At 20 airports in the United States, security screening is handled not by the Transportation Security Administration, but by private companies — and their checkpoints aren’t seeing long lines.

With the increasing demand for automation and remote operation, controlling electrical devices without the need for physical access has become an important area of development in modern engineering.

In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird. Credit...Illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato ...