Toronto and the corridor that stretches west to Kitchener and Waterloo is already Canada's capital of finance and technology--and naturally, the region's leaders want to set an example for the rest of the world. That's part of the reason why in 2017, municipal organizations in Toronto tapped Google's sister company Sidewalk Labs to redevelop a disused waterfront industrial district as a high-tech prototype for the "smarter, greener, more inclusive cities" of tomorrow. But within three years the deal had collapsed, a victim of conflicting visions, public concerns over privacy and surveillance, and (to hear Sidewalk Labs tell it) pandemic-era economic change. Journalist Brian Barth, who trained in urban planning and spent seven years living and working in Toronto before returning to the US this summer, says the Sidewalk fiasco also symbolizes a larger difference: the contrast between Silicon Valley's hard-charging, individualist, libertarian ethos and a Canadian business style that emphasizes collaboration, respect, and social responsibility. In this edition of Deep Tech, Barth talks about the tensions that led to Sidewalk Labs' departure and the strategies Canadian CEOs are following to build a more open and inclusive tech sector. Toronto would like to be seen as the nice person's Silicon Valley, if that's not too much trouble, June 17, 2020 Wade Roush: Is Toronto like Silicon Valley for nice people?

We give robots some pretty scary and stressful jobs: cleaning up nuclear sites, inspecting pipelines from the inside, exploring the frozen wastes of Mars. The arrival of the coronavirus has transformed more familiar settings, like grocery stores and hospitals, into potentially hazardous environments as well. Erika Hayasaki, a writer and journalism professor in California, learned that the pandemic is leading some organizations to speed up their automation plans in order to aid front-line workers. Her feature article appears in the July issue of MIT Technology Review. In this episode of Deep Tech, she describes her reporting on companies in California and Texas that are rushing to meet the demand, and asks whether the new wave of safety-driven automation could ultimately force more human workers into retraining programs. Amazon's Investment in Robots is Eliminating Human Jobs, December 5, 2017 Wade Roush: The day when robots show up in your workplace may be closer than you think. BBC Business News: The robots are coming.

Deep Tech is a new subscriber-only podcast that brings alive the people and ideas in our print magazine. Episodes are released every two weeks. We're making the first four installments, built around our 10 Breakthrough Technologies issue, available for free. Every two weeks, give or take, SpaceX puts another 60 Starlink communications satellites into low Earth orbit. Its initial goal is to launch 12,000 of these small mass-produced satellites--six times the number of operating satellites currently in orbit--with another 42,000 possibly to follow. Other companies such as Amazon, Telesat, and Planet are planning their own satellite "mega-constellations." The result could be a welter of new space-based services, from Internet connectivity to continuous mapping. But there's also growing attention to the potential downsides, including an increased risk of collisions that could end up littering low Earth orbit with dangerous debris and rendering it unusable. In this episode of Deep Tech, we hear from OneWeb founder Greg Wyler and science writer and former astrophysicist Ramin Skibba about efforts to mitigate the hazards.