The future is not completely unpredictable. Many of the most powerful economic and political trends in this country can be found inside an Amazon warehouse. And what happens to the workers there will say a lot about our collective future.
Australia uses five different tests to evaluate potential immigrants’ mastery of English, but only one of those tests uses computer-assisted voice recognition. Louise Kennedy, a native English speaker from Ireland, was unfortunate enough to receive the automated test when she was applying for residency in Australia.…
You’ve probably got enough on your plate without wasting time on phone chores that could be running automatically—like clearing out old photos, muting and unmuting your handset, posting to all of your social media accounts at once, and so on. Here are five automations you can set up quickly and for free as soon as you…
While Elon Musk is running around cautioning the world about the real danger of Skynet-style warrior robots, Jack Ma would like you to consider another possible problem: CEOs might lose their overpaid gigs and there will be no golden parachute. Well, let’s be honest, there probably will be a golden parachute...…
We all know, or at least suspect, that robots are taking people’s jobs, but new research shows the dramatic degree to which industrial robots are replacing human workers and forcing down wages.
Donald Trump loves trucks, I guess. Also, the trucking industry is poised to be decimated by technological change. Here we have an opportunity.
Whether it’s poorly reported stories of hacked Samsung TVs, sadly hilarious tales of hacked teddy bears, or even more bizarre claims about wiretapped microwaves, real, fake, and overblown accounts of all the things that can happen with the devices we choose to connect to the internet dominate the news. We’ve brought…
Earlier this month, IFTTT (If This Then That) changed its automation platform into a more sophisticated tool. Rather than using one-dimensional “recipes” that trigger actions when certain conditions are met, the company launched something entirely new called “applets.” The new applets allow users to create multiple…
We could all use a little more time in the day, and that means you shouldn’t be wasting time navigating through menus or punching through keyboard commands while you’re at work. Luckily, there are a bunch of apps available for Mac and Windows that will help you get work done faster. These are our picks for the best…
A few years ago, a burrito joint near my college campus installed computers so that customers could place their orders without ever having to make eye contact with a cashier. It was meant as a convenience, but my friends and I felt oddly detached ordering food through a computer. And we wondered: Did this signal the…
As the automation era unfolds around is, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that no jobs are safe—not even those belonging to dogs. Introducing Swagbot, the world’s first herding robot.
When you take a vacation, you get to explore a new place and get away from the daily grind. Of course, vacations require a fair amount of prep work, and the super useful tool IFTTT can help with that.
Remember travel agents? Or Victrola repairmen? Their jobs disappeared as society became more technologically advanced. And a new study shows that most Americans believe robots will replace many human workers soon. But they overwhelmingly think their own jobs are safe.
“The Last Job on Earth” takes place in one of those nebulous near-future worlds so beloved by fiction. In it, the world is 99.99 percent automated. Instead of a utopia or dystopia, it presents something that is pretty much in between. The tolls of automation are more internal than external.
The World Economic Forum expects automation and robots will eliminate 5.1 million jobs within the next five years. That’s a scary thought, especially if you have one of these jobs that could theoretically be done more efficiently (and for less cost) with an automated machine.
Don’t read this if you’re about to board an airplane. A new report by the Department of Transportation warns that US pilot training no longer helps airline pilots maintain the ability to fly commercial flights manually, because of the surfeit of autonomous technology inside the cockpit.
Are you getting or renewing your driver’s license in California soon? Don’t worry about registering to vote. California just became the second state in the country to pass a law creating automatic voter registration at the DMV.
Driverless cars are designed to cut down on traffic accidents, but that hasn’t stopped human-driven cars from crashing into them anyways.
Suddenly, your boss doesn’t seem so bad. Japanese firm Hitachi is now using artificially intelligent managers, in what may be a world’s first. These AI bosses can not only issue workflows and employee duties in real time, they can even find ways to improve employee efficiency.
This ping pong bot is so good it doesn’t even need to watch the ball, it just—OH MY GOD IT’S EYEING THE CHILD.
