Foxconn replaces ’60,000 factory workers with robots

RT @afpfr: Apple contre le FBI : un bras de fer aux vastes implications par @rleverafp

Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products. “I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”

iPad: The Reality Distortion Field

President Obama said he would support measures opening backdoors in communications and social media technologies last January. Such measures would force companies like Apple and Google to create holes in their programming that would let the government track suspected criminals or terrorists. “Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said in a Jan. 16 press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on cybersecurity.

The iOS terms clearly state that Apple will record what you say and may send it to subsidiaries and their agents. It goes on to add that they will record the names of your contacts, your relationships with them, in-home devices, and sometimes your location.

LA VIE ALGORITHMIQUE, Critique de la raison numérique via @Eric_Sadin

How Obama Can Encourage Tech Giants Like and to Aid Government

Google, Apple and Facebook are highly profitable and look likely to remain so. Still, a New Yorker looking up at the Pan Am, Chrysler and General Motors buildings might recall, wistfully, that the same must once have been said of those fallen titans, too.

When we’re told what the future will look like, we always see the version where everyone lives like Minority Report’s John Anderton. Played by Tom Cruise, Anderton is a wealthy police chief, the kind of person who can afford a summer house on the lake or the newest Lexus model. But unfortunately, if the future is anything like the present, his will only be one side of the story.