Jobs & economy

A Tsinghua University Ph.D. student who took on a series of short-term gigs for research shines a light on the pressures and pride felt by Beijing’s day laborers.

Podcast: Implements inaugural AI strategy outline and framework.

Journalist and author Cory Doctorow is coming to Australia to spread his message – humans will take their jobs back Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast When the AI bubble bursts, executives who enthusiastically replaced their staff with AI tools will learn that it takes a “really long time” to replace those lost skills, says Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and journalist. But those in creative fields should a

Reports of wide-scale replacement of workers by AI are overblown. Small businesses use it to help workers I recently met the owner of a company that sells windows and doors. He told me he invested about $10,000 in an AI application that is used by his salespeople in his showroom. The application listens to the conversations between the salesperson and the prospective customer and then automatically creates a quote for the salesperson to review and send. “It allows my salespeople to talk to more

Von Microsoft-365-Support bis zur Teamleitung in der Azure-Cloud: Diese sechs IT-Jobs bieten vielseitige Aufgaben zu guten Konditionen. ( Golem Karrierewelt , Unternehmenssoftware )

The Greek Ministry of Economy and Finance and minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis filed a lawsuit on Friday for deceptive advertising on Facebook against the unknown administrators of a page on the social media platform. The ministry and Pierrak ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1271#7596)

Ruff v0.16.0 Astral shipped a significant new version of their Ruff Python linting tool a few days ago on July 23rd. I noticed today because my various CI jobs all started failing thanks to new default Ruff checks and my unpinned "ruff" dev dependency. From Brent Westbrook's announcement post: Ruff now enables 413 rules by default, up from 59 in previous versions. Since Ruff's default rule set was last modified in v0.1.0 , the number of rules in Ruff has grown from 708 to 968. Many of these rule

On July 13, more than 200 leading economists and AI researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates, signed an open letter organised by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Its warning was stark: artificial intelligence may drive an economic transformation “larger than the Industrial Revolution” compressed into a fraction of the time, and that we “must act now” to build the institutions to steer it. We agree with every word. Then we scanned the signatory list. Four in five signatories come from the...

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Artificial intelligence may not deliver on its promise of vast economic opportunity at a price that humanity is willing to pay In March, Anthropic, the cutting-edge artificial intelligence business that gave us the chatbot Claude, published an analysis on the impact of AI on employment, to help us assess the claim that intelligent robots were about to redefine human existence, ending demand for human labor. Last year in May, Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, claimed AI could wipe out half of

Publication date: September 2026 Source: Technology in Society, Volume 88 Author(s): Asad Mahmood, Tian Yixiang, Muhammad Adeel Khan

A UK employment tribunal has ruled that forcing a remote worker with anxiety, ADHD, and autism to turn on her camera during a video training session amounted to disability discrimination. Laura Tait, a home-based travel consultant at Holiday Extras, was awarded compensation after the Croydon tribunal found the company failed to make reasonable adjustments for […] This story continues at The Next Web

Investment spree is reshaping Silicon Valley while wider US jobs market holds steady

Officials around the world are pushing back on the rationale for the new import duties.

We've been hearing about doomsday, but Peter McCrory writes we "don’t see significant impact of AI on the U.S. labor market."

To effectively integrate AI into high-stakes, critical environments such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and aviation--and to advance toward higher levels of automation and seamless human-AI collaboration--building trust in AI-driven solutions is essential. Trust, in turn, is closely linked to the explainability of AI systems. The rapid advancements in AI across various domains have underscored the challenges of establishing trust, raising increasing interest in AI explainability even more wh

Adding procedural skills to an LLM agent is typically evaluated by average improvement in task success. However, this metric hides an important cost: skills can also make agents worse. We measure both sides by comparing agents with and without skills across nearly 6,000 runs spanning two office automation benchmarks and three model harness stacks. This allows us to distinguish two outcomes. A regression is a task solved without skills but failed after skills are added. A residual failure is a ta

Meta is upgrading its AI chatbot with new productivity features in a bid to compete with rivals like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The update will allow Meta AI to tap into your calendar to help you plan events and generate daily briefings, as well as perform in-depth research that you can steer as it progresses. […]

For scale-invariant deep networks, Hyperball-style optimizers have shown strong performance in large-scale training by fixing the norms of matrix-valued parameters and normalizing updates. However, the source of their advantage remains unclear. Starting from the angular displacement between consecutive parameter states, we derive an angular effective learning rate that accounts for the parameter-update angle, parameter norm, and update norm. We also show that the conventional norm-based measure

Microsoft addresses a public-by-default configuration and chain of code flaws in Azure Automation that could have let attackers seize another tenant's identity and access others' data, credentials, and cloud workloads.

AI agents encounter learning opportunities in every episode they run, and discard nearly all of them: the underlying models are frozen at deployment, so an agent that resolves a difficult request today starts from zero when it recurs tomorrow. Yet ordinary operation already produces feedback, in the form of outcome verdicts and after-the-fact corrections. We show that this feedback is a sufficient signal for continual learning when the frozen model is paired with an external memory that distils

How the world's richest man explains the AI boom and 21st century economy. An interview with Quinn Slobodian, co-author of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Turning Apprenticeships Into Degrees Joshua.Bay Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:00 AM Michigan’s apprenticeship-credit initiative helps working adults apply job training toward an associate degree and future education. Byline(s) Joshua Bay

On Techpoint Digest, we discuss Uganda stepping up its telecom vandalism crackdown, Zambia updating postal laws for the digital economy, and Kenya mandating a one-year warranty on phones.

Meet Zubair Habib Timilehin, the founder and CEO of Bitoshi. Under his leadership, Bitoshi has grown to serve nearly 100,000 users, enabling individuals and businesses to transact in Africa's digital economy.

The EU will face a flat 10% tariff from Friday following the outcome of a US investigation into trade in products made with forced labour, a European Commission spokesperson said. Washington announced ...

While China’s humanoid robots and automated “dark factories” have made headlines, another form of automation has been advancing: the collaborative robot, or cobot. Designed to operate alongside human employees, cobots have been transformed by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). The latest models feature programming which requires no coding knowledge; instead they respond to natural-language voice commands, gesture controls and drag-to-teach demonstrations of tasks. They are also..

Contemporary policy and media discourse on AI and labour follows a recurring pattern. A demonstration of model capability runs through an inference about workplace substitution to a distributional politics, with the variables that would decide the outcome treated as background. This paper names that pattern capability determinism situates it within Wyatt’s account of soft technological determinism, and reframes the substitution question as a unit-cost economics test. On the AI side, cost per tas

Some firm leaders are logging the equivalent of an extra workweek every month, and none of it goes on a client bill. The post Congratulations On That Biglaw Leadership Role. Here’s Your Second Job. appeared first on Above the Law .

MEMORANDUM FOR THE UNITED STATES TRADE REPRESENTATIVE Subject: Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 of the Acts, Policies, and Practices of 60 Economies Related to the Failure of Each Economy to Impose and Effectively Enforce a Prohibition on the Importation of Goods Produced with […] The post Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 of the Acts, Policies, and Practices of 60 Economies R

A new study released on Wednesday finds that dependence on food stamps and Medicaid for gig economy workers has spiked since the start of the pandemic. A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the number of Amazon workers relying on federal assistance programs has tripled between February 2020 and September 2025. Walmart and...

Driving style is a key factor in the comfort and acceptance of automated vehicle (AV) features. In SAE Level-2 automation, where the driver must supervise the system and remain ready to intervene, mismatches between the automation's driving style and the driver's preference can reduce trust and trigger takeovers. This paper proposes an adaptive driving-style control framework that minimizes such preference mismatch. In a driving-simulator study, we compare fixed, trust-based, and preference-base

In our experiment, we deployed A.I. “agents” to act as office workers, and found that they were capable of performing some of the tasks we assigned, but not all of them.

Forty-one editors, associate editors and advisory board members resigned from their roles at the Review of Social Economy after the Association for Social Economics, which owns the journal, renewed its contract with publisher Taylor & Francis. The resigning members, who cited concerns the publisher would eventually transition the journal to a model based wholly on … Continue reading Editors of economics journal resign after association renews Taylor & Francis contract

Yes, strong laws already exist to protect job-seekers from discrimination. But AI has made things more complicated.

Reader’s react to the New York mayor’s video criticizing the Israeli prime minister. Also: A.I. jobs for philosophers; a battle in the health care industry; fast walkers; pregnant bellies.

Quality control in printing, particularly in rotogravure printing, still depends on slow, costly, and subjective manual inspection. Automated surface defect detection is critical for maintaining high-quality standards in rotogravure printing. Deep learning models give prospects for automation. However, training robust deep learning models, such as YOLO or Vision Transformers, is heavily hindered by the extreme scarcity of real-world industrial defects images. To overcome this limitation, this pa

The rapid progress of AI has intensified the long-standing pursuit of automation: replacing human participation with algorithms wherever possible. Implicit in this pursuit is the assumption that humans remain in the loop only because current AI systems are not yet sufficiently capable. This paper challenges that assumption. Rather than asking how far automation can extend, we ask where its conceptual limits lie and argue that human participation may persist even with highly capable AI systems fo

CEO Chris O’Shea defends Centrica’s plans as it reports rise in retail profits following focus on bigger margins The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres and back office. Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cuts it confirmed last month. Continue

AI agents are increasingly created inside organizations by non-engineering users through low-code, no-code, and conversational development environments. This democratization enables rapid local innovation, but it also creates a reliability gap: agents that appear to users as simple productivity artifacts may depend on changing models, tools, retrieval sources, permissions, prompts, schedules, and external services. These dependencies can cause silent degradation long after deployment, even when