Well this is bizarre. In yet another ironic science fiction becomes reality moment, the roleplaying game that Scout.ai designed to help protect democracy from the manipulations of algorithm-wielding billionaires has fallen into the hands of the algorithm-wielding billionaires themselves. Yesterday, in a New Yorker article, Jane Mayer wrote that Rebekah…

There’s a new automated propaganda machine driving global politics. How it works and what it will mean for the future of democracy. By Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath This piece was originally published at Scout.ai. “This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. …

Scout’s Head of Product, Brett Horvath, and I have had the great pleasure of spending the last four months working side-by-side with eleven other incredible companies as a part of Matter. …

Several years ago, a Chinese firm bought the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City, which historically played host to sensitive business and government meetings. Soon thereafter, President Obama and the U.S. State Department stopped using the Waldorf for these types of meetings. “For a long time, China has been known…

Thanks to Facebook’s renowned hacker culture, just two developers working together could push an update to the site’s news feed algorithms that changes the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. …

It took me 28 years to realize the power of science-fiction. I’d worked with my family for 15 of those running Future in Review, a $6,000 a head conference that brings together C-level executives, world-class scientists, economists, filmmakers, and, yes, science-fiction authors, to talk about where technology is headed in…

Technology may be inevitable, but our response to it isn’t. — Today we’re officially launching Scout, a place to explore the social implications of technology. Technology, well-deployed, can fight climate change, relieve suffering and make our lives easier. Followed blindly, it exacerbates inequality and can be used as a tool for oppression. …

Barry Briggs is an enterprise architect at Microsoft. Con Slobodchikoff is a renowned animal communication scientist known for his work on prairie dog linguistics. You might assume that never the two shall meet, but two and a half years ago, at Future in Review (FiRe), the pair coalesced around their…

Western media has tended to crow about Japan’s flailing economy — its history of protectionism, shrinking workforce, creeping GDP and a national debt sitting at more than 200 percent. …