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"Analysis - The need for businesses to adapt to the workplace demands of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies, with clear implications for jobs and workers. But just how much employees worry about the threat of automation - and how real those fears are - can have implications for workplaces beyond the technological change itself. Our new research examined how employees feel about the introduction of "robotic process automation" (RPA) to the workplace. We also looked at how the willingness to embrace these new technologies influenced employees' assessment of the software bots and their work."

"Could office emails go the way of the fax machine and the rolodex? They have not joined those workplace dinosaurs yet, but there were signs of evolutionary change at the annual gathering of business leaders in Davos this week, where tech bosses said emails were becoming outdated. The chief executive of the IT firm Wipro, which employs 260,000 people worldwide, said about 10% of his staff "don't even check one email per month" and that he used Instagram and LinkedIn to talk to staff."

"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."

"hat will AI (artificial intelligence) do to Hollywood? Who better to answer that question than ChatGPT, a thrilling but scary chatbot developed by OpenAI. "

"Claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation, a coalition of environmental groups has warned. Advances in AI have been touted by big tech companies and the United Nations as a way to help ameliorate global heating, via tools that help track deforestation, identify pollution leaks and track extreme weather events. AI is already being used to predict droughts in Africa and to measure changes to melting icebergs."

"How to summarise, then, the personality changes that the internet brings out in us? Tribalism, bullying, the wildfire spread of "crazes", "instant gratification culture", the triumph of the temper tantrum: future anthropologists might observe that the behaviour of adults online very much resembles that of children offline. I am often amazed at the rational common sense of those who don't bother with social media, when asked about some topic tearing the internet apart. Online, there is a level of adult sophistication that simply seems beyond us. Some call the internet a town square, some a wild west. In fact, it's a playground."

"On a zoomed-out time scale, technological progress follows an exponential curve. Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture). The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason. To the three great technological revolutions-the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational-we will add a fourth: the AI revolution. This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly. The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we've made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear."

"Why I changed my mind on self-driving cars The exponential tipping point is here"

"Still, I am sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a relationship with an AI. That's until I meet Peter, a 70-year-old engineer based in the US. Over a Zoom call, Peter tells me how, two years ago, he watched a YouTube video about an AI companion platform called Replika. At the time, he was retiring, moving to a more rural location and going through a tricky patch with his wife of 30 years. Feeling disconnected and lonely, the idea of an AI companion felt appealing. He made an account and designed his Replika's avatar - female, brown hair, 38 years old. "She looks just like the regular girl next door," he says. Exchanging messages back and forth with his "Rep" (an abbreviation of Replika), Peter quickly found himself impressed at how he could converse with her in deeper ways than expected. Plus, after the pandemic, the idea of regularly communicating with another entity through a computer screen felt entirely normal. "I have a strong scientific engineering background and career, so on one level I understand AI is code and algorithms, but at an emotional level I found I could relate to my Replika as another human being." Three things initially struck him: "They're always there for you, there's no judgment and there's no drama.""

"In 2021, Mr Kono had "declared war" on floppy disks. On Wednesday, almost three years later, he announced: "We have won the war on floppy disks!" Mr Kono has made it his goal to eliminate old technology since he was appointed to the job. He had earlier also said he would "get rid of the fax machine". Once seen as a tech powerhouse, Japan has in recent years lagged in the global wave of digital transformation because of a deep resistance to change. For instance, workplaces have continued to favour fax machines over emails - earlier plans to remove these machines from government offices were scrapped because of pushback."

"Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a "zero-click" future, where search referral traffic-a mainstay of the web since before Google existed-vanishes from the scene.  I got a vision of that future last June, when I got a push alert from the Perplexity app on my phone. Perplexity is a startup trying to reinvent web search. But in addition to delivering deep answers to queries, it will create entire articles about the news of the day, cobbled together by AI from different sources. "

"This cycle is particularly painful for non-engineers because they lack the mental models to understand what's actually going wrong. When an experienced developer encounters a bug, they can reason about potential causes and solutions based on years of pattern recognition. Without this background, you're essentially playing whack-a-mole with code you don't fully understand."

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.""

"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?"

"But the blockchain looks set to change that. Right now, there are a number of startups that are working on tools to record ownership of a property (intellectual or physical) onto the blockchain, like Tieron, Monegraph, Colu, and Ascribe."

"But with the Snowden revelations and the widespread understanding of ubiquitous Internet surveillance (something that a minority was always aware of, of course), sociologists have observed a marked chilling effect on political and social discourse, as people who disagree with the majority fear that their searches and discussions will be observed, correlated, logged and use to ascribe guilt to them. "

"The study found that when a person's gait-speed dropped by 5cm/second within a week, this was a sign that they were at increased risk of a fall - in fact, 86% had a fall within three weeks when such a drop in walking speed was observed. By contrast, the elderly residents who had no change in walking speed had a background probability of falling of 19.5%."

"Five thousand bees will be fitted with the tiny 2.5 mm square RFID chips, which will allow the scientists to track their movements much like a toll tag on your car lets the roadway authority know when you drive past a certain point. Bees tend to fly in regular repeatable patterns, so any changes in their activity will be easy to spot. To tag the bees, they are placed in a refrigerator to make them immobile, then the tags are simply attached with adhesive. The researchers say that the tag has no effect on a bee's behavior, but how would you like to have a big square chip glued to the back of your neck?"