Workplace surveillance sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but we are having to get used to it. In a sign of the times, the European Court of Human Rights has just ruled that a supermarket in Barcelona was entitled to fire employees after catching them stealing on CCTV cameras that they didn’t know were installed. This overturned a decision by the court’s lower chamber that the cameras had breached the employees’ human rights.
The digital economy has been getting a lot of attention, with increasingly strong headlines offering apocalyptic as well as breathtakingly exciting scenarios. Some warn of job losses due to automation, some wonder at the things digital technology can do. And then there’s real scepticism about whether this will translate into delivering to people who need it most.
Did you know that Facebook has an artificial intelligence (AI) division? Not just the regular stuff that dictates what you see from the many, many posts on the social network, but an AI division with designs on more… practical applications? That division has announced that it’s built a ” large-scale distributed reinforcement learning…algorithm”.
No matter, the result is the same — Lego’s due to release a new Creator Expert set into the world and it’s a weird one — It’s called the #10272 Old Trafford — Manchester United set and it’s bound to find a few fans out in the world.
Before you question the odd headline for the new Garmin Tactix Delta, know that Stuff’s publisher and editor-in-chief actually owns…
If you’re like most workers, you don’t spend 100% of your time at the office doing what you’re supposed to be doing. In fact, on average, U.S. workers spend about 10% of their work day surfing the internet, emailing friends or shopping online. This so-called cyberloafing costs employers up to US$85 billion a year.
A remarkable combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has produced the world’s first “living robots”.
People who use fitness trackers have been frustrated with how they get “credit” for their activities, which drives some users to abandon fitness trackers.
Lithium-ion batteries have changed the world. Without the ability to store meaningful amounts of energy in a rechargeable, portable format we would have no smartphones or other personal electronic devices. The pioneers of the technology were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for chemistry.
It’s time for Stuff’s annual Gadget Awards, where we look back at the year and devices that were in 2019.…