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"Seeing an opportunity, Franklin decided to take advantage. On 9 July, the company said that it would begin to support digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like any other employee. "Today Lattice is making AI history," Franklin pronounced. "We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access and even a manager. Just as any person would be." The pushback was swift - and, in many cases, brutal, particularly on LinkedIn, which is generally not known for its savage engagement like X (formerly known as Twitter). "This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company," said Sawyer Middeleer, an executive at a firm that uses AI to help with sales research, on LinkedIn. "Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it implies that you view humans simply as 'resources' to be optimized and measured against machines. It's the exact opposite of a work environment designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.""

"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

"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."

"At 221 of the Fortune 500 companies, Fortune magazine's list of the the top 500 U.S. public corporations ranked by gross revenue, employees' credentials are posted publicly online for hackers to steal and reuse in cyberattacks, according to new research from the web intelligence firm Recorded Future. "

"Social media sites are increasingly informing employees of the negative effects of moderation jobs following several reports on harrowing working conditions, including long hours viewing violent and sexually exploitative content with little mental health support. Before accepting a job with Accenture, a subcontractor that works with several social media companies and manages some YouTube moderators at a Texas facility, employees had to sign a form titled "Acknowledgement", the Verge reported."

"Employees use Hubstaff, one of the myriad monitoring tools that companies turned to as the Covid pandemic forced many to work remotely. Some, such as CleverControl and FlexiSPY offer webcam monitoring and audio recording. Mae says she often has dry eyes and a sore head at the end of the working day. "Tracking doesn't allow for thinking time or stepping away and coming back to work - it's very intense.""

"n many jobs, work email doesn't stop when the employee leaves the office. And now France has decided to act. It has introduced rules to protect about a million people working in the digital and consultancy sectors from work email outside office hours. Those are taken to be before 9am and after 6pm. The deal signed between employers federations and unions says that employees will have to switch off work phones and avoid looking at work email, while firms cannot pressure staff to check messages. "

"Hundreds of Facebook employees have signed a letter to executive Mark Zuckerberg decrying his decision to allow politicians to post advertisements on the platform that include false claims."

"According to the report, Twitter's security "problems" were only exacerbated by the push to remote work necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic. Like many other newly remote workers, Twitter's employees experienced tech problems working from home. Hackers were able to capitalize on this, tricking at least one Twitter employee into believing the hacker was a member of Twitter's IT team."

"The tool tracks every click and interaction by employees and presents managers with leaderboards showing relative "productivity" of each employee, down to how many mentions they get in workplace emails."

"Twitter stands a 50% chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the World Cup, according to a recently departed employee with knowledge of how the company responds to large-scale events. The former employee, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed, has knowledge of the workings of Twitter Command Centre, the platform's team of troubleshooters who monitor the site for issues such as traffic spikes and data centre outages."

"The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew - but never disclosed - it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an "open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents. In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage"."

"Three Google employees have been injured in a crash involving one of the company's self-driving cars. Google revealed the accident happened on 1 July when its car was rear-ended while stationary on a public road in Mountain View, California. It is the first accident involving one of Google's fleet of self-driving vehicles to have resulted in injury."

"As Reuters reports, on March 28 SpaceX sent out an email to all of its 6,000+ employees telling them access to the Zoom video chat service had been disabled. The email stated, "We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support ... Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication." The stated reason given for disabling access to the service is, "significant privacy and security concerns.""

"Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. "The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful," said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. "It's not only that Signal doesn't have these policies in place. But they've been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.""

"When Reddit user Throwaway59724 had to start working from home because of Covid, they learned how to automate their IT job duties so they don't have to work more than 10 minutes a day to earn their "just-shy-of-90k" salary."

"A Google employee named Blake Lemoine was put on leave recently after claiming that one of Google's artificial-intelligence language models, called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications), is sentient. He went public with his concerns, sharing his text conversations with LaMDA. At one point, Lemoine asks, "What does the word 'soul' mean to you?" LaMDA answers, "To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself." "I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt," Lemoine explained, citing his religious beliefs. "Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?""

Huge chunks of the Internet will be effectively unreachable, and which sites go into the censorship bucket will be decided upon in secret, by unelected employees of big corporations, like China's Huawei. Sure, you can untick the box if you want, but as David Cameron's advisors will tell you, defaults are powerful and most users never change them.

"In case you're wondering what could be wrong with entrusting secret keys to the government for use "in exceptional circumstances", just ponder this: a few months ago, hackers (suspected to be Chinese) stole the personnel records of 21.5 million US federal employees, including the records of every person given a government background check for the last 15 years."

"Human beings have been replaced with robot arms, which have been busily crafting parts for mobile phones, with production per employee increased from 8,000 to 21,000 pieces at the same time. This amounts to a 162.5 per cent productivity improvement, and there is further bad news for the outdated meatsacks clutching their Chinese equivalent of P45s - the previous defect rate average of 25 per cent has now been reduced to just five per cent."