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"For many years, even TikTok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But TikTok couldn't resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop."

" Some search engines, including Bing and DuckDuckGo, give an entire first page of spurious results (see image in upper left). Most of the results are for pages obviously designed to obfuscate, throwing banal dust into the eyes of the search engine and leaving a casual searcher with the incorrect impression that there's nothing to see here. "

"Three months passed. Then, on Wednesday, anonymous government officials reportedly confirmed that a local company called Systems Engineering of Egypt (SEE or See Egypt) had won the bid to develop the system, which would allegedly allow the Egyptian government to sniff and analyze Internet and social media activity, as well as intercept Skype, WhatsApp and Viber conversations. "

"…in about ten years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore's Law. In fact, already, we see a slowing down of Moore's Law. Computer power simply cannot maintain its rapid exponential rise using standard silicon technology. - Dr. Michio Kaku - 2012"

"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

"And, of course, there's the law-enforcement angle. Instead of relying on sketch artists and police lineups, a real-life version of a Recaller could tap into a witness's memory and reconstruct what they saw. Forget security-camera footage - cops just need your thoughts."

"Every time I see a news story blaming a selfie for a death, I also see a missed opportunity. If social media was powerful enough to draw a person to that place, and inspire them to take a photo, then surely it can also be powerful enough to reach that person with a powerful message about responsible recreation."

"School officials see the cameras as a way to improve student confidence and crowdsource the task of catching misbehaving pupils. Parents use the feeds to monitor their children's academic progress and spy on their friendships and romances. But many students see live-streaming as an intrusion, prompting a broader debate in China about privacy, educational ethics and the perils of helicopter parenting."

" respite was thanks to a sloppy bit of programming from the worm's creator, who'd left a killswitch in the code: newly infected systems checked to see if a certain domain (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com) existed before attempting to spread the infection; by registering this domain, security researchers were able to freeze the worm.The respite was thanks to a sloppy bit of programming from the worm's creator, who'd left a killswitch in the code: newly infected systems checked to see if a certain domain (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com) existed before attempting to spread the infection; by registering this domain, security researchers were able to freeze the worm. But a day later, it's back, and this time, without the killswitch. Security researchers running honeypots have seen new infections by versions of the worm that can spread even when the iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com domain is live."

"Some Facebook users who recently watched a Daily Mail video depicting Black men reported seeing a label from Facebook asking if they were interested in watching more videos about "primates." The label appeared in bold text under the video, stating "Keep seeing videos about Primates?" next to "Yes" and "Dismiss" buttons that users could click to answer the prompt. It's part of an AI-powered Facebook process that attempts to gather information on users' personal interests in order to deliver relevant content into their News Feed"

"Some experts see platforms like Appen as a new form of data colonialism, says Saiph Savage, director of the Civic AI lab at Northeastern University. "Workers in Latin America are labeling images, and those labeled images are going to feed into AI that will be used in the Global North," she says. "While it might be creating new types of jobs, it's not completely clear how fulfilling these types of jobs are for the workers in the region." Due to the ever moving goal posts of AI, workers are in a constant race against the technology, says Schmidt. "One workforce is trained to three-dimensionally place bounding boxes around cars very precisely, and suddenly it's about figuring out if a large language model has given an appropriate answer," he says, regarding the industry's shift from self-driving cars to chatbots. Thus, niche labeling skills have a "very short half-life." "From the clients' perspective, the invisibility of the workers in microtasking is not a bug but a feature," says Schmidt. Economically, because the tasks are so small, it's more feasible to deal with contractors as a crowd instead of individuals. This creates an industry of irregular labor with no face-to-face resolution for disputes if, say, a client deems their answers inaccurate or wages are withheld. The workers WIRED spoke to say it's not low fees but the way platforms pay them that's the key issue. "I don't like the uncertainty of not knowing when an assignment will come out, as it forces us to be near the computer all day long," says Fuentes, who would like to see additional compensation for time spent waiting in front of her screen. Mutmain, 18, from Pakistan, who asked not to use his surname, echoes this. He says he joined Appen at 15, using a family member's ID, and works from 8 am to 6 pm, and another shift from 2 am to 6 am. "I need to stick to these platforms at all times, so that I don't lose work," he says, but he struggles to earn more than $50

"And he emphatically doesn't see the process of building an AI image as dehumanised, or even one in which the human is sidelined. "I don't see it as a threat to creativity. For me, it really is setting me free. All the boundaries I had in the past - material boundaries, budgets - no longer matter. And for the first time in history, the older generation has an advantage, because AI is a knowledge accelerator. Two thirds of the prompts are only good if you have knowledge and skills, when you know how photography works, when you know art history. This is something that a 20-year-old can't do.""

"There has also been, he says, "a real push in opinion pieces and popular-press books that are sloppy scientifically but stated so confidently. The ideas in these books are not peer-reviewed." The published studies they cite tend to have small samples and no control groups, and to be based on associations rather than proving cause. "People will say: 'The iPhone was invented in 2007 and Instagram became popular in 2012 and, oh my God, look, tech use has gone up at the same time mental health has gone down!' It seems like common sense - that's why you have this kind of consensus. But it just isn't scientific." In 2023, Przybylski and his colleagues looked at data from almost 12,000 children in the US aged between nine and 12 and found no impact from screen time on functional connectivity ("how different parts of the brain kind of talk to each other", he explains), as measured with fMRI scans while the children completed tasks. They also found no negative impact on the children's self-reported wellbeing. "If you publish a study like we do, where we cross our Ts, we dot our Is, we state our hypotheses before we see the data, we share the data and the code, those types of studies don't show the negative effects that we expect to see.""

"But Duolingo now seems to have changed its tune, at least in terms of hiring. CEO Luis von Ahn wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this week: "To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are, in fact, continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it-and use it responsibly-the better off we will be in the long run." Though many language learners obviously appreciate the human touch on their materials, Duolingo isn't the only one leaning toward AI for language education. Last month, Google applied its flagship Google Gemini AI model to create three new tools, dubbed Little Language Lessons, accessible via the Google Labs page. However, Google did dub the new set of tools as "just an early exploration.""

"What wasn't publicly known until now is that Facebook actually ran experiments to see how the changes would affect publishers-and when it found that some of them would have a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing "junk sites," as a former employee with knowledge of the conversations puts it, the engineers were sent back to lessen those impacts. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, they came back in January 2018 with a second iteration that dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead."

"That algorithm can make the app powerfully addictive and fun, but like other social media platforms, it may also be cutting out whole swaths of content that you'll never get to see. I ran an experiment by creating two fresh accounts on TikTok. With these accounts, the only bias they start with is knowing my location - Toronto - which brings up content made near me."

"Ellie may be a computer simulation, but she's incredibly perceptive. By reading the body language and vocal inflections of real live humans, she can engage in surprisingly meaningful exchanges, and even evoke emotional openness from her conversation partners. Her creators believe her receptivity to human emotional cues could revolutionize the field of mental health. Watching Ellie in action, it's not hard to see why."

As our connectivity increases, we're seeing a growing number of cases of law enforcement using social media and other digital tools to help solve crimes. A study from Accenture, a global management and consulting agency, showed that 72 percent of respondent citizens believe that social media can help in crime investigations and in the prosecution of offenders.

"Amazon's algorithms encourage customers pay more than they need to for popular products and appear to give more prominence to items that benefit the retail giant, according to an investigation by ProPublica. The investigation looked at 250 frequently purchased products over several weeks to see which ones were chosen to appear in the highly-prized "buy box" that pops up first as a suggested purchase. "