Tech Reading. Last night a robot saved my life.
Welcome to yet another of my tech reading lists. Moderating content on a community is hard and a sometimes thankless task that often goes unpaid. Now big social media companies are employing people to moderate and delete content especially in Germany. This article from ZDNet gives you an indication why “Germany’s new hate speech law goes live: So who’s in its sights? The NetzDG or ‘Facebook law’ is now in force with big implications for social networks.” (02/10/17). This law requires social media companies to take down ‘objectionable content’ in day or at most a week. Benefits are accruing for job creation as Facebook is outsourcing jobs in centres dedicated to deleting hateful or violent content.
Does this work? Time will tell but encouraging news from Reddit as a “Study finds Reddit’s controversial ban of its most toxic subreddits actually worked” (TechCrunch, 11/09/17)
Last night a robot saved my life. Not quite but it could happen as “Honda unveils a disaster relief robot” (BBC, 06/10/17). This sits under the umbrella of humanitarian tech. Easy to be cynical about this side of tech but credit to Facebook as “Zuckerberg details Facebook’s response to Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis” (TechCrunch, 27/09/17).
Our relationship in the workplace with robots will be as Co-Bots. These will be in factories rather than the office to start with. This Austin Badger article “The Rise of Co-Bots” (Medium, 26/09/17) sets the scene with some stats
According to the International Federation of Robotics, more than 1.4 million new industrial robots are expected to be installed in factories around the world by 2019. The top five countries investing in robotics are China, South Korea, Japan, the United States and Germany.
This last article “The secret lives of children and their phones: Snapchat and Clash Royale, but not Facebook — what children really do with their phones” (Financial Times, 06/10/17) not only gives you an insight into their social media lives. But also makes you as a reader reflect on your own social media use.
This quote stood out for me;
For those concerned about the well-documented addictive nature of smartphones, some research suggests that many children are slowly starting to emerge from the haze, with some even experimenting with a tech-lite lifestyle, especially as they get past the hump of their early teens. In May, a survey from the social research organisation NORC at the University of Chicago found that 58 per cent of American teens reported taking breaks from social media, many voluntarily.
Name checked in the article is an app called Forest which helps you focus because if you don’t, a tree dies. Hat tip to Charlie Taylor for highlighting this fascinating FT article.
Have a great tech week.
