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That is, both traditional companies and “on demand” companies use apps and algorithms to manage workers. But there’s an important difference. Companies using the top-down scheduling approach adopted by traditional low-wage employers have used technology to amplify and enable all the worst features …

Labor advocates point out that the new on-demand jobs have no guaranteed wages, and hold them in stark contrast to the steady jobs of the 1950s and 1960s manufacturing economy that we now look back to as a golden age of the middle class. Yet if we are going to get the future right, we have to start…

This notion of “the creep factor” should be central to the future of privacy regulation. When companies use our data for our benefit, we know it and we are grateful for it. We happily give up our location data to Google so they can give us directions, or to Yelp or Foursquare so they can help us fi…

Perhaps the most important question for machine learning, as for every new technology, though, is which problems we should choose to tackle in the first place. Jeremy Howard went on to cofound Enlitic, a company that is using machine learning to review diagnostic radiology images, as well as scanni…

When Google introduced its pay-per-click ad auction in 2002, what had started out as an idealistic quest for better search results became the basis of a hugely successful business. Fortunately, unlike other advertising business models, which can pit the interests of advertisers against the interest…