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The Download: AI “coworkers” and stratospheric internet

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Why This Matters

The integration of AI as digital coworkers and the development of stratospheric internet platforms highlight both the rapid advancements and potential pitfalls in the tech industry. These innovations could reshape workplace dynamics and global connectivity, but also raise concerns about effectiveness and societal impact.

Key Takeaways

If you're anything like the managers studied by Boston University professor Emma Wiles, treating that AI as a "coworker" would lead you to do a worse job. They caught 18% fewer errors when the work was attributed to an agentic "AI employee" rather than a chatbot.

This is an alarming glimpse of the future Silicon Valley is hurling us toward. Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all released tools for managing teams of AI agents, many of which are advertised as digital colleagues. Find out why that’s a losing proposition for workers.

—James O'Donnell

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

This flying solar-powered platform could deliver better internet from the air

As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan.

Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface in the stratosphere, then use a custom-built antenna to supplement a 5G network, in a test that includes beaming data straight to devices.

Sceye (pronounced “sky”) is one of several firms building these high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Find out why they plan to connect us from the stratosphere.

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