You didn't actually believe all those founder's myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when Lancashire's own Richard Arkwright wrote it. Arkwright is credited with developing a means of forming cotton fully into thread — technically he didn't actually invent or design the machine, but developed the overarching system in which it could be run at scale — and spinning that success into financial fortune. Never mind the fact that his 24-hour production lines were operated by boys as young as seven pulling 13-hour shifts.

InBlood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech — one of the best books I've read this year — LA Times tech reporter Brian Merchant lays bare the inhumane cost of capitalism wrought by the industrial revolution and celebrates the workers who stood against those first tides of automation: the Luddites.

Hachette Book Group

Excerpted from Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. Published by Hachette Book Group. Copyright © 2023 by Brian Merchant. All rights reserved.

The first tech titans were not building global information networks or commercial space rockets. They were making yarn and cloth. A lot of yarn, and a lot of cloth.

Like our modern-day titans, they started out as entrepreneurs. But until the nineteenth century, entrepreneurship was not a cultural phenomenon. Businessmen took risks, of course, and undertook novel efforts to increase their profits. Yet there was not a popular conception of the heroic entrepreneur, of the adventuring businessman, until after the birth of industrial capitalism. The term itself was popularized by Jean-Baptiste Say, in his 1803 work A Treatise on Political Economy. An admirer of Adam Smith’s, Say thought that The Wealth of Nations was missing an account of the individuals who bore the risk of starting new business; he called this figure the entrepreneur, which translated from the French as “adventurer” or “undertaker.”

For a worker, aspiring to entrepreneurship was different than merely seeking upward mobility. The standard path an ambitious, skilled weaver might pursue was to graduate from apprentice to journeyman weaver, who rented a loom or worked in a shop, to owning his own loom, to becoming a master weaver and running a small shop of his own that employed other journeymen. This was customary.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as now in the twenty-first century, entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to use technology to disrupt longstanding customs in order to increase efficiencies, output, and personal profit. There were few opportunities for entrepreneurship without some form of automation; control of technologies of production grants its owner a chance to gain advantage or take pay or market share from others. In the past, like now, entrepreneurs started small businesses at some personal financial risk, whether by taking out a loan to purchase used handlooms and rent a small factory space, or by using inherited capital to procure a steam engine and a host of power looms.

The most ambitious entrepreneurs tapped untested technologies and novel working arrangements, and the most successful irrevocably changed the structure and nature of our daily lives, setting standards that still exist today. The least successful would go bankrupt, then as now.

In the first century of the Industrial Revolution, one entrepreneur looms above the others, and has a strong claim on the mantle of the first of what we’d call a tech titan today. Richard Arkwright was born to a middle-class tailor’s family and originally apprenticed as a barber and wigmaker. He opened a shop in the Lancashire city of Bolton in the 1760s. There, he invented a waterproof dye for the wigs that were in fashion at the time, and traveled the country collecting hair to make them. In his travels across the Midlands, he met spinners and weavers, and became familiar with the machinery they used to make cotton garments. Bolton was right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution’s cotton hub hotspot.

Arkwright took the money he made from the wigs, plus the dowry from his second marriage, and invested it in upgraded spinning machinery. “The improvement of spinning was much in the air, and many men up and down Lancashire were working at it,” Arkwright’s biographer notes. James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny, a machine that allowed a single worker to create eight threads of yarn simultaneously—though they were not very strong—in 1767. Working with one of his employees, John Kay, Arkwright tweaked the designs to spin much stronger threads using water or steam power. Without crediting Kay, Arkwright patented his water frame in 1769 and a carding engine in 1775, and attracted investment from wealthy hosiers in Nottingham to build out his operation. He built his famous water-powered factory in Cromford in 1771.

His real innovation was not the technology itself; several similar machines had been patented, some before his. His true innovation was creating and successfully implementing the system of modern factory work.

“Arkwright was not the great inventor, nor the technical genius,” as the Oxford economic historian Peter Mathias explains, “but he was the first man to make the new technology of massive machinery and power source work as a system — technical, organizational, commercial — and, as a proof, created the first great personal fortune and received the accolade of a knighthood in the textile industry as an industrialist.” Richard Arkwright Jr., who inherited his business, became the richest commoner in England.

Arkwright was the first start-up founder to launch a unicorn company, we might say, and the first tech entrepreneur to strike it wildly rich. He did so by marrying the emergent technologies that automated the making of yarn with a relentless new work regime. His legacy is alive today in companies like Amazon, which strive to automate as much of their operations as is financially viable, and to introduce surveillance-intensive worker-productivity programs.

Often called the grandfather of the factory, Arkwright did not invent the idea of organizing workers into strict shifts to produce goods with maximal efficiency. But he pursued the “manufactory” formation most ruthlessly, and most vividly demonstrated the practice could generate huge profits. Arkwright’s factory system, which was quickly and widely emulated, divided his hundreds of workers into two overlapping thirteen-hour shifts. A bell was rung twice a day, at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. The gates would shut and work would start an hour later. If a worker was late, they sat the shift out, forfeiting that day’s pay. (Employers of the era touted this practice as a positive for workers; it was a more flexible schedule, they said, since employees no longer needed to “give notice” if they couldn’t work. This reasoning is reminiscent of that offered by twenty-first-century on-demand app companies.) For the first twenty-two years of its operation, the factory was worked around the clock, mostly by boys like Robert Blincoe, some as young as seven years old. At its peak, two-thirds of the 1,100-strong workforce were children. Richard Arkwright Jr. admitted in later testimony that they looked “extremely dissipated, and many of them had seldom more than a few hours of sleep,” though he maintained they were well paid.

The industrialist also built on-site housing, luring whole families from around the country to come work his frames. He gave them one week’s worth of vacation a year, “but on condition that they could not leave the village.” Today, even some of our most cutting-edge consumer products are still manufactured in similar conditions, in imposing factories with on-site dormitories and strictly regimented production processes, by workers who have left home for the job. Companies like Foxconn operate factories where the regimen can be so grueling it has led to suicide epidemics among the workforce.

The strict work schedule and a raft of rules instilled a sense of discipline among the laborers; long, miserable shifts inside the factory walls were the new standard. Previously, of course, similar work was done at home or in small shops, where shifts were not so rigid or enforced.

Arkwright’s “main difficulty,” according to the early business theorist Andrew Ure, did not “lie so much in the invention of a proper mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in . . . training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.” This was his legacy. “To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright,” Ure continued. “It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleon nerve and ambition to subdue the refractory tempers of workpeople.”

Ure was hardly exaggerating, as many workers did in fact view Arkwright as akin to an invading enemy. When he opened a factory in Chorley, Lancashire, in 1779, a crowd of hundreds of cloth workers broke in, smashed the machines, and burned the place to the ground. Arkwright did not try to open another mill in Lancashire.

Arkwright also vigorously defended his patents in the legal system. He collected royalties on his water frame and carding engine until 1785, when the court decided that he had not actually invented the machines but had instead copied their parts from other inventors, and threw the patents out. By then, he was astronomically wealthy. Before he died, he would be worth £500,000, or around $425 million in today’s dollars, and his son would expand and entrench his factory empire.

The success apparently went to his head — he was considered arrogant, even among his admirers. In fact, arrogance was a key ingredient in his success: he had what Ure described as “fortitude in the face of public opposition.” He was unyielding with critics when they pointed out, say, that he was employing hundreds of children in machine-filled rooms for thirteen hours straight. That for all his innovation, the secret sauce in his groundbreaking success was labor exploitation.

In Arkwright, we see the DNA of those who would attain tech titanhood in the ensuing decades and centuries. Arkwright’s brashness rhymes with that of bullheaded modern tech executives who see virtue in a willingness to ignore regulations and push their workforces to extremes, or who, like Elon Musk, would gleefully wage war with perceived foes on Twitter rather than engage any criticism of how they run their businesses. Like Steve Jobs, who famously said, “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” Arkwright surveyed the technologies of the day, recognized what worked and could be profitable, lifted the ideas, and then put them into action with an unmatched aggression. Like Jeff Bezos, Arkwright hyper-charged a new mode of factory work by finding ways to impose discipline and rigidity on his workers, and adapting them to the rhythms of the machine and the dictates of capital — not the other way around.

We can look back at the Industrial Revolution and lament the working conditions, but popular culture still lionizes entrepreneurs cut in the mold of Arkwright, who made a choice to employ thousands of child laborers and to institute a dehumanizing system of factory work to increase revenue and lower costs. We have acclimated to the idea that such exploitation was somehow inevitable, even natural, while casting aspersions on movements like the Luddites as being technophobic for trying to stop it. We forget that working people vehemently opposed such exploitation from the beginning.

Arkwright’s imprint feels familiar to us, in our own era where entrepreneurs loom large. So might a litany of other first-wave tech titans. Take James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine that powered countless factories in industrial England. Once he was confident in his product, much like a latter-day Bill Gates, Watts sold subscriptions for its use. With his partner, Matthew Boulton, Watts installed the engine and then collected annual payments that were structured around how much the customer would save on fuel costs compared to the previous engine. Then, like Gates, Watts would sue anyone he thought had violated his patent, effectively winning himself a monopoly on the trade. The Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that this had the effect of constraining innovation on the steam engine for thirty years.

Or take William Horsfall or William Cartwright. These were men who were less innovative than relentless in their pursuit of disrupting a previous mode of work as they strove to monopolize a market. (The word innovation, it’s worth noting, carried negative connotations until the mid-twentieth century or so; Edmund Burke famously called the French Revolution “a revolt of innovation.”) They can perhaps be seen as precursors to the likes of Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, the pugnacious trampler of the taxi industry. Kalanick’s business idea — that it would be convenient to hail a taxi from your smartphone — was not remarkably inventive. But he had intense levels of self-determination and pugnacity, which helped him overrun the taxi cartels and dozens of cities’ regulatory codes. His attitude was reflected in Uber’s treatment of its drivers, who, the company insists, are not employees but independent contractors, and in the endemic culture of harassment and mistreatment of the women on staff.

These are extreme examples, perhaps. But extremity is often needed to break down long-held norms, and the potential rewards are extreme, too. Like the mill bosses who shattered nineteenth-century standards and traditions by automating cloth-making, today’s start-up founders aim to disrupt one job category after another with gig work platforms or artificial intelligence, and encourage others to follow their lead. There’s a reason Arkwright and his factories were both emulated and feared. Even two centuries later, the most successful tech titans typically are.

You didn't actually believe all those founder's myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when Lancashire's own Richard Arkwright wrote it. Arkwright is credited with developing a means of forming cotton fully into thread — technically he didn't actually invent or design the machine, but developed the overarching system in which it could be run at scale — and spinning that success into financial fortune. Never mind the fact that his 24-hour production lines were operated by boys as young as seven pulling 13-hour shifts.   

In Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech — one of the best books I've read this year — LA Times tech reporter Brian Merchant lays bare the inhumane cost of capitalism wrought by the industrial revolution and celebrates the workers who stood against those first tides of automation: the Luddites. 

Hachette Book Group

Excerpted from Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant. Published by Hachette Book Group. Copyright © 2023 by Brian Merchant. All rights reserved.

The first tech titans were not building global information networks or commercial space rockets. They were making yarn and cloth. 

A lot of yarn, and a lot of cloth. Like our modern-day titans, they started out as entrepreneurs. But until the nineteenth century, entrepreneurship was not a cultural phenomenon. Businessmen took risks, of course, and undertook novel efforts to increase their profits. Yet there was not a popular conception of the heroic entrepreneur, of the adventuring businessman, until long after the birth of industrial capitalism. The term itself was popularized by Jean-Baptiste Say, in his 1803 work A Treatise on Political Economy. An admirer of Adam Smith’s, Say thought that The Wealth of Nations was missing an account of the individuals who bore the risk of starting new business; he called this figure the entrepreneur, translating it from the French as “adventurer” or “undertaker.” 

For a worker, aspiring to entrepreneurship was different than merely seeking upward mobility. The standard path an ambitious, skilled weaver might pursue was to graduate from apprentice to journeyman weaver, who rented a loom or worked in a shop, to owning his own loom, to becoming a master weaver and running a small shop of his own that employed other journeymen. This was customary. 

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as now in the twenty-first century, entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to use technology to disrupt longstanding customs in order to increase efficiencies, output, and personal profit. There were few opportunities for entrepreneurship without some form of automation; control of technologies of production grants its owner a chance to gain advantage or take pay or market share from others. In the past, like now, owners started small businesses at some personal financial risk, whether by taking out a loan to purchase used handlooms and rent a small factory space, or by using inherited capital to procure a steam engine and a host of power looms.

The most ambitious entrepreneurs tapped untested technologies and novel working arrangements, and the most successful irrevocably changed the structure and nature of our daily lives, setting standards that still exist today. The least successful would go bankrupt, then as now. 

In the first century of the Industrial Revolution, one entrepreneur looms above the others, and has a strong claim on the mantle of the first of what we’d call a tech titan today. Richard Arkwright was born to a middle-class tailor’s family and originally apprenticed as a barber and wigmaker. He opened a shop in the Lancashire city of Bolton in the 1760s. There, he invented a waterproof dye for the wigs that were in fashion at the time, and traveled the country collecting hair to make them. In his travels across the Midlands, he met spinners and weavers, and became familiar with the machinery they used to make cotton garments. Bolton was right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution’s cotton hub hotspot. 

Arkwright took the money he made from the wigs, plus the dowry from his second marriage, and invested it in upgraded spinning machinery. “The improvement of spinning was much in the air, and many men up and down Lancashire were working at it,” Arkwright’s biographer notes. James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny, a machine that automated the process of spinning cotton into a weft— halfway into yarn, basically— in 1767. Working with one of his employees, John Kay, Arkwright tweaked the designs to spin cotton entirely into yarn, using water or steam power. Without crediting Kay, Arkwright patented his water frame in 1769 and a carding engine in 1775, and attracted investment from wealthy hosiers in Nottingham to build out his operation. He built his famous water-powered factory in Cromford in 1771. 

His real innovation was not the machinery itself; several similar machines had been patented, some before his. His true innovation was creating and successfully implementing the system of modern factory work. 

“Arkwright was not the great inventor, nor the technical genius,” as the Oxford economic historian Peter Mathias explains, “but he was the first man to make the new technology of massive machinery and power source work as a system— technical, organizational, commercial— and, as a proof, created the first great personal fortune and received the accolade of a knighthood in the textile industry as an industrialist.” Richard Arkwright Jr., who inherited his business, became the richest commoner in England. 

Arkwright père was the first start‑up founder to launch a unicorn company we might say, and the first tech entrepreneur to strike it wildly rich. He did so by marrying the emergent technologies that automated the making of yarn with a relentless new work regime. His legacy is alive today in companies like Amazon, which strive to automate as much of their operations as is financially viable, and to introduce highly surveilled worker-productivity programs. 

Often called the grandfather of the factory, Arkwright did not invent the idea of organizing workers into strict shifts to produce goods with maximal efficiency. But he pursued the “manufactory” formation most ruthlessly, and most vividly demonstrated the practice could generate huge profits. Arkwright’s factory system, which was quickly and widely emulated, divided his hundreds of workers into two overlapping thirteen-hour shifts. A bell was rung twice a day, at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. The gates would shut and work would start an hour later. If a worker was late, they sat the day out, forfeiting that day’s pay. (Employers of the era touted this practice as a positive for workers; it was a more flexible schedule, they said, since employees no longer needed to “give notice” if they couldn’t work. This reasoning is reminiscent of that offered by twenty-first-century on‑demand app companies.) For the first twenty-two years of its operation, the factory was worked around the clock, mostly by boys like Robert Blincoe, some as young as seven years old. At its peak, two-thirds of the 1,100-strong workforce were children. Richard Arkwright Jr. admitted in later testimony that they looked “extremely dissipated, and many of them had seldom more than a few hours of sleep,” though he maintained they were well paid. 

The industrialist also built on‑site housing, luring whole families from around the country to come work his frames. He gave them one week’s worth of vacation a year, “but on condition that they could not leave the village.” Today, even our most cutting-edge consumer products are still manufactured in similar conditions, in imposing factories with on‑site dormitories and strictly regimented production processes, by workers who have left home for the job. Companies like Foxconn operate factories where the regimen can be so grueling it has led to suicide epidemics among the workforce. 

The strict work schedule and a raft of rules instilled a sense of discipline among the laborers; long, miserable shifts inside the factory walls were the new standard. Previously, of course, similar work was done at home or in small shops, where shifts were not so rigid or enforced. 

Arkwright’s “main difficulty,” according to the early business theorist Andrew Ure, did not “lie so much in the invention of a proper mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in [. . .] training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation.” This was his legacy. “To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright,” Ure continued. “It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleon nerve and ambition to subdue the refractory tempers of workpeople.” 

Ure was hardly exaggerating, as many workers did in fact view Arkwright as akin to an invading enemy. When he opened a factory in Chorley, Lancashire, in 1779, a crowd of stockingers and spinners broke in, smashed the machines, and burned the place to the ground. Arkwright did not try to open another mill in Lancashire. 

Arkwright also vigorously defended his patents in the legal system. He collected royalties on his water frame and carding engine until 1785, when the court decided that he had not actually invented the machines but had instead copied their parts from other inventors, and threw the patents out. By then, he was astronomically wealthy. Before he died, he would be worth £500,000, or around $425 million in today’s dollars, and his son would expand and entrench his factory empire. 

The success apparently went to his head— he was considered arrogant, even among his admirers. In fact, arrogance was a key ingredient in his success: he had what Ure described as “fortitude in the face of public opposition.” He was unyielding with critics when they pointed out, say, that he was employing hundreds of children in machine-filled rooms for thirteen hours straight. That for all his innovation, the secret sauce in his groundbreaking success was labor exploitation. 

In Arkwright, we see the DNA of those who would attain tech titanhood in the ensuing decades and centuries. Arkwright’s brashness rhymes with that of bullheaded modern tech executives who see virtue in a willingness to ignore regulations and push their workforces to extremes, or who, like Elon Musk, would gleefully wage war with perceived foes on Twitter rather than engage any criticism of how he runs his businesses. Like Steve Jobs, who famously said, “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” Arkwright surveyed the technologies of the day, recognized what worked and could be profitable, lifted the ideas, and then put them into action with an unmatched aggression. Like Jeff Bezos, Arkwright hypercharged a new mode of factory work by finding ways to impose discipline and rigidity on his workers, and adapting them to the rhythms of the machine and the dictates of capital— not the other way around. 

We can look back at the Industrial Revolution and lament the working conditions, but popular culture still lionizes entrepreneurs cut in the mold of Arkwright, who made a choice to employ thousands of child laborers and to institute a dehumanizing system of factory work to increase revenue and lower costs. We have acclimated to the idea that such exploitation was somehow inevitable, even natural, while casting aspersions on movements like the Luddites as being technophobic for trying to stop it. We forget that working people vehemently opposed such exploitation from the beginning. 

Arkwright’s imprint feels familiar to us, in our own era where entrepreneurs loom large. So might a litany of other first-wave tech titans. Take James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine that powered countless factories in industrial England. Once he was confident in his product, much like a latter-day Bill Gates, Watts sold subscriptions for its use. With his partner, Matthew Boulton, Watts installed the engine and then collected annual payments that were structured around how much the customer would save on fuel costs compared to the previous engine. Then, like Gates, Watts would sue anyone he thought had violated his patent, effectively winning himself a monopoly on the trade. The Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that this had the effect of constraining innovation on the steam engine for thirty years. 

Or take William Horsfall or William Cartwright. These were men who were less innovative than relentless in their pursuit of disrupting a previous mode of work as they strove to monopolize a market. (The word innovation, it’s worth noting, carried negative connotations until the mid-twentieth century or so; Edmund Burke famously called the French Revolution “a revolt of innovation.”) They can perhaps be seen as precursors to the likes of Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, the pugnacious trampler of the taxi industry. Kalanick’s business idea— that it would be convenient to hail a taxi from your smartphone— was not remarkably inventive. But he had intense levels of self-determination and pugnacity, which helped him overrun the taxi cartels and dozens of cities’ regulatory codes. His attitude was reflected in Uber’s treatment of its drivers, who, the company insists, are not employees but independent contractors, and in the endemic culture of harassment and mistreatment of the women on staff. 

These are extreme examples, perhaps. But to disrupt long-held norms for the promise of extreme rewards, entrepreneurs often pursue extreme actions. Like the mill bosses who shattered 19th-century standards by automating cloth-making, today’s start‑up founders aim to disrupt one job category after another with gig work platforms or artificial intelligence, and encourage others to follow their lead. There’s a reason Arkwright and his factories were both emulated and feared. Even two centuries later, many tech titans still are.

X, the social media company previously known as Twitter, is suing the state of California over a law that requires companies to disclose details about their content moderation practices. The law, known as AB 587, requires social media companies to publish information about their handling of hate speech, extremism, misinformation and other issues, as well as details about internal moderation processes.

Lawyers for X argue that the law is unconstitutional and will lead to censorship. It “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech,” the company wrote in the lawsuit. “The true intent of AB 587 is to pressure social media platforms to ‘eliminate’ certain constitutionally-protected content viewed by the State as problematic.”

X is not alone in its opposition to the law. Though the measure was backed by some activists, a number of industry groups took issue with AB 587. Netchoice, a trade group which represents Meta, Google, TikTok and other tech companies, argued last year that AB 587 would help bad actors evade companies’ security measures, and make it harder for them to enforce their rules.

At the same time, AB 587's backers have said it’s necessary to increase the transparency of major platforms. “If @X has nothing to hide, then they should have no objection to this bill,” Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, who wrote AB 587, said in response to X’s lawsuit.

There’s no denying Nintendo’s Switch, at 6.5 years, is reaching the end. Nintendo is (finally) gearing up for what’s next and was reportedly showing tech demos of its next-gen system to developers at Gamescom last month.

According to Eurogamer, one of the Switch 2 demos was a beefed-up version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It was apparently a tech demo, showing the world of Hyrule at a higher frame rate and resolution than the existing game.

Engadget

VGC says another tech demo was The Matrix Awakens, running on the dev kit. The captivating tech demo was originally designed to highlight what Unreal Engine 5 can do on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, but Nintendo got it working on an early version of its next system. The Switch 2 demo also featured NVIDIA’s DLSS upscaling tech, ray-tracing and visuals comparable to those on the PS5 and Series X. DLSS support is key, as that could help Nintendo run games at higher frame rates and resolution without having to use more powerful components.

Nintendo is expected to release its next console in 2024 – but what will be its unique trick?

– Mat Smith

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BMW’s terrible heated seats subscription didn’t make it to a second winter

Drivers will no longer have to deal with hardware paywalls in the brand’s cars.

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BMW is one of several automakers that have been nickel and diming customers, with a monthly subscription for heated seats (which already exist in these vehicles) in certain models and territories. The company has dropped that controversial practice to focus on paid software services — it no longer plans to charge drivers extra to use hardware features already in their cars.

Drivers didn’t take to the $18 per month heated seats subscription in the countries where BMW offered that, er, perk. “We thought that we would provide an extra service to the customer by offering the chance to activate that later, but the user acceptance isn’t that high,” Pieter Nota, BMW’s board member for sales and marketing, said.

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iOS apps will publish to the Apple Vision Pro store by default

This should give headset owners access to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of applications.

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Walgreens agrees to pay $44 million to Theranos blood test customers

The company used to offer Theranos’ faulty blood tests in its stores.

There was a time when Walgreens championed Theranos’ blood tests and offered them at “wellness centers” in its stores. That was before it came to light that Theranos’ tests were faulty. Now, according to Bloomberg, Walgreens has agreed to pay $44 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by customers who received flawed Theranos blood tests. A court still has to approve the proposal, but based on the court filing by the plaintiffs, those customers will receive around double their out-of-pocket damages if the terms remain unaltered.

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There was a time when Walgreens championed Theranos' blood tests and offered them at "wellness centers" in its stores. That was before it came to light that Theranos' tests were faulty, leading to a bitter breakup between the two companies. Now, according to Bloomberg, Walgreens has agreed to pay $44 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by customers who received flawed Theranos blood tests through its centers in Arizona and California. 

Lawyers for both sides struck a deal after a US district judge ordered the case to go to trial, and they filed a notice for a tentative settlement back in May. A court still has to approve the proposal, but based on the court filing by the plaintiffs, those customers will receive around double their out-of-pocket damages if the terms remain unaltered. 

The lawsuit accused Walgreens of being "willfully blind" to its partnership with Theranos, alleging that it had good reason to be suspicious of the latter's fingerprick testing method. Bloomberg says the plaintiffs' lawyers have acknowledged, however, that Walgreens had a "potent" defense argument when it said that it was also defrauded by the blood-testing company. 

Walgreens took Theranos to court in 2016 for a reported $140 million shortly after it formally ended their relationship. They eventually settled the lawsuit in a way that "resolve[d] all claims," but details about that agreement were undisclosed. As for Theranos, well, the company is now dead, with company founder Elizabeth Holmes currently serving time in prison with a scheduled release date of December 29, 2032.

Google has tentatively settled with the alliance of attorneys general that filed a lawsuit in 2021 alleging the search giant abused its dominance on Android app distribution through the Google Play store. Officials claimed Google was leveraging “its monopoly power with Android to unlawfully maintain its monopoly,” saying that 90 percent of all app sales took place through Google Play. Bloomberg reports that the matter has been referred to a judge who, if happy, can confirm the settlement and cancel the pending courtroom battle. It’s a smart move on Google’s part as it has faced a number of antitrust lawsuits over its dominance and power in recent years, with outcomes including a €4.3 billion ($4.6 billion) fine and threats to break up its advertising business.

Not everyone is pleased about the latest deal, with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney tweeting Epic isn’t included in the settlement. The games developer sued Google in 2020, alleging the latter had made deals with other big games publisher to box out rival app stores. Sweeney is also, as usual, grumbling about other stores asking a cut of each transaction to pay for the running costs of those stores.

Epic's trial against Google is set for November 6th, but Sweeney tweeted: "If Google is ending its payments monopoly without imposing a Google Tax on third party transactions, we'll settle and be Google's friend in their new era. But if the settlement merely pays off the other plaintiffs while leaving the Google Tax in place, we'll fight on. Consumers only benefit if antitrust enforcement not only opens up markets, but also restores price competition." The exact amount Google must pay and any necessary changes required have yet to be disclosed, but could be made public at an October 12th hearing.

The US Copyright Office (USCO) wants your thoughts on generative AI and who can theoretically be declared to own its outputs. The technology has increasingly commanded the legal system’s attention, and as such office began seeking public comments on Wednesday about some of AI’s thorniest issues (viaArs Technica). These include questions about companies training AI models on copyrighted works, the copyright eligibility of AI-generated content (along with liability for infringing on it) and how to handle machine-made outputs mimicking human artists’ work.

“The adoption and use of generative AI systems by millions of Americans — and the resulting volume of AI-generated material — have sparked widespread public debate about what these systems may mean for the future of creative industries and raise significant questions for the copyright system,” the USCO wrote in a notice published on Wednesday.

One issue the office hopes to address is the required degree of human authorship to register a copyright on (otherwise AI-driven) content, citing the rising number of attempts to copyright material that names AI as an author or co-author. “The crucial question appears to be whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine,” the USCO wrote.

Although the issue is far from resolved, several cases have hinted at where the boundaries may fall. For example, the office said in February that the (human-made) text and layout arrangement from a partially AI-generated graphic novel were copyrightable, but the work’s Midjourney-generated images weren’t. On the other hand, a Federal judge recently rejected an attempt to register AI-generated art which had no human intervention other than its inciting text prompt. “Copyright has never stretched so far [...] as to protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand, as plaintiff urges here,” US District Judge Beryl Howell wrote in that ruling.

The USCO also seeks input on increasing infringement claims from copyright owners against AI companies for training on their published works. Sarah Silverman is among the high-profile plaintiffs suing OpenAI and Meta for allegedly training ChatGPT and LLaMA (respectively) on their written work — in her case, her 2010 memoir The Bedwetter. OpenAI also faces a class-action lawsuit over using scraped web data to train its viral chatbot.

The USPO says the public comment period will be open until November 15th. You can share your thoughts until then.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise today, the business-focused subscription it teased in April. The company says it won’t train its AI models on any business data or conversations under the new plan. “Our models don’t learn from your usage,” the company wrote in an announcement blog post about the enterprise features. In addition, the new plan encrypts business chats (in transit and at rest) and is SOC 2 compliant. OpenAI says companies including Block, Canva, Carlyle, The Estée Lauder Companies, PwC and Zapier have already tested ChatGPT Enterprise.

ChatGPT Enterprise provides two times faster access to GPT-4 (the same model from ChatGPT Pro) but without usage caps — and with a boosted 32,000-token context, letting the AI model process up to four times the input / output text as the $20-per-month Pro tier. The business-focused plan also includes unlimited access to advanced data analysis (previously called Code Interpreter), allowing teams to quickly analyze enormous swaths of data.

The business subscription gives companies an admin console, allowing for bulk management of employee use. This includes the ability to create shared chat templates for teams that share common workflows. It also offers enterprises free credits for OpenAI’s API, which can be used for custom chatbots and other tailored AI-generated text. Business customers will also receive an analytics dashboard for “usage insights” within their organizations.

With today’s launch focusing on large corporations, OpenAI says a version for smaller businesses will arrive at some point in the future. COO Brian Lightcap toldCNBC today that starting with more robust enterprise customers “gives us a little bit more of a way to engage with teams in a hands-on way and understand what the deployment motion looks like before we fully open it up.” The company isn’t announcing pricing publicly, but businesses can contact OpenAI to learn about their options and tailor a custom plan. Lightcap told CNBC that pricing “will depend, for us, on every company’s use cases and size.”

Last year, the Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a lawsuit against Google accusing it of political bias over its Gmail spam filters. Now, a federal judge has dismissed that lawsuit, noting that Google was effectively protected by Section 230 of US law, and that the RNC had not "sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith" by filtering out campaign emails, The Washington Post has reported. 

According to the lawsuit, Google intentionally marked "millions" of RNC emails as spam, so the group sought reimbursement for "donations it allegedly lost as a result" of that. As evidence, it cited a study finding that Gmail was more likely than Yahoo and other mail systems to mark Republican emails as spam. (One of the study's authors told the Post last year that its findings were cherry-picked.)

Calling the lawsuit a "close case," US District Court judge Daniel Calabretta said the RNC had "failed to plausibly allege its claims" that Google's spam filtering was done in bad faith. Google said that the emails in questions were likely flagged as spam because of user complaints, and cited RNC domain authentication issues and frequent mailouts as other potential issues. 

The court also decided that RNC emails could be deemed "objectionable" based on the CAN-SPAM Act, and the fact that Google flagged them as such was covered by Section 230, which provides immunity to online platforms from civil liability based on third-party content. All that said, the judge said Republicans could still amend the lawsuit to better establish a lack of good faith by Google. 

Interestingly, during last year's mid-term US elections, Google created a loophole allowing political campaigns to dodge Gmail spam filters. However, the RNC reportedly didn't take advantage of the program. Google has since ended the experiment, following largely negative feedback from the public. 

The US Department of Justice just sued SpaceX, alleging that the company engaged in discriminatory hiring practices against refugees and asylum seekers. The suit says that these practices occurred between 2018 and 2022 and that SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that export control laws limited it to hiring US citizens and lawful permanent residents.

The DOJ began its investigation in 2020 when the department’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section received complaints of employee discrimination. Kristen Clarke, Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement that the “investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status” going on to say that this amounted to a “ban” regardless of their qualifications. This is a violation of federal law.

The investigation also found that “SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged” these people from seeking employment with the company.

The DOJ lawsuit seeks damages and back pay for “asylees and refugees who were deterred or denied employment at SpaceX.” It also seeks civil penalties and hiring policy changes from the company. The Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) even alleges that SpaceX ignored a subpoena related to the suit in 2021, forcing the DOJ to request a judge order the company to comply with document requests.

The IER opened this probe in 2020 after claimant Fabian Hutter alleged discrimination after losing a spot at SpaceX when asked about his citizenship status during a job interview. It's requesting other alleged victims to come forward and contact the department, particularly if they were discouraged from applying to SpaceX due to citizenship concerns.

Is this the only Elon Musk-led company facing legal troubles regarding hiring practices and employee treatment? Of course not! The self-proclaimed “Technoking of Tesla” faced penalties when a federal court found that Musk made unlawful threats surrounding employee compensation and unions. There’s also a suit making its way through the New York courts that alleges Musk and Tesla fired workers “in retaliation for union activity.” 

Another big suit alleged a racist work environment at Tesla, which was recently settled for just over $3 million. Employees recently sued Twitter/X after Musk-led mass layoffs. The list goes on and on for the man who used to repeatedly state that he simply wants to save the world. Nowadays, he spends most of his time issuing controversial posts on X and being investigated for building literal glass houses using Tesla company funds.