Creepy Database Lists Whether 1.8M Chinese Women Are “Breedready”
By: Futurism March 11, 2019 We already knew China kept a close eye on its population, monitoring everything from their spending habits to their social interactions. Now we know someone in the nation is also tracking which female citizens are “breedready,” a term apparently used to signal that a woman is likely able to have children — […]
Elizabeth Warren is right – we must break up Facebook, Google and Amazon
By: Robert Reich March 10, 2019 The presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren announced on Friday she wants to bust up giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon. America’s first Gilded Age began in the late 19th century with a raft of innovations – railroads, steel production, oil extraction – but culminated in mammoth trusts run by “robber […]
How smart tech is giving ageing prisoners a lifeline
By: Sarah Johnson March 6, 2019 Jim Lees woke up late one night needing to use the toilet. As he sat up in bed, he felt dizzy, then blacked out and fell to the floor. He remembers: “Everything went blank. I fell and was unconscious. I don’t know how long I was out.” When Lees […]
Could robots make us better humans?
By: John Harris March 5, 2019 As Marcus du Sautoy greets me at the entrance to New College, Oxford, his appearance is a quiet riot of colour. His clothes rather suggest someone who ran into White Stuff or Fat Face and frantically grabbed anything he could find – in this case, a salmon zip-up top, […]
Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws
By: Carole Cadwalladr and Duncan Campbell March 2, 2017 Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed. The documents, […]
Y Combinator CEO: AI Will Replace Jobs, But Life Will be Awesome
By: Victor Tangermann February 28, 2019 What will artificial intelligence mean for the job market? That’s a question that’s been met with a lot of pessimism — from predictions of a collapse of the global economy to soaring mass unemployment. But Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator president Sam Altman has a far more positive […]
Are you being scanned? How facial recognition technology follows you, even as you shop
By: Eden Gillespie February 24, 2019 As digital billboards record customers’ reactions to advertisements tailored to them, just who is safeguarding Australians’ privacy? According to experts, FRT is now more accurate than humans at identifying faces. Photograph: Jochen Tack/Alamy If you shop at Westfield, you’ve probably been scanned and recorded by dozens of hidden cameras […]
The Retraining Paradox
By: Ruth Graham Feb 23, 2017 When Nathan Kecy graduated from Plymouth State University in New Hampshire a decade ago with a bachelor’s degree in communications, he found himself with about $10,000 in debt and few clear career options. He first found work as a door-to-door salesman (“a pyramid scheme,” he recalls) and then in […]
No global digital tax by end-2020 would mean chaos: France
By: Reuters feb 23, 2020 Failure to reach a global deal on where and how much to tax digital giants such as Google (GOOGL.O), Amazon (AMZN.O) or Meta (META.O) would result in many digital tax regimes emerging all over the world, France’s Finance Minister said on Sunday. It would also likely trigger U.S. retaliatory tariffs, […]