Data and Society

Join us online on September 23, 2026 at 1 p.m ET. The United States census, conducted every ten years, is one of the world’s oldest and biggest data-making endeavors, and one of the country’s most consequential.

NEW YORK (AP) — College administrators read an adjunct professor’s comments to students on personal essays. Managers told a pharmacist to spend less time with patients after tracking the number and length of her appointments. Scanners on a warehouse conveyor belt monitored the pace of workers to ensure they inspected hundreds of items per hour.

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The language of human oversight gives us a familiar way to talk about mitigating AI failures. Oversight organizes the promise of accountability through the presence of a person who reviews, approves, pauses, or corrects what the system does when needed. This picture is reassuring because it assigns responsibility to an informed user. It suggests that autonomous delegation can expand effectively as long as someone is nearby, ready to intervene when the system begins to fail.

The 2026 National Conference of State Legislatures in Chicago. Photo by Justin Hendrix. Good morning! This week I saw some members of the Tech Policy Press community in Chicago last week at the National Conference of State Legislatures, the annual gathering of state lawmakers, policy experts and the lobbyists who hope to influence them.

The 26-year-old died on Wednesday after a three-year cancer battle that she documented online. Thu, August 6, 2026 at 9:10 PM UTC 5 min read Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Sydney Towle died on Wednesday at 26 years old after three years of documenting her cancer journey on TikTok.

Listen to this episode from The Daily on Spotify. With the school year ending, all over the country educators and parents are taking stock of the drastic shift caused by artificial intelligence in the classroom. Today, Natasha Singer, a technology reporter, discusses the year that reshaped American classrooms and how one dedicated teacher helped his students chart their own path into an uncertain future.

Artificial intelligence systems are software that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions; they are

As AI agents move from speculative promise into daily deployment, their relative autonomy challenges the traditional means of human oversight. When a user gives an agent goals, they also give it room to decide how those goals should be pursued. If the user’s goal and the agent’s execution drift apart, failures — including altered data, deleted files, and misallocated resources — can become consequential.

Join us online on August 20, 2026 at 1 p.m. ET. AI agents have begun to move from speculative promise into everyday deployment. They translate high-level goals into plans and carry them out across connected digital environments. Agent builders often promise that users will remain in control through approval prompts and pause buttons. Yet these safeguards work only when users can recognize a mistake and intervene before its consequences cascade.