The Snarchitect

Will our children welcome the new robot overlords?

There will of course be new industries and jobs created in the future, just as there always have been. The question is, will they look like GM and Wal-Mart? Or more like Facebook, which provides a global service to more than a billion people with just 8000 employees? Or WhatsApp, which served 500 million customers with a staff of fewer than 20? And wouldn’t the new industries, funded by the profits generated by smart machines themselves, use those technologies to minimize their costs—including labor?
When smart machines can do most routine work in the economy, the demand for human labor splits into two camps. A small group with the most valued skills and talents—creative, intellectual, entrepreneurial—will earn great rewards. For the remaining jobs that machines can’t do, the qualification will be “being a human,” and the basic rules of supply and demand will drive those wages to the legal minimum.

www.thedailybeast.com

The ecosystem of digital collaboration tools and its evolution in the coming year.

These days, it’s lightweight tools and techniques for working together that are in vogue again. The reasons are complex but can mostly be summarized partially as a push back against the perceived scale and complexity of newer and more strategic forms of collaboration and partly just because better formats and user experiences for collaboration continue to be discovered and developed.
As a result, simpler forms of communication and sharing knowledge, well demonstrated by the growth and popularity of services like Dropbox, Box, and now Slack shows that innovation in collaboration isn’t slowing down. In fact, I find that offerings are continuing to proliferate, instead of consolidating, like we’d typically expect in an otherwise mature market.
This is largely driven by two key forces: Collaboration has a) become central to the high functioning of today’s knowledge worker (the worker that usually creates most of the bottom-line value in companies today), and b) continues to evolve as the arrival of new collaborative models is found to create high levels of differentiation and leverage to business operations.

www.zdnet.com

The technology that can read your emotions. (Login required)

The evolving technology has the potential to help people or even save lives. Cameras that could sense when a trucker is exhausted might prevent him from falling asleep at the wheel. Putting cameras embedded with emotion sensing software in the classroom, could help teachers determine whether they were holding their students’ attention.
But other applications are likely to breed privacy concerns. One retailer, for instance, is starting to test software embedded in security cameras that can scan people’s faces and divine their emotions as they walk in and out of its stores. Eyeris, based in Mountain View, Calif., says it has sold its software to federal law-enforcement agencies for use in interrogations.
The danger, Dr. Ekman and privacy advocates say, is that the technology could reveal people’s emotions without their consent, and their feelings could be misinterpreted. People might try to use the software to determine whether their spouse was lying, police might read the emotions of crowds or employers might use it to secretly monitor workers or job applicants.
“I can’t control usage,” Dr. Ekman says of his catalog, called the Facial Action Coding System. “I can only be certain that what I’m providing is at least an accurate depiction of when someone is concealing emotion.”
In Dr. Ekman’s analysis, there is no such thing as a simple smile or a frown. Facial movements are broken down into more-nuanced expressions; there are seven ways a forehead can furrow.

www.wsj.com