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"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"They still have far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it - making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing. But the basic existence of that technology is years old, at this point. And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal - not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it."

"Anouk van Maris, a robot cognition specialist who is researching ethical human-robot interaction, has found that comfort levels with robots vary greatly depending on location and culture. "It depends on what you expect from it. Some people love it, others want to run away as soon as it starts moving," she says. "The advantage of a robot that looks human-like is that people feel more comfortable with it being close to them, and it is easier to communicate with it. The big disadvantage is that you expect it to be able to do human things and it often can't.""

"Will Knight wrote. "Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey… . The car didn't follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it. "Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it's also a bit unsettling, since it isn't completely clear how the car makes its decisions…. What if one day it did something unexpected-crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why." "

"The data wars to come? Worryingly, there was one question where the AI simply couldn't come up with a counter argument. When arguing for the motion that "Data will become the most fought-over resource of the 21st century", the Megatron said: The ability to provide information, rather than the ability to provide goods and services, will be the defining feature of the economy of the 21st century. But when we asked it to oppose the motion - in other words, to argue that data wasn't going to be the most vital of resources, worth fighting a war over - it simply couldn't, or wouldn't, make the case. In fact, it undermined its own position: We will able to see everything about a person, everywhere they go, and it will be stored and used in ways that we cannot even imagine."

"This is partially why online anonymity is so important - it gives people the grace of exploration and inquiry. It allows people to make choices, change their minds, learn, and grow. TikTok doesn't make room for this kind of internet exploration; it makes it impossible to have curiosity without consequence. TikTok isn't alone in using engagement and recommender algorithms to curate personalised content feeds, but it does take it to the extreme. This is profitable both because it keeps people scrolling and because there's very little difference between being able to personalise content and personalise ads."

"The intriguing echo of Eliza in thinking about ChatGPT is that people regard it as magical even though they know how it works - as a "stochastic parrot" (in the words of Timnit Gebru, a well-known researcher) or as a machine for "hi-tech plagiarism" (Noam Chomsky). But actually we do not know the half of it yet - not the CO2 emissions incurred in training its underlying language model or the carbon footprint of all those delighted interactions people are having with it. Or, pace Chomsky, that the technology only exists because of its unauthorised appropriation of the creative work of millions of people that just happened to be lying around on the web? What's the business model behind these tools? And so on. Answer: we don't know."

"There it is. If you run a business, and the FBI or NSA want to turn it into a mass surveillance tool, they believe they can do so, solely on their own initiative. They can force you to modify your system. They can do it all in secret and then force your business to keep that secret. Once they do that, you no longer control that part of your business. You can't shut it down. You can't terminate part of your service. In a very real sense, it is not your business anymore. It is an arm of the vast U.S. surveillance apparatus, and if your interest conflicts with theirs then they win. Your business has been commandeered."

When you're trying to keep something a secret, it may not be a good idea to take it out into the public and lose it. It might not also be a good idea to take it and post about it, even if you are Gizmodo.

"Once it's verified, the transaction's information, plus both your digital signature and your friend's digital signature, are stored in a block alongside many other transactions like it. Once the block is full, it gets a hash, which is a unique code that sort of acts like its nametag. It also stores its position on the chain and the hash of the previous block on the chain. (Here's an example block to illustrate what kind of information is stored there.) "

"When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn't set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn't tamed politics. It sent them berserk. And it hadn't brought people closer together. It had alienated them."

"Telegram, a messaging app created by the reclusive Russian exile Pavel Durov, is suited to running protests for a number of reasons. It allows huge encrypted chat groups, making it easier to organise people, like a slicker version of WhatsApp. And its "channels" allow moderators to disseminate information quickly to large numbers of followers in a way that other messaging services do not; they combine the reach and immediacy of a Twitter feed, and the focus of an email newsletter. The combination of usability and privacy has made the app popular with protestors (it has been adopted by Extinction Rebellion) as well as people standing against authoritarian regimes (in Hong Kong and Iran, as well as Belarus); it is also used by terrorists and criminals. In the past five years, Telegram has grown at a remarkable speed, hitting 60 million users in 2015 and 400 million in April this year. "

"100 Things We've Lost to the Internet. Its form seems to fit an era of short attention spans, breaking up its author's writing into short essays with headings such as "Solitude", "Ignoring people", "Leaving a message" and "A parent's undivided attention". At its best, the book reads like it mixes journalism with sociology and anthropology. To its credit, it also manages the rare feat of exploring what technology has done to us without succumbing to doom and panic."

"In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19b, and promised users that it wouldn't harvest their data and mix it with the surveillance troves it got from Facebook and Instagram. It lied. Years later, Facebook mixes data from all of its properties, mining it for data that ultimately helps advertisers, political campaigns and fraudsters find prospects for whatever they're peddling. Today, Facebook is in the process of acquiring Giphy, and while Giphy currently doesn't track users when they embed GIFs in messages, Facebook could start doing that anytime"

"Why? Because it has an internal app store that puts its young player base to work making virtual stuff and selling it for scrip or peanuts while the company pockets the profits. It even promotes the far-right personalities and groups using it to recruit. It is a ruthless money machine that embodies the perverse incentives of social media, aimed directly at children and operated by amoral reptiles."

"But the uniqueness of TSMC and its location on an island that the Chinese regime regards as part of the mainland is giving rise to strategic panic. Both the US and the EU are racing to try to ensure that they have 2nm chip-fabrication capability within their respective jurisdictions. The problem is that one cannot conjure up such capacity just by throwing money at it. TSMC itself has built a fabrication plant in Arizona. But in his speech marking the ceremonial opening of the facility last December, Morris Chang, the firm's founder, said that it could not find enough qualified American workers to run it. It was sending every new American recruit to Taiwan for 18 months of training and was even importing engineers from Taiwan to make the Arizona plant operational. Hopefully it will all be up and running before Xi decides to "do a Putin" and we will no longer to be able to have chips with everything."

"The specific engineering of ChatGPT has made it quite compelling. But ultimately (at least until it can use outside tools) ChatGPT is "merely" pulling out some "coherent thread of text" from the "statistics of conventional wisdom" that it's accumulated. But it's amazing how human-like the results are. And as I've discussed, this suggests something that's at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more "law like" in their structure than we thought. ChatGPT has implicitly discovered it. But we can potentially explicitly expose it, with semantic grammar, computational language, etc."

"Henle was surprised by how much she felt seen by this technology. She also tried using Bard and Bing AI for the same purpose, but both fell short. ChatGPT was much more convincing. "I felt like it was taking the best parts of my mom and the best parts of psychology and fusing those things together," she says. While Henle had initially hoped ChatGPT would give her the chance to converse with what she describes as "a reincarnated version of her mother", she says has since used it with a different intent. "I think I'm going to use it when I'm doubting myself or some part of our relationship," she says. "But I will probably not try to converse with it as if I really believe it's her talking back to me. What I'm getting more out of it is more just wisdom. It's like a friend bringing me comfort.""

"Cave wrote in his response: "Since its launch in November last year many people, most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic awe, have sent me songs 'in the style of Nick Cave' created by ChatGPT. There have been dozens of them. Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology. I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI - that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster.""

"In a simulated test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI killed its operator to prevent it from interfering with its efforts to achieve its mission, an official said last month. AI used "highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal" in the simulated test, said Col Tucker 'Cinco' Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May. Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy enemy's air defense systems, and attacked anyone who interfered with that order."