What could be more delightful than a trip to Greece to meet Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic leftwing firebrand who tried to stick it to the man, AKA the IMF, EU and entire global financial order? The mental imagery I have before the visit is roughly two parts Zorba the Greek to one part an episode of BBC series Holiday from the Jill Dando era: blue skies, blue sea, maybe some plate breaking in a jolly taverna. What I'm not expecting is a wall of flames rippling across a hillside next to the highway from the airport and a plume of black smoke billowing across the carriageway. Because even a modernist villa on a hillside on the island of Aegina – a fast ferry ride from the port of Piraeus and the summer bolthole of chic Athenians – is not the sanctuary from the modern world that it might once have been. The house is where Varoufakis and his wife, landscape artist Danae Stratou, live, year round since the pandemic, but in August 2023 at the end of a summer of heatwaves and extreme weather conditions across the world, it feels more than a little apocalyptic. The sun is a dim orange orb struggling to shine through a haze of smoke while a shower of fine ash falls invisibly from the sky.

Meta is not pivoting away from its signature product, the metaverse. Or at least that's what the Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, is arguing. Despite reports that sales teams at Meta have spent less time pitching the metaverse to advertisers, Zuckerberg claimed on the tech firm's latest quarterly earnings call that it's business as usual over at the company formerly known as Facebook. "A narrative has developed that we're somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision, so I just want to say upfront that that's not accurate," the CEO said. But neither is the virtual reality world the only product Meta has bet its future on, Zuckerberg argued: "We've been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both."

McNamee's portrayal is probably the furthest from the original Sonya, but that doesn't make it any less entertaining. Unlike the rest of the cast, Sonya is the only one who has to "earn" her powers. Is it a commentary on gender inequality? The movie at least retains the original character's central conflict with Kano, her mortal enemy. Their backstory is much different here, but they eventually clash, and it makes for one of the more personal fights of the film.

The first five days or so of SXSW in Austin are always dedicated to the "interactive" portion of the festival. The city's downtown streets swell with lanyard-laden "entrepreneurs" and "founders" wearing that familiar uniform of T-shirts screen-printed with their company's clever logo, an outfit made professional by throwing a blazer over the ensemble. They bounce from panel to panel and branded "house" to branded "house" (this year, on scooters, so many scooters) hawking their new apps and software products, each promising to be more revolutionary and life-changing and utterly necessary than the next. For years, the unspoken question at the conference seemed to be which company will become SXSW famous, like Persicope, Foursquare, or, most memorably, Twitter? But this year, on the opening Friday of SXSW, Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren unleashed a manifesto titled "Here's How We Can Break Up Big Tech," and a new question burst onto the scene: What do you think of Warren's proposal?

Ginni Rometty, chief executive officer of International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), speaks during the IBM Think Conference in San Francisco, California, U.S. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg photo credit: 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP The title of this article comes from one of many memorable (and tweetable) lines I heard from one of the speakers at IBM's THINK 2019 conference in San Francisco. This is one of the major conferences focused on AI, data, and technology that drives business today. I attended sessions that had universal business lessons for the forward-thinking company. Here is a summary of some takeaways. Ginni Rometty, IBM's CEO, came out strong in her "Chairman's Presentation" with another provocative statement: "Data is the basis for the competitive advantage."

The tech industry can't hide from the information war, particularly when its own creations are being weaponized. That was the consensus of a panel at the Techonomy17 conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., last week. The group assembled to discuss the meaning of authority in a networked, artificially intelligent world. The panelists quickly zoomed in on the manipulation of Facebook, Google, and other sites by Russians during the U.S. presidential election. They, as well as several other speakers at the conference, painted a dark picture of our current online world for at least the immediate future; they concluded that preventing such manipulation is not going to be easy. "I spent my whole life working in civil liberties, and I didn't see this coming," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

These include fast food, retail, hospitality and so forth. But those jobs are not going to be around forever," President elect Donald Trumphas sought to address burgeoning discontent among displaced workers by striking deals to keep more jobs from being outsourced overseas. When asked keeping jobs in the U.S. will cause them to be replaced by robots, Trump said "they will, and we'll make the robots too," according to The New York Times. Researchers at IDC predict that by 2019, the government will begin implementing robotics-specific regulations to preserve jobs. "I think what it leads to is more job destruction, and less job creation, especially for average typical people that don't necessarily have PhDs from MIT and all of that," Ford said. To be sure, self-checkout has been around for years, even as cashiers and retail salespersons have seen high employment rates, Roger McNamee, co-founder of technology investment firm Elevation Partners, pointed out to CNBC on Monday. These workers are often a "positive part" of the retail experience, McNamee added. But the technology that powers Amazon Go, like the computer vision and artificial intelligence used by self-driving cars, is different that what's come before it, said Ford. "It's true that technology always creates and destroys jobs, and historically, of course, it's created more jobs," Ford said. "But I do think we're getting to the point -- with the advent of real artificial intelligence, machine learning,and so forth -- [where] these technologies are beginning to think.