4 days ago
Lately: Canadian CEOs embrace AI, Wikipedia's unsung heroes and the joy of screen-free events
Welcome back to Lately, The Globe's weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.
🤖 Canadian CEOs embrace AI. But what does that mean for workers?
💸 Shopify becomes Canada's most valuable company
✍️ Meet the Wikipedia editors keeping the website one of the last best places online
✂️ The offline joy of collaging parties
In June, a Vancouver-based software company cut nearly half its staff, a move the chief executive officer said would help the company reinvent itself and inject AI into every facet of their operations. A healthy company, the CEO argued, is no longer one that is merely adding people, but one that's growing with fewer people. This point of view is becoming more popular among Canadian CEOs.
Reporters Joe Castaldo and Sean Silcoff spoke to more than a dozen CEOs, who found there's been a notable shift this year in approaching AI: instead of simply nudging employees to try it out, some companies are bringing AI tools to everyone, and mandating that employees use them – or else.
The promises of AI – more productivity, lower costs – is enticing to CEOs. But for everybody else, including the workers who will be laid off, it's a potentially destabilizing force. Read the full story here.
In any given month, Wikipedia gets more than four billion page views globally, but only a tiny sliver of those visitors will actually make edits to the website. An army of volunteers writes and edits article pages, removes vandalism and misinformation, and adds citations. The internet runs on these kinds of quiet acts of online altruism: the unsung heroes who upload fresh menus on Google, moderate Reddit forums, or post honest product reviews on Amazon amid the flood of fake ones.
In its nearly 25 years of existence, Wikipedia has been able to adapt to the changing tides of the internet. But now, it faces an existential threat. Editors are fearful that as more people use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Gemini to find information, they won't need Wikipedia. Read my full story here.
Shopify regained its position as the most valuable company in Canada. On Wednesday, its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange closed up 22 per cent, giving the company a market capitalization of $275.7-billion – replacing the former top stock, Royal Bank of Canada. Analysts had worried that U.S. tariffs and the suspension of de minimis exemptions, which allow products worth less than US$800 to enter the U.S. tariff-free, would affect Shopify's growth by slowing shipments. But in an earnings call, the company's chief financial officer said they hadn't seen a drop in U.S. demand and that, in fact, sales accelerated.
OpenAI says latest ChatGPT upgrade is big step forward but still can't do humans' jobs (The Guardian)
Age verification is sweeping gaming. Is it ready for the age of AI fakes? (WIRED)
First came Tea. Then came the male rage (The Atlantic)
Devices that stick to your forehead, $500 rings, high-tech headbands and eye masks: there's no shortage of sleep tracking technology that promise to improve your sleep. But do these gadgets actually work? A recent national survey found that one in five Canadians uses wearable devices to monitor their sleep. Of the users surveyed, 45 per cent said their tracker had a positive impact on their sleep, while 4.5 per cent felt this made their sleep worse. That latter group makes up only a small percentage, but sleep researchers say it nonetheless highlights a new kind of sleep problem: orthosomnia.
The term refers to an unhealthy and perfectionistic pursuit of the 'perfect' sleep – often triggered by the feedback from wearable devices. Paradoxically, anxiety about sleeping makes it harder to sleep in the first place. So while tracking data could be helpful to identify optimal bed and wake times, you also run the risk of becoming so obsessed with your sleep stats, you can't get a good night's rest.
Earlier this summer, I attended a collage party at a magazine shop in Toronto. For two hours, I cut up old magazines and books, meticulously arranging and then gluing together my found paper treasures. These kinds of collage events have popped up in cities across Canada – proof that, while collaging may evoke middle-school sleepovers, it's being revived as a creative outlet for a new crowd hungry for offline social interactions.
That's part of the reason I wanted to attend and write about my experience. I cover online culture, so understandably, most of my reporting involves being very online. But something I've noticed in the past couple years is that people are actively trying to spend less time online, which has led to a rise of analogue, old-timey events such as chess clubs, board game nights, silent reading clubs or speed puzzling competitions. The appeal is partly to meet new people somewhere other than bars, and partly as an antidote to infinite doom-scrolling. None require a screen.
Some of these events are definitely catered to the Gen Z crowd, but at the collage night I attended, there was a range of ages – a testament that all types of people are craving in-person activities.
