8 Ways Robots Are Taking Over Our Jobs and Our World
Robots that replace workers are being prototyped in more and more areas, including some highly-paid professions.
Read more...Category Archives: Technology and innovation
The Shafting, Um, Sharing Economy
The Wall Street Journal, of all places, describes the dark economic underbelly of Uber and other Orwellianly-named “sharing” services.
Read more...Michael Perelman: The Dysfunctionality of Slavery and Neoliberalism
Slavery and periods of low pay to labor are correlated with low innovation .
Read more...The “War on Cash” in 10 Spine-Chilling Quotes
The war on cash is escalating.
Read more...Media Consolidation Thwarted Again as Comcast Backs Off Time Warner Deal
Late Thursday, Comcast apparently signaled that they would abort a 14-month bid to purchase Time Warner Cable, in a deal that would have created the nation’s largest cable operator by a wide margin. The FCC was going to recommend a hearing, which is a prelude to cancellation. The spin is that there are more consolidation attempts on the way, but there’s no guarantee that they would be successful either.
Read more...Rajiv Sethi: Spoofing in an Algorithmic Ecosystem
A London trader recently charged with price manipulation appears to have been using a strategy designed to trigger high-frequency trading algorithms. Whether he used an algorithm himself is beside the point: he made money because the market is dominated by computer programs responding rapidly to incoming market data, and he understood the basic logic of their structure.
Read more...On Generic Management in Health Care: Hospital Chief Information Officers (CIOs) Say Patient Engagement is All About… Themselves?
Health care management seems to believe it delivers health care, as opposed to facilitating those who really deliver it: Doctors and nurses.
Read more...Technology Trauma
More misadventures with the Typhoid Mary of technology.
Read more...Bill Black: How the “Super Crunchers” Became the “Super Torturers” of Finance Data
Many of the concerns about Big Data focus on the surveillance apparatus used to collect it, or on the naive modeling approaches, like attributing causality to mere correlations. Here Black addresses an established problem: that of deliberate abuse of models.
Read more...Lousy Electronic Medical Records Fuel Successful Lawsuits
A new article in ComputerWorld (hat tip Chuck L) describes how the screw-ups resulting from lousy electronic medical records are large and frequent enough to have caught the attention of attorneys.
Read more...RJ Eskow: The 5 Worst Things About the Techno-Libertarians Solidifying Their Grasp on Our Economy and Culture
Some of the Valley’s billionaires are using their publicly-assisted wealth to back far-right politics under a “libertarian” label.
Read more...Can Voter Choice Technology Succeed Where Arab Spring Failed?
Yves here. As much as technology offers great promise as a way to create new routes for organizing, consensus-building, and decision-making, I’m not optimistic about the prospects for democracy in societies with no democratic traditions. Nevertheless, voter choice technology does seem more promising and lower cost than US adventurism as a way to try to build democratic muscles in the Middle East.
Read more...Big Data Is Watching You (at Work)
By Lambert Strether of Corrente. There’s been some admiring coverage in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere of UPS’s Orion system of algorithmic route selection (driver reactions), but not much discussion of how electronic monitoring structures the UPS driver’s entire working day (or what we “professional” types are wont to call our “workflow”). A recent […]
Read more...Tech’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple
This is a great talk on the outlook for the four dominant tech companies by Scott Galloway of L2. Trust me. Just watch it.
Read more...Obama Administration Makes Unverifiable Claim of 545,000 IT Job Openings; H-1B Visa Boosting Likely Culprit
Two stories on Slashdot say a great deal about the reality of the labor market versus the official hype. It’s noteworthy that the comments, which are typically fractious at Slashdot, line up almost uniformly on the “employers are looking for insanely specific and often unrealistic experience.” And why might that be? In the case of tech in particular, to justify bringing in more H-1B visa candidates.
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