The Download: AI “coworkers” and stratospheric internet

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI agents are not your “coworkers” Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool—one that your company nonetheless calls Alex, an “employee” with a title and defined responsibilities. How well do you think you would work with Alex? If you’re anything like the managers studied by Boston University professor Emma Wiles, treating that AI as a “coworker” would lead you to do a worse job. They caught 18% fewer errors when the work was attributed to an agentic “AI employee” rather than a chatbot. This is an alarming glimpse of the future Silicon Valley is hurling us toward. Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all released tools for managing teams of AI agents, many of which are advertised as digital colleagues. Find out why that’s a losing proposition for workers. —James O’Donnell This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday. This flying solar-powered platform could deliver better internet from the air As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan.Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface in the stratosphere, then use a custom-built antenna to supplement a 5G network, in a test that includes beaming data straight to devices.Sceye (pronounced “sky”) is one of several firms building these high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Find out why they plan to connect us from the stratosphere. —Rachel Courtland This story is from the latest edition of our magazine, which is all about engineering. Subscribe now to get a copy, plus all our other issue