Business, Spoken

The world is commonly divided into industrialized and emerging economies. A new study of how technology will transform demand for workers suggests we might talk of the automated and automating worlds instead. Economic think tank McKinsey Global Institute forecast changes in demand for different kinds of labor across 45 countries as technologies improve to perform physical or office tasks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Federal Communications Commission's plan to jettison its net-neutrality rules found a surprise supporter this week in respected technology industry analyst and blogger Ben Thompson. In a blog post Tuesday, Thompson argued that he supports net neutrality, but thinks the FCC is right to repeal rules that ban broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down, or otherwise discriminating against legal content.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

FRESNO, Calif. — A group of seventh- and eighth-grade girls sat around a lunch table discussing a new game-like app they use in school. Danna Rodriguez somewhat sullenly said she didn’t want to care about Strides, which tracks points students earn for attendance, grade-point average and using the app itself, among other things. But she can’t help herself. She does care.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a year or two in the early 2010s, a certain genre of cheesy, irresistibly uplifting headline was unavoidable on Facebook. You know the trope – someone died in an inspiring way, a potentially bad situation led to an unlikely friendship, a dog saved someone’s life. Followed, almost always, by “You’ll never believe what happened next.” It was a sure bet to make content go viral, and traffic-hungry publishers flooded Facebook with curiosity-gap headlines.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dag Spicer is expecting a special package soon, but it’s not a Black Friday impulse buy. The fist-sized motor, greened by corrosion, is from a historic room-sized computer intended to ape the human brain. It may also point toward artificial intelligence's future. Spicer is senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The motor in the mail is from the Mark 1 Perceptron, built by Cornell researcher Frank Rosenblatt in 1958.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Federal Communications Commission this week is widely expected to release its plan to reverse Obama-era net neutrality rules that banned internet service providers from blocking or slowing down content or creating so-called "fast lanes" for companies willing to pay extra to deliver their content more quickly.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Silicon Valley job perks are mythic. Self-replenishing snacks. Unlimited vacation. A pile of stock options. But as much as these professional entrapments might seem like dotcom-era phenomena, the practice of sweetening the deal for tech employees dates back to the ’70s as a way to ward off labor unions. Happy workers, explains Stanford historian Leslie Berlin, are less likely to agitate for better conditions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Recently, Rob Beschizza—a coder and the managing editor of Boing Boing—released a stripped-down blogging tool called txt.fyi. Write something, hit Publish, and voilà: your deathless prose, online. But here’s the thing: txt.fyi has no social mechanics. None. No Like button, no Share button, no comments. No feed showing which posts are most popular. Each post has a tag telling search engines not to index it, so it won’t even show up on Google.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit Monday to block AT&T's planned $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, in a move that could signal tougher scrutiny for tech companies. The lawsuit breaks with the recent DOJ tradition of approving mergers between companies that don't directly compete, such as AT&T and Time Warner. The government followed that traditional thinking in allowing Comcast to acquire NBCUniversal in 2011.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon may soon be free to block content, slow video-streaming services from rivals, and offer “fast lanes” to preferred partners. For a glimpse of how the internet experience may change, look at what broadband providers are doing under the existing “net neutrality” rules. When AT&T customers access its DirecTV Now video-streaming service, the data doesn’t count against their plan’s data limits.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices