Elon Musk bought Twitter. Now what?

04/26/22 • 7 min

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Twitter officially accepted a buyout offer from Elon Musk on Monday valued at $44 billion. Musk is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, the richest person in the world and has been described as something of a memelord on Twitter. He’s praised the platform as a bastion of free speech but he has some ideas to make it ... more free: more transparency about the algorithm, maybe an edit button and less content moderation. What he’s not after, he’s said, is making money. Then he’s in the right place, says Amy Webb, a futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute.

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The future tech worker pipeline might not be through college

There are two long-standing trends in the tech industry that have intensified over the last couple years: there are more jobs than workers to fill them, and there’s a need to diversify this workforce. More and more companies are rolling back degree requirements that were part of many job descriptions. Today, we’ll hear how that dynamic has given new opportunities to people like Stanley Omotuyole, who left Nigeria a couple of years ago, giving up a degree program in laboratory science to join his dad in Seattle.

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Could deep-learning algorithms help us prepare for the Big One?

Contrary to what you might have seen in the Rock’s movie “San Andreas,” we still can’t predict earthquakes. But there have been recent advances in seismology assisted by artificial intelligence. Researchers at Stanford used a deep-learning algorithm to detect more earthquakes in cities by filtering out the normal noise and vibrations of urban life. And a group at Penn State used machine learning to analyze simulated fault movements in the lab and look for indicators that could help predict an impending quake. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Egill Hauksson, a research professor of geophysics at Caltech, who said these tools can give us a fuller understanding of earthquake patterns.