Marketplace Tech

The resemblance to an actual dog is loose but the quadrupedal robot dogs known as “Spot” from Boston Dynamics do have four legs. They're often used to do reconnaissance in hazardous environments. And four of them are working security at the World Cup games in Dallas and New York. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Merry Frayne, at Boston Dynamics about Spot’s capabilities and why they wanted to deploy them at live sporting events.

There’s a longstanding nursing shortage in the U.S. that's only expected to get worse. Some hospitals have experimented with robotic nursing assistants to lighten the load, like a model known as Moxi that rolled out in 2019. They’re kind of R2D2-meets-Rosie-the-robots and were designed to handle non-patient-facing tasks like transporting lab samples. But many hospitals eventually pulled them from operation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Varsha Bansal, reporter at Proof News, about what went wrong.

SpaceX stock prices fell back to earth this week after they skyrocketed in the wake of the IPO a couple weeks ago. Plus, why a Google AI subsidiary is investing in the film studio A24. And why Meta might be getting into the prediction markets. The New York Times reported this week the social media giant was working on its own prediction market app, sort of like Kalshi and Polymarket, which have been bringing in billions of dollars but also drawing lots of scrutiny and legal challenges. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, financial columnist at The Information, for this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Check out our YouTube page to watch more episodes of “Tech Bytes.”

We here at Marketplace love indicators that give us insights into which direction the economy is moving. But AI is evolving fast and it can be hard for the data — and the people looking to it for clues about AI's effects — to keep up. So the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, with help from the payroll firm ADP, recently launched its own AI Economic Indicators. They track things like AI adoption, productivity, and of course, jobs. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Connacher Murphy, research manager at Stanford Digital Economy Lab, to learn more about the database and what researchers call the Canary Dashboard for jobs.

Big Tech is looking for land to build its AI data centers. HBCUs are looking for new funding after federal cuts.

And partnerships between them, like one announced by Fisk University, could be a mutually beneficial — or could end up being a form of "digital sharecropping," according to strategist Ashley Northington, who wrote about this for Tech Policy Press.