Marketplace Tech

''Marketplace Tech'' podcast, hosted by the Marketplace Tech staff.

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AI's role in human productivity and prosperity

AI's role in human productivity and prosperity

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.

Small tweaks to AI prompts can have significant impacts on output

Small tweaks to AI prompts can have significant impacts on output

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.

Apps that match truckers and loads are changing freight transport

Apps that match truckers and loads are changing freight transport

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.

The growing market for cool wearables to help beat the heat

The growing market for cool wearables to help beat the heat

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 traditional chronic kidney disease. That's hypertension, obesity and diabetes. And, the only history these people have is working under hot environments,” Amorim said. 


Many people do not develop serious symptoms until it’s too late. That means employers must be proactive in employing cooling gadgets and strategies such as rest breaks in shaded areas, access to cool water, and access to bathrooms so workers feel confident in drinking plenty of liquids


But while more tools to avoid heat illness are coming to market, companies are not racing to adopt them. Many do not have adequate heat stress prevention programs at all. 


“There needs to be an acceptance by the business community, the public community, about the ramifications of heat stress. So I would hope that if we continue, instead of having 20% of businesses having an adequate heat stress prevention program, in 10 years, we'll have 80%,” Perkison said. 


Adopting cooling gadgets as part of prevention programs faces hurdles. Aside from concerns over efficacy, there is also the problem of measurement. Perkison said it is hard to tell when someone is struggling with heat before symptoms start. 


“There's not a lab value that we can get to identify when somebody has heat stress,” he said, which means that it is hard for companies to keep track of workers’ health and know when to take action, unless they use a digital monitor like the one provided by GreenTeg. 


Mike Beavers, the Tennessee-based inventor of the CülCan, said he has been surprised by the diversity of his client base, including the many people with multiple sclerosis who are using it. 


The disease of the central nervous system causes symptoms such as numbness and trouble walking which, for some, can worsen in heat. 


“We had one guy write us a full one page letter handwritten that basically he was bragging about the fact that he could actually go out and cut his yard now,” Beavers said. 

Bytes: Week in Review — Trump's new AI executive orders, Google seeks licensing deals with news publishers, and NASA employees dissent against budget cuts

Bytes: Week in Review — Trump's new AI executive orders, Google seeks licensing deals with news publishers, and NASA employees dissent against budget cuts

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.

Defense billions flow into drone tech

Defense billions flow into drone tech

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.

IRS data deal with ICE raises privacy alarms

IRS data deal with ICE raises privacy alarms

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.

The AI talent wars have begun

The AI talent wars have begun

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

What the

What the "Big Beautiful Bill" means for U.S. energy

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. 

Bio of Marketplace Tech

''Marketplace Tech'' podcast, hosted by the Marketplace Tech staff, is a daily radio show and podcast that aims to demystify the digital economy. With episodes running for less than 10 minutes, the show provides concise and insightful coverage of how technology influences our lives and the broader economy.

The podcast goes beyond the surface level to explore the impact of tech, business, and the digital world in unexpected ways. It delves into the latest trends, innovations, and challenges shaping the tech industry, providing context and analysis for listeners who are interested in understanding the effects of technology on society.

Marketplace Tech takes a critical approach to report, asking tough questions and cutting through the hype that often surrounds the tech industry. The show offers a balanced perspective on the constantly evolving digital landscape, helping listeners navigate through complex topics and understand the implications of tech-driven changes.

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