“The only operators are the ones in the ceiling,” says Chris Belfi, wrapped up in a Tyvek bunny suit, tinted yellow under the photo-safe lights. The robots rush by on overhead tracks, blinking and whirring. Every few seconds, one pauses above a giant machine. Out of its laundry-basket-size belly, a plastic box drops on thin wires, like Tom Cruise in a catsuit. It holds precious cargo: up to 25 shiny silicon wafers, each the size of a 12-in. pizza. The process of transforming them into tiny computer brains—call them microchips, semiconductors or just chips—takes nearly three months. “I use an analogy like baking a cake,” says Belfi, an automation engineer at chipmaker GlobalFoundries. “The only difference is our cake is about 66 layers.”
A version of this article was published in TIME’s newsletter Into the Metaverse. Subscribe for a weekly guide to the future of the Internet.
My friend and colleague Billy Perrigo has long written about the perils of Big Tech: how it spreads misinformation, fosters extremist networks worldwide and even threatens democracy. Last month, Billy traveled to Paris to interview the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen for the cover story of our Dec. 6 issue.…
“So, how much do you make?”
For decades, this was a deeply personal and uncomfortable question no one wanted to answer. But pay transparency is becoming more mainstream today. Already seven states require employers to disclose salary ranges during the hiring process.
And more workers are taking matters into their own hands, too. On social media, people are openly sharing what they do for work and how much money they make. The goal is to empower others to seek higher pay and to address pay inequity, which disproportionately affects women and minorities.
One of the leading voices in this movement is Hannah Williams, a 26-year-old content creator from Alexandria, Va. who in April 2022 launched Salary Transparent Street, a viral TikTok series in which sh…