"Take Yoti, for instance: the company provides a range of age verification services, partnering with CitizenCard to offer a digital version of its ID, and working with self-service supermarkets to experiment with automatic age recognition of individuals. John Abbott, Yoti's chief business officer, says the system is already as good as a person at telling someone's age from a video of them, and has been tested against a wide range of demographics - including age, race and gender - to ensure that it's not wildly miscategorising any particular group. The company's most recent report claims that a "Challenge 21" policy (blocking under-18s by asking for strong proof of age from people who look under 21) would catch 98% of 17-year-olds, and 99.15% of 16 year olds, for instance."
"A third of social media users aged between eight and 17 have the online age of an adult because they sign up with a false date of birth, according to new research.
The fake age issue means that young users in the UK are at greater risk of being exposed to harmful or adult content, as platforms presume they are older than they in fact are."
"The children's safety codes, introduced as part of the Online Safety Act, let Ofcom set new, tight rules for internet companies and how they can interact with children. It calls on services to make their platforms child-safe by default or implement robust age checks to identify children and give them safer versions of the experience.
For those sites with age checks, Ofcom will require algorithmic curation to be tweaked to limit the risks to younger users. That would require sites such as Instagram and TikTok to ensure the suggested posts and "for you" pages explicitly take account of the age of children."
"How we verify your users
We use a combination of AI technology, liveness anti-spoofing and document authenticity checks so you can be confident in the age of your customers."
"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
"Among six to seven year olds, who have grown up with YouTube, Spotify music streaming and the BBC iPlayer, the average DQ (digital quotient) score was 98, higher than for those aged between 45 and 49, who scored an average of 96. Digital understanding peaks between 14 and 15, with a DQ of 113 - and then drops gradually throughout adulthood, before falling rapidly in old age."
"The Details: The law requires people under 14 who have accounts to delete them. It also demands enhanced age verification for sites containing 'obscene' or 'harmful' content.
The Debate: Supporters view this as a welcome step towards child safety. Critics question the law's enforceability, querying account detection methods, use of VPNs by children, and age verification standards."
"If you've been job hunting recently, chances are you've interacted with a resume robot, a nickname for an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS. In its most basic form, an ATS acts like an online assistant, helping hiring managers write job descriptions, scan resumes and schedule interviews. As artificial intelligence advances, employers are increasingly relying on a combination of predictive analytics, machine learning and complex algorithms to sort through candidates, evaluate their skills and estimate their performance. Today, it's not uncommon for applicants to be rejected by a robot before they're connected with an actual human in human resources.
The job market is ripe for the explosion of AI recruitment tools. Hiring managers are coping with deflated HR budgets while confronting growing pools of applicants, a result of both the economic downturn and the post-pandemic expansion of remote work. As automated software makes pivotal decisions about our employment, usually without any oversight, it's posing fundamental questions about privacy, accountability and transparency."
"Nearly half of three to four year-olds (48 per cent) were reported by their parent or guardian in the Ofcom survey to have used apps or sites to send messages or make video or voice calls. Those who did mainly used WhatsApp (25 per cent) and Facetime (19 per cent).
"It's likely that children of this age were receiving help with these communication activities as they are still developing basic reading and writing skills," said Ofcom.
The disclosures prompted a warning by Dame Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner, that young children should not have internet-enabled phones because of the risk of them accessing harmful content."
"In this age of information overload, internet exhibitionism and NSA snooping, is it possible to make yourself unGoogleable? And does it earn you added credibility, as fashion designer Phoebe Philo and bands such as !!! suggest?"
"If there is nowhere to hide, how can disagreements safely ferment in political life, at work, in relationships? By definition, change disturbs something or annoys someone. And, moving to paranoia, or full awareness, the age-old question arises: who will guard us from the guardians?"
"Advances in technology have long been recognised as a threat to manual labour. Now highly skilled, knowledge-based jobs that were once regarded as safe could be at risk. How will they adapt to the digital age?"
""We have absolutely nothing against bricklayers," Pivac says. "The problem is the average age of bricklayers is going up and it's difficult to attract new young people to the trade."
There's a debate on about the future of automation-what it means that machines may be able to match humans at virtually any task. For now, robots are nowhere near that advanced."