From lasers that cut denim at a factory, to drones that irrigate crops, it’s not a new story that machines are doing more work than ever. But people have long feared that robots are coming for their jobs, so technology evangelists now are calling on their peers to build a future in which the impact on human is lessened.

Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, a technology consulting company, thinks the solution is a “hybrid,” mixing humans and machines. He sees that happening already. O’Reilly says most software, for example, is actually a service that depends on human beings in the background to keep it updated and running.

This could be a paradigm shift for Silicon Valley acolytes. Out with the old: a reputedly cold, relentless push for efficiency through algorithms and automation, no matter the consequences for the working class. In with the new: innovation with a human face.

“It’s so important that we have to think about not using technology to replace people — but to augment them, to do something that was previously impossible,” O’Reilly said last week in Ho Chi Minh City at Apricot, an annual summit organized by the Asia and Pacific Internet Association and APNIC, the regional registry for domain names.

With more skills, people can work alongside robots. Lyft and Uber rely on software that’s intended to make drivers more productive. They’re not completely different from airplanes, which are flown mostly by computers, but there might never be a day when passengers feel comfortable flying without at least one human at the helm.

Jonathan Brewer, a trainer at the nonprofit Network Startup Resource Center, believes the next stage of development should improve on the one before it, when the exploding numbers of factories and machines left so many people with undrinkable water and unbreathable air. Now, he said, technophiles must consider how their inventions help people. 

At an Apricot workshop, Brewer described sensors that alert residents an hour before a mudslide will hit, for example, and other “life-saving devices that cost very, very little money.”He says there doesn’t seem much point in having droids to clear tables and dig up copper ore if humans aren’t in a position to use the results of their labor.

O’Reilly illustrated the hybrid approach with the so-called Mechanical Turk. Not Amazon’s tool to outsource small tasks, but the 18th-century machine that seemed to beat humans at chess. In fact, there was a man inside all along, and that is the point. Looking out over an audience of programmers, engineers, and other operators building the internet, O’Reilly compared them to the Mechanical Turk: The world needs workers powered by blood, not just those powered by batteries.

“All of you, in some sense, are inside the internet. You go away, it stops working,” he said. “It’s not like a piece of software in a PC era where if you had a copy of Microsoft Windows running on your personal computer, it would keep running without the original programmers. Almost all of the software we depend on today is a service that depends on the work of people like you.”

There may be some wishful thinking, too, in technologists’ optimism that humans will thrive in the robot future. In 2015, consulting firm McKinsey projected that automation could eliminate 45 percent of today’s occupations. That’s why more people in the technology sector are warming to the idea of a universal basic income, which shares the benefits of innovation by giving each citizen a small monthly check.

But Brewer holds out hope in cooperation between people and machines. Many advancements don’t just make lives easier, such as thermostats that adjust the temperature to a dweller’s liking. He said there is technology, for example, that lets city employees know when street lights go out, or trash cans are full, so they don’t have to drive around checking manually, which many local governments do. But once the notice is sent, a human still needs to respond and ensure services are delivered.

For technology, conference-goers said, early adopters first embraced the inexorable, unsympathetic march of change as an indisputable benefit. But in this next phase, people are rethinking disruption, or at least wondering how to soften the blow on humans.
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A pair of $250,000 autonomous buses began driving around an empty San Francisco Bay Area parking lot on Monday, preparing to move onto a local public road in California’s first pilot program for a self-driving vehicle without steering wheel or human operator.

California and other states are weighing the opportunities of becoming a hub of testing a technology that is seen as the future of transportation and the risks from giving up active control of a large, potentially dangerous vehicle.

In most tests of self-driving cars there is still a person seated at the steering wheel, ready to take over, although Alphabet Inc’s Waymo tested a car with no steering wheel or pedals in Austin, Texas, as early as 2015.

The bus project in San Ramon, at the Bishop Ranch office park complex, involves two 12-passenger shuttle buses from French private company EasyMile.

The project is backed by a combination of private companies and public transit and air quality authorities, with the intention of turning it into a permanent, expanded operation, said Habib Shamskhou, a program manager who strolled in front of a moving bus to show that the vehicle would notice him and react. It stopped.

In a test for reporters, one bus cruised a block-long circuit so consistently that it created a dirt track on the tarmac.

California legislators late last year passed a law to allow slow-speed testing of fully autonomous vehicles without steering wheels or pedals on public roads, with the Bishop Ranch test in mind.

The shuttle buses will test for a few months in the parking lots before operators apply for Department of Motor Vehicles approval under the new law. The vehicles are expected to swing onto the local street late this year or early in 2018.   
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Young adults who spend a lot of time looking for social connections on social media could instead find themselves feeling socially isolated, a new study suggests.

Researchers looked at the social media habits of 1,787 American adults aged 19 to 32, asking them how much they used 11 popular social media sites, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and LinkedIn, among others.

After controlling for various demographic factors, they found that people who used social media more than two hours per day “had twice the odds for perceived social isolation than their peers who spent less than half an hour on social media each day.”

Those who visited social media sites 58 times a week or more “had about triple the odds of perceived social isolation than those who visited fewer than nine times per week.”

Writing in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine add that increased social isolation has been associated with “an increased risk for mortality.”

“This is an important issue to study because mental health problems and social isolation are at epidemic levels among young adults,” said lead author Dr. Brian A. Primack, director of Pitt’s Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health. “We are inherently social creatures, but modern life tends to compartmentalize us instead of bringing us together. While it may seem that social media presents opportunities to fill that social void, I think this study suggests that it may not be the solution people were hoping for.”

“We do not yet know which came first, the social media use or the perceived social isolation,” said senior author Dr. Elizabeth Miller, professor of pediatrics at Pitt and chief of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC.

“It’s possible that young adults who initially felt socially isolated turned to social media. Or it could be that their increased use of social media somehow led to feeling isolated from the real world. It also could be a combination of both. But even if the social isolation came first, it did not seem to be alleviated by spending time online, even in purportedly social situations.”

Researchers social media may cause feelings of social isolation by replacing “authentic social experiences;” causing feelings of exclusion stemming from seeing photos of friends having fun at events to which they were not invited; or may lead people to think others have happier or more successful lives due to often idealized presentation of one’s life online.

Researchers say more study needs to be done, but they say doctors should ask patients about social media use if they show symptoms of social isolation.

“People interact with each other over social media in many different ways,” said Primack, “In a large population-based study such as this, we report overall tendencies that may or may not apply to each individual. I don’t doubt that some people using certain platforms in specific ways may find comfort and social connectedness via social media relationships. However, the results of this study simply remind us that, on the whole, use of social media tends to be associated with increased social isolation and not decreased social isolation.”
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Oil and gas companies, including some of the most celebrated industry names in the Houston area, are facing increasingly sophisticated hackers seeking to steal trade secrets and disrupt operations, according to a newspaper investigation.

A stretch of the Gulf Coast near Houston features one of the largest concentrations of refineries, pipelines and chemical plants in the country, and cybersecurity experts say it’s an alluring target for espionage and other cyberattacks.

“There are actors that are scanning for these vulnerable systems and taking advantage of those weaknesses when they find them,” said Marty Edwards, director of U.S. Homeland Security’s Cyber Emergency Response Team for industrial systems.

Homeland Security, which is responsible for protecting the nation from cybercrime, received reports of some 350 incidents at energy companies from 2011 to 2015, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle has found. Over that period, the agency found nearly 900 security flaws within U.S. energy companies, more than any other industry.

Steps are being taken to thwart attacks. For instance, the Coast Guard in a joint operation with Houston police patrolled the waters southeast of Houston last year conducting sweeps for unprotected wireless signals that hackers could use to gain access to facilities. The operation was one of the first of its kind in the U.S. concentrating on cyberattacks by sea.

But the vast network of oil and gas operations makes it difficult to secure. Thousands of interconnected sensors and controls that run oil and gas facilities remain rife with weak spots.

Many companies the technology and personnel to detect hackers. Equipment was designed decades ago without security features, and efforts over the years to link computer networks to devices that monitor pressure or control valves have exposed operations to online threats.

“You could mess with a refinery or cause a vessel to explode,” Richard Garcia, a former FBI agent who became a cybersecurity specialist, told the Chronicle.

Power, chemical and nuclear facilities must adhere to strict cybersecurity measures, but federal law doesn’t impose such standards on the oil and gas sector. And when oil and gas companies have been infiltrated by a hacker, they’re not required to report the incident.

More than 20 of the nation’s largest oil companies _  including Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips, refiner Phillips 66 and pipeline operator Kinder Morgan _ declined to comment or did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The American Petroleum Institute, the national trade association for oil and gas, also declined to comment.

Charles McConnell, executive director of Rice University’s Energy and Environment Initiative, said oil companies tend to rush to deploy new computer technologies that make operations more productive, but only afterward considering ways to defuse online threats.

“The pace of change of the technology we’ve adopted is every step of the way more and more vulnerable to cyberattack,” McConnell said.
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Twitter introduced new safety measures this week meant to crack down on online harassment and protect people from viewing offensive material, but some free-speech advocates are concerned the changes could lead to censorship of unpopular ideas.

The social media company announced Wednesday that it would start hiding potentially menacing tweets, even if the tweets or accounts in question hadn’t been reported as abusive.

“We’re working to identify accounts as they’re engaging in abusive behavior, even if this behavior hasn’t been reported to us,” the company said in a statement announcing the changes. “Then, we’re taking action by limiting certain account functionality for a set amount of time, such as allowing only their followers to see their Tweets.”

The so-called stealth bans could be placed on accounts, the company’s statement said, if a Twitter user sent unsolicited messages to another user who was not following the sender.

Twitter said it would “act on accounts” only when it was confident abuse had taken place, based on the algorithms it uses to identify illicit posts.

This new automated stealth ban capability became a cause of consternation for Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the free-speech advocacy group PEN America, because she said it could easily become a solution “where there is really no problem that needs to be solved.”

‘Mistaken’ moves?

“To take action when there hasn’t been a complaint raises the concern of whether there will be mistaken blocking of accounts or suspending of accounts,” she said. “That raises a risk.”

Twitter has been under pressure to address abusive speech and trolling on its platform in recent months after celebrities and others complained of sustained, coordinated abuse campaigns.

Actress Leslie Jones notably swore off the social media service for a brief time last year after she was targeted by online trolls and harassed with racism and death threats. The incident led to a personal meeting between Jones and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and several months later the company began introducing new tools to address online abuse.

Twitter expanded its “mute” feature to allow users to block specific words or phrases from showing up in their notifications. It expanded users’ ability to report hateful conduct. And it retrained its support teams on dealing with online abuse.

These types of changes that allow users to have more control over what content they see and whom they interact with are positive steps, Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told VOA.

Control for users

The ACLU encourages companies to focus less on a top-down approach to censorship and more “on tools that allow users to control their experience on the platform,” she said.

“Attempts to put the thumb on the scale on the censorship side are prone to error and prone to human biases,” Bhandari said.

Newer tools introduced by Twitter, though, give the company a far greater role in controlling what content gets seen.

In February, Twitter began pre-emptively hiding what it called “potentially abusive or low-quality tweets” from conversations on the website. The tweets will still be visible to users, but only to “those who seek them out.”

“Our team has also been working on identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so the most relevant conversations are brought forward,” Twitter said in a February statement.

VOA contacted Twitter multiple times for clarification on guidelines used to identify “low-quality” tweets but received no response.

Twitter also introduced a “safe search” feature in February that automatically removes tweets that contain “potentially sensitive content” from search results. A request for clarification on how this content is identified was not returned.

Being a private company, Twitter has no real obligation to preserve free speech on its website. But Twitter has billed itself as a platform for free expression, and on the Twitter rules page, it says it believes in “speaking truth to power.”

Global town square

This is a role both PEN America and the ACLU take seriously. Both Nossel and Bhandari referred to the website as a sort of global town square, where everyone’s voice has equal weight.

“As a practical matter, decisions made by Twitter have a huge impact on the messages that we receive, and I hope that Twitter and other companies take those responsibilities seriously,” Bhandari said.

Nossel noted that Twitter has a financial incentive to be cautious on issues involving the balance between allowing free expression and stopping abuse.

“The power and influence of their platform depends on the free flow of ideas, so I think there are commercial reasons why they would not want to limit [free speech],” she said. “And I think for their users, they do have a kind of softer, implicit contract that they are going to be a platform in which you can express things freely.”

Bhandari said it’s important to find that balance, because if Twitter “allows a heckler’s veto to take over,” it will have a chilling effect on speech that’s similar to pre-emptively hiding content.

“One of the really important parts of that has to be transparency,” she said.
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Scientists and engineers are constantly looking for more efficient ways to harvest energy from sustainable sources, such as the sun, wind, ocean waves and river flows. Researchers from Brown University have teamed up with a company from Rhode Island to build an innovative power generator suitable for slow-flowing rivers and tidal canals. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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We are in the midst of a mobile tech revolution that promises to change the way we live, say industry experts at this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, where the ‘Internet of Things’ and superfast 5G technologies are all the rage. But even the most basic mobile technology is changing lives in some of the world’s most remote parts.

The exhibit is a showcase of the latest technology — and a glimpse of what the future holds. And industry insiders at the MWC 2017 say  there is a lot more to come.

Pibo, for example, is a mobile-connected robot designed to help families connect and express their emotions in the digital age.  On the other hand, they could invest in a digital hang drum — a traditional instrument used in yoga, updated for the 21st century so it syncs with your smartphone.

U.S. technology giants AT&T and General Electric have come up with smart street lamps, with cameras, sensors and microphones connected to 4G mobile networks. Over three thousand are being installed in the western U.S. city of San Diego, California and will be used for traffic analysis.

But AT&T product manager Trey Winter, said the makers have bigger ambitions.

“You are going to be able to detect smart parking solutions, gunshot detections inside of a city infrastructure. Environmental features detecting weather, smog, pollution,” he said. “Really bringing to life the intelligence inside of the city.“

5G networks

Much of the buzz at this year’s show is around super-fast 5G networks — with faster download speeds and almost zero delay.

Roger Chen of CNET magazine explained that this means a “real-time connection.”

“The best example someone has given to me is a surgeon performing a surgery in one country with robotic hands in another country,” he added.

Apps offer solutions for Africa

Mobile technology is transforming the economies of many African countries, with smartphone apps ranging from herding cattle in Kenya and connecting dirty laundry to mobile washerwomen in Uganda.

Eneza, for one, uses basic mobile technology to offer access to a huge range of education. Two million students are signed up to its ‘virtual classroom‘ — and the better their grades, the more mobile airtime the parents receive.

The company’s chairman, Stephen Haggard said “they are able to access all the education they want for a subscription that’s about 10 U.S. cents per week.”

“That covers the full curriculum and will get them everything they need to do from around age eight to finishing school,” he said. “The reality in most of Africa is that mobile technology is actually the only way that you can reach huge numbers of people at low cost with any kind of content.”

A recent report by consultants McKinsey predicted that by 2025 half of sub-Saharan Africa’s billion strong population will have internet access, over two-thirds via smartphones.
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A California high school has made millions of dollars from the initial public offering of shares in Snap Inc., the company behind the Snapchat photo messaging application.

The board of the Saint Francis high school in Mountain View agreed to invest $15,000 in seed money in Snap in 2012, when the company was just getting started.

They had been invited to do so by one of the student’s parents, a venture capital investor, the high school president says in a letter issued to the school community Thursday.

The school held onto the investment until this week, when Snap shares sold for $17 each in an IPO. The share price rocketed another 44 percent higher when trading began Thursday.

The school was quoted by media including website Quartz as saying they sold two-thirds of their shares at $17 each, to raise $24 million.

“The school’s investment in Snap – which this morning announced the completion of its IPO – has matured and given us a significant boost,” said the high school president, Simon Chiu, in the letter.

 
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We are in the midst of a mobile tech revolution that promises to change the way we live, say industry experts at this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, where ‘Internet of Things’ and superfast 5G technologies are all the rage. But even the most basic mobile technology is changing lives in some of the world’s most remote parts. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, better known as drones, are increasingly being used in emergency situations. But safety concerns in a congested airspace prompted the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, to limit their use. Researchers from the University of Maryland hope the regulations will be eased for drones making emergency medical deliveries. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Amazon.com has launched a new program to help students build capabilities into its voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the company told Reuters, the latest move by a technology firm to nurture ideas and talent in artificial intelligence research.

The e-commerce company said it was paying for a yearlong doctoral fellowship at four universities for an undisclosed sum.

Working with professors, the Alexa Fund Fellows will help students tackle complex technology problems in class on Alexa, like how to convert text to speech or process conversation.

Amazon, Alphabet’s Google and others are locked in a race to develop and monetize artificial intelligence. Unlike some rivals, Amazon has made it easy for third-party developers to create skills for Alexa so it can get better faster — a tactic it now is extending to the classroom.

The fellowship may also help Amazon recruit sought-after engineers whose studies will make them more familiar with Alexa than with other voice-controlled assistants. The schools in the program are Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, the University of Southern California and Canada’s University of Waterloo.

‘A great sandbox’

“We want Alexa to be a great sandbox” for students, Doug Booms, vice president of worldwide corporate development at Amazon, said Wednesday in an interview.

He added that the fellowship’s goal was to excite the next generation of scholars about natural language understanding and other voice technologies, not to produce research for Amazon.

Under the program, students’ projects remain their own intellectual property.

At the University of Waterloo, students are improving Alexa’s interaction with air conditioners so it understands requests to cool a room to its normal temperature, without requiring the user to specify a number in Celsius, said Fakhri Karray, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who is overseeing the work.

Securing close ties to university talent and research has become an urgent priority for many tech firms. Uber Technologies in 2015 took 40 people from Carnegie Mellon’s robotics center in-house to work on self-driving cars and other projects. Microsoft has awarded fellowships to doctoral researchers in different areas of computer science, like artificial intelligence, for years.

Amazon itself created the Alexa Prize competition among universities to push forward conversational artificial intelligence, with a $100,000 stipend for each sponsored team.

The money for the new fellowship comes from the Alexa Fund, an investment by Amazon of up to $100 million to advance voice technology.
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Smartphones have replaced lots of other accessories — cameras, flashlights, calculators. But many people are still reluctant to swap the wallets in their pockets for their digital counterparts.

A key reason consumers are hesitant to adopt mobile payment systems like Apple Pay and Android Pay, surveys say, is fear about security: High-profile retailer data breaches have made buyers wary of sharing credit card information. But while there’s cause not to rely 100 percent on your mobile wallet just yet — lack of widespread acceptance by merchants, for one thing — security concerns shouldn’t be holding shoppers back, experts say.

“I think some people get nervous about this idea of, `This thing is sending telepathic waves to that machine to say that I’m paying,’ ” said Mark Ranta, head of digital banking solutions at ACI Worldwide, a payment systems company.

But your mobile wallet is arguably the safest way to pay, and it offers a few benefits to boot. Here’s why this payment method is worth considering.

Safety

Contactless payment services can offer more security than cash or traditional card usage.

“You never have to take out your credit card or debit card, so there’s a lot less chance of someone seeing it,” said Jason Chaikin, president of biometrics security company Vkansee. “For every transaction, [mobile wallets] create a random, one-time number — a transaction token — and even if someone was able to know that number, it’s not valid later.”

Samsung Pay, Android Pay and Apple Pay each use this process, called tokenization. Although you load your card into the payment app, the actual card number is not shared with the merchant when you pay. Rather, a temporary code is issued in its place, similar to the way EMV chip cards work. EMV credit and debit cards have chips that create a unique code, or cryptogram, when inserted into a merchant’s payment terminal. However, the card is in view while the terminal reads the chip.

Mobile payments provide security measures on top of existing bank protections that chip cards can’t match. Full card numbers are not displayed in mobile wallet apps, and users are able to authorize payments with their fingerprints, which can protect your card information in the event your phone is stolen.

Convenience

Services like Apple Pay let users add multiple cards to their phones or smartwatches, theoretically giving them the option to leave overstuffed wallets and purses at home.

But consumers don’t entirely trust mobile wallets partly because availability is limited, Ranta said. Not all cards and loyalty programs are compatible with the payment services, and some stores are not equipped to take mobile payments. Establishments such as bars and restaurants may accept only cash or plastic. Apple Pay has the highest retailer acceptance rate among the mobile payment services, at 36 percent, according to survey data from the retail consulting firm Boston Retail Partners.

“We’re still very much in the early stages of this,” Ranta said, and for now, the merchant acceptance problem remains.

But when shoppers can use their mobile wallets, they can save time at the register. A common complaint among dissatisfied chip-card users is the slow transaction process, as shoppers wait for the EMV terminal to complete the transaction. Mobile payments can be quicker. A user opens a payment app and holds his device over a terminal; a fingerprint or PIN verifies the purchase.

Shopping online can be faster, too. For example, Apple Pay and Android Pay are accepted on certain websites and in apps like Airbnb, allowing shoppers to make purchases without entering card information — or keeping card numbers on file, which may assuage data-breach fears.

And like some bank apps, a mobile wallet saves your recent transaction history for reference, with the added benefit of allowing you to see all activity in one place, even if your cards are from various banks.

Rewards

Mobile credit card payments function just like regular credit cards. As long as your card is compatible with the service, you’ll continue to earn your usual rewards, like travel points or cash back.

Mobile users can add certain retailer loyalty cards to Android Pay and Apple Pay wallets to seamlessly earn store-specific points. Samsung Pay accepts most membership cards.

Samsung also has its own loyalty program, Samsung Rewards. In addition to credit card rewards, members earn points for Samsung Pay purchases; the points are redeemable for rewards like gift cards and fitness trackers.

Mobile payment still has far to go before shoppers begin leaving their old wallets at home. As technology advances, Chaikin said, innovations and improvements in security will most likely make the process more comfortable and accessible for consumers and retailers alike. “Our mobile phone revolution is really just at the tipping point,” he said.
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