Five Things Tech: Apple, Smart TV, Musk, Digital Education, Really long cables
Everything you should read about Tech right now.
Aaaaaaan we’re back with another edition of Five Things Tech. Today, this is on our agenda: Apple wants to make its chip supply chain more American, starting with a gigantic GlobalWafers factory that looks like a sci-fi monument to silicon. The company is flexing its influence to get TSMC and others to buy U.S.-made wafers and push the ecosystem forward. Meanwhile, your smart TV might secretly double as a web crawler, helping AI models scrape half the internet through Bright’s SDK—so much for just watching Netflix. Elon Musk, now fully in his techno-utopian phase, is talking about “sustainable abundance” and using it to tie together his sprawling empire of robots, rockets, and AI, which makes me think he might as well test that theory on Mars. Fortune worries that tablets in schools have made a generation less cognitively sharp, but I see it more as a transitional chaos: we’re still figuring out how to learn in the digital age. And Wired says goodbye to the legendary undersea cable that connected continents through glass strands of light—reminding me of the days when calling across the Atlantic cost a small fortune.
This is my very subjective and opinionated selection of articles you should read this week.
Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖
Inside Apple’s Push to Build an All-American Chip
The quarter-mile long facility begins with a digital-era Stonehenge: a room of 35-foot-tall machines that grow torpedo-shaped silicon ingots weighing hundreds of pounds. The ingots are cut into wafers, polished and placed into special shipping containers that will carry them throughout the chip supply chain so their delicate properties aren’t ruined.
Apple is helping the company sell its wafers by pushing TSMC and other chip makers to use them, said Mark England, president of GlobalWafers’s U.S. operation. The company hopes Apple’s help will enable it to expand the facility faster, said England, in part to take advantage of tax credits.
Apple designs its own chips. TSMC makes them. Apple has helped anoint TSMC as the world’s dominant chip manufacturer by committing to use TSMC’s leading-edge technology, also called a process node, in its designs. That gives TSMC confidence to invest gigantic sums in the new plants each successive chip generation requires.
Your smart TV may be crawling the web for AI
The catch? With Bright’s SDK, a viewer’s smart TV becomes part of a massive global proxy network that crawls and scrapes the web. Including apps running on desktop PCs and mobile devices, the company claims to operate 150 million such residential proxies worldwide. Together, these devices gather petabytes of public web data from a wide range of different locations and IP addresses. This approach allows the company to capture localized versions of websites, but also helps to circumvent web crawler blacklists.
And I always wondered how those residential proxies really work. Now I know.
A World Where All Is Free? That’s Elon Musk’s Theory of ‘Sustainable Abundance.’
Mr. Musk’s push for sustainable abundance is a window into what appears to be his rising techno-optimism. It is a major departure from his position a decade ago when he said unchecked A.I. would destroy the human race.
The concept gives Mr. Musk, 54, an organizing mission for his companies, which he can use to promote and expand his businesses through new technologies. It helps explain why Tesla is trying to shift from electric cars, where sales have flagged, to servant-like robots called Optimus. SpaceX, which merged with xAI this month, has said it wants to build A.I. data centers in space and “self-growing bases on the Moon,” as it prepares for an initial public offering that could take place as soon as June.
I think that Mr. Musk, 54, should shoot himself up to Mars and stay there.
The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents
While skills measured by these tests, like literacy and numeracy, aren’t always indicative of intelligence, they are a reflection of cognitive capability, which Horvath said has been on the decline over the last decade or so.
Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds around the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores. He blamed students having unfettered access to technology that atrophied rather than bolstered learning capabilities. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn’t help.
I’m not alarmed by this. I think we are all running in high speed right now and trying to ty our shoelaces by doing so. We are still in the early days of figuring out the digital stuff around us.
Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible
Most people call them “internet cables,” but technically, fiber-optic transmission was developed for telephone calls. One of the people involved was an English scientist named Alec Reeves, who also spent his time working on psychokinesis and telepathy. With fiber, voices become light, pulsate across spiderweb-thin strings of glass, and become voices again in your handset on the other end. Maybe there isn’t that much of a conceptual leap between that and moving things with your mind. TAT is short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone, and TAT-8—built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom—was the eighth transoceanic system across the Atlantic. It was the first to use optical fibers to transmit traffic between Europe and the United States. Fiber optics for communication had only been worked out in theory in the 1960s, and terrestrial cables were first used in the 1970s. But using this technology to span continents was practically tantamount to human galactic expansion. When TAT-8 went into service on December 14, 1988, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov spoke on video link from New York to audiences in Paris and London: “Welcome everyone to this historic transatlantic crossing,” he said, “this maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light.” AT&T made a TV ad, in which an earnest voice-over promised a “worldwide intelligent network” where people could send information in any format to anyone they want.
And I remember how expensive those trans-atlantic calls where in the late 80s, early 90s. Something my kids will never understand. To me, those cables are just a marvelous piece of technology.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
🤖
— Nico