Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm April Glazer.

And I'm Will Oremes.

Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 2nd. On today's show, we'll talk about a key detail of the new tax plan that could have a huge effect on gig workers in the tech sector and maybe on robots. We'll talk a little bit about Apple's

battery gate situation and the company's rare apology. And later, we'll be joined by Future Tent's

Tori Bosch to talk about the anthology, What Future, the year's best ideas to reclaim,

reanimate, and reinvent our future.

April, how are your holidays?

I moved this holiday. So I was pretty much just, you know, packing and unpacking boxes,

but it was nice to have the moment of respite from work to do that. What about you, Will? How was

yours?

Ours was a little hectic. We had that

trip up to the Bay Area, but it gave me the chance to record in person with you guys our last

couple episodes. I'm back here in Santa Barbara. The holidays were good. I hear the big

winner of these holidays were Amazon Alexa devices, which were the top sellers on Amazon.com.

I noticed the Alexa app was number one for a time on the iTunes store. What do you make of that, April? I think that there are super easy gifts to get people that you don't know very well. Or maybe if you do know them, well, they might think it's cool, but I think it's like pretty much a gift that you could get for anybody. So it makes sense to me. Yeah, it makes sense. There's actually a great piece that I would recommend listeners check out if they have a chance, which is our colleague Heather Schwedell wrote a piece in Slate about people who have gotten Alexa devices as gifts and some of the uncomfortable situations that have ensued. But April, you wanted to talk about the tax plan, and specifically this revision of the tax

plan, I understand, that would affect how the gig economy works. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

So we all know that at the end of the year, the Republicans shoved this huge tax plan through Congress,

and the centerpiece of that plan was to slash the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, which is huge.

But that's just one of the truckloads of changes

that will kind of be ushered in with this new tax code. Another that really deserves some

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