Hartman) doddered around the Oval Office whenever a journalist or tour group showed up, then snapped into evil-genius mode when they left the room. “Casey!” he barks at CIA Director William Casey. “The TOW missiles and grenade launchers will leave for South Africa at 0800 hours!” He performs lightning-quick mental arithmetic to improvise funding for a covert op. Those who lived through the second Reagan administration may remember the alarm at the president’s creeping senility. That someone with a declining mind and a preoccupation with the apocalypse had to make decisions about thermonuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union was so unsettling that to keep sane, one had to crack jokes about it. President Joe Biden was only 41 when that SNL skit aired. Thirty-eight years later, Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report exonerating Biden in a classified-documents case took palpable digs at the octogenarian’s acuity. Biden reacted angrily, particularly at the assertion that …

How Dyson Took Over TikTok

How Dyson Took Over TikTok

Every time I see a high schooler on TikTok flying through a tutorial of how she gets perfect beach waves with her Dyson Airwrap hair wand, I think of the time my mother straightened my ringlet-curly hair with an iron. Like, on the ironing board, in the kitchen, before a middle-school dance in the 1990s. Or my first Conair flat iron, purchased with money saved up from my summer job, which only got hot enough to make me look like the lead singer of a hair-metal band. Or the time I spent in my freshman college dorm, trying and mostly failing to harness the dexterity and fine motor skills necessary to manipulate the clamp on a Hot Tools curling iron. The Dyson Airwrap is my version of In my day, we used to walk to school uphill, both ways, in the snow. It is my proof, as someone rapidly progressing toward 40, that kids these days are soft. TikTok is crowded with these tutorials, which feature the $600 hair tool or one of its many …

Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore

Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore

You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day. The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless”  and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, “the age of social media is ending,” and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web. Behind these theories is the same general perception: Understanding what is actually happening online has become harder than ever. The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the …

The Murky Shoplifting Narrative – The Atlantic

The Murky Shoplifting Narrative – The Atlantic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Despite inconclusive evidence, some retailers have seized on the narrative that theft is a major issue, pressuring lawmakers to crack down and changing the shopping experience as a result. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The specter of shoplifting is haunting America. Viral videos show frightening scenes: people in masks smashing windows, groups swarming stores, thieves attacking workers. Retail executives have referred to theft as a serious threat, suggesting that their companies are victims of a national crime wave. Already, they have made a number of decisions—including locking up items, closing stores, and advocating for harsher larceny laws—under the auspices of trying to deter theft. Despite some disturbing reports of both violent and nonviolent crime in stores, data do not conclusively show that instances of shoplifting are up everywhere; shoplifting has risen overall during the past …

Donald Trump Is Old – The Atlantic

Donald Trump Is Old – The Atlantic

Donald Trump is an old man. He’s 77 years old. When Trump was born, Harry S. Truman was president and Perry Como topped the year’s pop charts. Betty White hadn’t yet started her career in film. Israel and Pakistan didn’t exist. Korea was a unified country, and Vietnam was not. The pioneering computer ENIAC was just four months old. Trump’s cultural references are dated, and only getting more so. Elton John and the Rolling Stones headline his rally playlists. When, as president, he had a chance to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, his selections included Babe Ruth (who died in 1948) and Elvis (who died in 1977—perhaps). The same goes for his political touchstones. His view of immigration, in which foreign countries dispatch their undesirables en masse, seems to be shaped largely by the 1980 Mariel boatlift. His trade policy is steeped in ’80s-era fears of Japan. He rails against “Communists” and “Marxists” like a Cold Warrior of yore (only with a peculiar affection for the Russians, rather than …

Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment

Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment

When self-checkout kiosks began to pop up in American grocery stores, the sales pitch to shoppers was impressive: Scan your stuff, plunk it in a bag, and you’re done. Long checkout lines would disappear. Waits would dwindle. Small talk with cashiers would be a thing of the past. Need help? Store associates, freed from the drudgery of scanning barcodes, would be close at hand to answer your questions. You know how this process actually goes by now: You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot—wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly you’ve scanned it two or three times. Then you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk’s touch screen from pure muscle memory. If you want to buy something that even might …

Is Mississippi Really as Poor as Britain?

Is Mississippi Really as Poor as Britain?

The shame of it! Mississippi has found itself in the humiliating position of being compared disobligingly with the United Kingdom. Just last week, the Financial Times ran a column asking, “Is Britain Really as Poor as Mississippi?” Most Mississippians do not spend much time worrying about comparisons with Britain. The same cannot be said about those on the other side of the Atlantic. For Brits—and I am one, though now based in Jackson, Mississippi—the issue of whether they are more or less prosperous than Mississippi has become a thing. Indeed, the Financial Times now calls it “the Mississippi Question.” It was nine years ago when Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, first suggested that the U.K. was poorer than any U.S. state but Mississippi. This came as an uncomfortable shock for many in Britain for whom Mississippi, as a byword for backwardness, conjures up clichés about the Deep South. Every time anyone has made the comparison since, there has been an indignant outburst from Britons keen to denounce the data. In practice, when trying …