It’s safe to say that we’re becoming increasingly afraid of tech. Algorithms and ad platforms are feeding us information we can’t trust, companies are storing and sharing our personal data and robots might be coming for our jobs. Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, is a futurist who wrote the new book “WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us.” Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks to him about how tech could do better.

The Labor Department released its monthly jobs report on Friday, and in September, for the first time in seven years, we lost jobs — 33,000 of them. But the government isn’t the only entity tracking the workforce. LinkedIn data show that hiring was on the upswing in September. So who’s right here? It turns out, both may be. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Guy Berger, an economist with LinkedIn, about how the company gets its data.

After this week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, both Google and Facebook promoted false news stories about the massacre. Both platforms took down the stories, but not before they were widely shared. Today on Marketplace Tech, we look at how fake news is promoted and why algorithms might not be enough to stop it.

If you had a Yahoo account in 2013, it was hacked. Verizon, which now owns Yahoo, announced this week that all three billion of Yahoo’s accounts were hacked. Yahoo had previously said only one-third of user accounts were affected. Why is the company just figuring this out now? On today’s show, we talk to Chester Wisniewski, a senior security researcher at Sophos, a network security company, about what happened and what you can do if you were affected.

There’s a lot of talk about smart machines taking our jobs. But AI pioneer Andrew Ng thinks we should focus on programming those smart machines in the first place. Ng is the co-founder of the massive online open course company Coursera. This fall, Coursera is offering classes in deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence. We ask Ng: In the future, will the world be split into two kinds of people — those who know how to code and those who don’t?

The National Defense Authorization Act specifies the budget every year for the Department of Defense. The House and Senate have each passed different versions of it. One major difference between the two: the House version includes funding for the militarization of space through a new military branch called the Space Corps. Molly Wood talks with Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams about what it might look like.

Almost 40 percent of American households have some kind of credit card debt. A startup called Affirm wants to provide an alternative. It partners with stores to offer loans for when you make a big purchase, like a mattress or a bike. Affirm was started by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with him about the project and his own early borrowing mistakes. 

Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple are four of tech’s most powerful brands. But have they become too powerful? And is regulation the only way to stop them? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, about how these companies grew to global dominance and our love-hate relationship with them.

By now we are all very aware of the Amazon effect: how Amazon is changing the retail industry. But it’s reaching businesses you may not expect. One is high-end hair salons, which used to make big profits from selling products like luxury shampoo and styling sprays. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood looks into how online sellers have cut into the business of hair.