Everything you need to know about ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, Dall-E and more.
New York City is very loud, as you might infer from a place whose principal mythology insists it never sleeps. Or you might know firsthand from having lived there and somehow never managed to stray more than three blocks from a clanging jackhammer or an incessant car alarm. It’s so loud that in 2014, a…
Automation is often presented as an inexorably advancing force, whether it’s ushering in a threat to jobs or a promise of increased leisure or larger profits. We’re made to imagine the robots rising, increasingly mechanized systems of production, more streamlined modes of everyday living. But the truth is that automation technology and automated systems very…
Lyft finally filed for an IPO on Friday, a long-expected move for the ride-sharing company that has been racing to beat its larger competitor Uber to the public-offering punch. Aiming for a $20 billion valuation, Lyft’s newly filed IPO prospectus claims 39 percent of the U.S. ride-share market, a 17 percent jump in two years.…
When pundits, politicians, or advocates have talked about the need to reduce fossil fuel production to combat climate change, one of the most common rejoinders has been to appeal to that most central of American concerns—it creates a lot of jobs. Oil industry backers are often touting the notion that it creates lots of decent-paying…
Have a plan to track and predict the behavior of ex-cons using artificial intelligence? The U.S. Department of Justice is all ears. Last week, the Justice Department announced it was awarding up to $3 million for artificial intelligence projects that promote “the successful reentry of offenders under community supervision.” The solicitation for R&D proposals characterizes…
Yesterday morning, news went viral that PepsiCo was spending $2.5 billion on a plan to restructure the company that involved laying off an untold number of its workers. It was probably the phrase “relentlessly automating,” which Business Insider threw in the headline, that did the trick. Pepsi’s new CEO, Ramon Laguarta had said in an…
In a deal that made few ripples outside the energy industry, two very large but relatively obscure companies, Rockwell Automation and Schlumberger Limited, announced a joint venture called Sensia. The new company will “sell equipment and services to advance digital technology and automation in the oilfield,” according to the Houston Chronicle. Yet the partnership has…
Researchers at the non-profit AI research group OpenAI just wanted to train their new text generation software to predict the next word in a sentence. It blew away all of their expectations and was so good at mimicking writing by humans they’ve decided to pump the brakes on the research while they explore the damage…
Walmart has published a wide-ranging report on how the company predicts automation will unfold across the nation. Based on data supplied by the McKinsey Global Institute, the report “examines more than 3,000 counties in the United States with the goal of helping communities plan for their individual situations and develop responses that will position them…
President Donald Trump reportedly plans to sign an executive order today creating something called the American AI Initiative. The executive order is apparently a symbolic nod to artificial intelligence that doesn’t create any new funding but encourages the federal government to do more with AI. And we can’t help but wonder, what are the odds…
Over the last year or two, it’s sure felt like a seismic shift’s been underfoot in the way tech employees think about labor conditions and work—or, at least, in the way the media portrays them doing so. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Regardless, a number of stories have documented both an ascendent drive for…
The first substantive claim President Donald Trump made in his second State of the Union address concerned what is perhaps his favorite non-Wallean topic: blue-collar jobs. If there are two professions that Trump has awkwardly and effusively embraced during his tenure as president, it’s coal and manufacturing—you know, salt-of-the-earth jobs. Manly jobs. American jobs. Disappearing…
Researchers have built a massive dataset of hotel images with the intention of helping law enforcement in human trafficking investigations. The dataset, called Hotels-50k, consists over more than 1 million images from 50,000 hotels globally. “Recognizing a hotel from an image of a hotel room is important for human trafficking investigations,” the researchers wrote in…
If the robots are indeed taking our jobs, shouldn’t we all probably be working less? A movement is picking up momentum in the United Kingdom based on that very reasonable logic. On Thursday, a proposal backed by eminent British progressives like John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor (the party’s chief economic spokesperson), is making the call…
A full quarter of all U.S. employment is highly vulnerable to automation, a new report from the Brookings Institute finds. That’s the equivalent of 36 million jobs. Meanwhile, some 36 percent of U.S. employment—52 million jobs—will “experience medium exposure to automation in coming decades.” While the remainder of U.S. jobs are likely to experience only…
Over the last five years, the global management consulting company Accenture has developed proprietary automation software called the SynOps platform that it says has helped it cut 40,000 jobs within the company. First, allow me to apologize for being forced to string together some of the dullest words in the English language, as few industries…
One of the most egregious myths about automation is that it is a faceless and elemental force of nature that we puny humans are capable only of scrambling to adapt to. This is technological determinism at its most aggressive, and it’s generally a big fat fallacy. As I’ve tried to show in these pages, automation…
When we talk about how artificial threatens to impact jobs, we’re usually talking about how machine learning threatens to impact jobs. As the ‘hottest’ subfield of AI going, i.e. the one receiving the lion’s share of the research dollars and commercial investment, it’s pretty crucial to understand how, specifically, it’s going to roll out in…
In the world of Merger, the worker sits alone in front of a screen or eight, surrounded by a sea of constantly compounding data, anxiously trying to handle tasks as they rapidly pile up, and attempting to make sense of the nearly incomprehensible world it all somehow fits into. It’s a film apparently set in…
During his first day on the job at a small 3D-modelling company, Griffith noticed that his new colleagues’ workstations were hopelessly out of date. So he took the initiative to suggest some automation upgrades to the higher-ups, who concurred. Two years later, 20 employees—some of them good friends—were out of work. “I feel bad because…
