The weekend starts here! Welcome back to Five Things Tech!
Quantum moving from lab curiosity to neutral-atom machines that almost look useful feels a lot like mobile right before the iPhone moment, when everyone was still joking about dropped calls and then suddenly it all worked.
Craigslist, on the other hand, just keeps chugging along as the scruffy, non-optimized bazaar of the old web, stubbornly resisting profiles, ratings and the whole influencer circus and thereby feeling more real than most of what came after it.
In parallel, a new wave of “anti-iPhone” gadgets, upgraded smart speakers and voice-first assistants is trying once again to make talking to computers feel natural, with Alexa+, Gemini, Siri and a whole zoo of AI pendants and pins betting that this time voice will finally stick.
Down in the very physical world, vision models are staring at conveyor belts full of trash, spotting plastics, metals and food-grade material with superhuman consistency so that robots can grab the good stuff and turn waste streams into proper data products.
All of this lands in a tech industry that is paradoxically booming on balance sheets while laying off hundreds of thousands of workers, shipping half-baked products and replacing parts of “real” engineering work with tools like Google Antigravity that quietly take over more and more of the coding.
Put together, this week’s selection is very much about the tension between shiny disruption and messy reality: quantum that might finally deliver, a stubbornly simple marketplace that still works, disembodied voices in your gadgets, robots sifting through garbage and a tech career path that looks a lot less straightforward than the hype around AI would have you believe.
It may be no coincidence that both of the level-two quantum computers will be built out of the same types of qubits: neutral atoms. While the classical computing world has long since settled on the transistor as the fundamental device of choice, the quantum-computing world has yet to pick the perfect qubit, be it a superconductor (pursued at IBM, Google, and others), a photon (used by the likes of PsiQuantum and Xanadu), an ion (developed by IonQ and Quantinuum, to name a few), or other.
All of these options have their advantages and disadvantages, but there is a reason some of the earliest error-corrected machines are built with neutral atoms. The physical qubits that make up a logical qubit need to be close to each other, or connected in some way, in order to share information. Unlike, say, superconducting qubits printed on a chip, any two atomic qubits can be brought right next to each other (an advantage shared by trapped ions).
Quantum is a bit like mobile 20 years ago. Everybody talked about it, it didn’t really work and all of a sudden it was there and everyone was surprised it could work.
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Unlike flashier online marketplaces such as DePop and its parent company, Etsy, or Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist doesn’t use algorithms to track users’ moves and predict what they want to see next. It doesn’t offer public profiles, rating systems, or “likes” and “shares” to dole out like social currency; as a result, Craigslist effectively disincentivizes clout-chasing and virality-seeking—behaviors that are often rewarded on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. It’s a utopian vision of a much earlier, far more earnest internet.
Craigslist is amazing and also feels a bit outdated, which is the whole point of it. I used it 30 years ago while I lived in the Bay Area and it hasn’t changed much since then…
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The past 18 months have seen a lot of reports about projects trying to break outside of that textbox. While the early attempts quickly – and in some cases spectacularly – failed, undoubtedly because they were trying to be too ambitious, and do too much, a new wave is now coming to tackle the problem. This is led by none other than OpenAI itself, which acquired the hardware startup co-founded by one Jony Ive to clearly go after this space. To make an “anti-iPhone” as it were. A deceptively simple companion device powered by AI and driven by voice.
That’s just a guess, of course. But it’s undoubtedly a good one. And you can see all of the other startups coalescing around all of this as well. Hardware startups too! Pendants, and clips, and bracelets, and note-taking rings – not one, but two separate, similar projects – oh my. All of them clearly believe that voice is on the cusp of taking off, for real this time.
And right on cue, Alexa is back, after some fits and starts, resurrected as Alexa+ powered by LLMs. Google Home is on the verge of being reborn, powered by Gemini. Siri too! Maybe, hopefully, really for real this time!
Even I am using voice these days in a way I would have never guessed myself: I talk to ChatGPT while working my dog sometimes.
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At Murphy Road Recycling’s material recovery facility near Hartford, the machines are taking over the dirtiest jobs. A few workers remain on the line, mostly near the front to watch for hazardous items. Otherwise, the system of conveyors, magnets, optical sorters and pneumatic blocks runs largely unmanned.
Watching over it all are computers that analyze material as it passes by at about 7 miles an hour. The devices, made by London-based Greyparrot, use artificial intelligence to identify recyclables, flag food-grade material, gauge items’ mass, assess market value and calculate points at which a robotic claw might best clasp each piece.
Just imagine what cool tech can be build with sensors and AI - this is so cool!
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If you’re outside the industry, you may be confused — isn’t there an AI boom that’s getting hundreds of billions of dollars in investments? Doesn’t that mean the tech bros are doing great? What you may have missed is that half a million tech workers have been laid off in the years since ChatGPT was released; the same attacks on marginalized workers and DEI and “woke” that the tech robber barons launched against the rest of society were aimed at their own companies first.
So the good people who actually make the technology we use every day, the real innovators and creators and designers, are reacting to the unprecedented disconnect between the contemporary tech industry and the fundamentals that drew so many people toward it in the first place. Many of the biggest companies have abandoned the basic principle of making technology that actually_ works._ So many new products fail to deliver on even the basic capabilities that the companies are promising that they will provide.
While I really enjoy my coding sessions on Google Antigravity, where I do not code, but let the computer do it, I do understand that this fundamentally changes the good old tech industry.
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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico
