Technology News and More

South Korea has introduced what is being called the world's first tax on robots amid fears that machines will replace human workers, leading to mass unemployment.

The country will limit tax incentives for investments in automated machines as part of a newly proposed revision of its tax laws.

It is hoped the policy will make up for lost income taxes as workers are gradually replaced by machines, as well as filling welfare coffers ahead of an expected rise in unemployment, according to the Korea Times.

Experts predict robot workers will replace humans in numerous industries in the near future, with machines and artificial intelligence expected to take a third of British jobs by 2030.

The South Korean Government said it will reduce tax deduction benefits for investment in automation, which had been introduced to boost productivity. The proposal could come into force at the end of the year, when the country's current tax law is due to expire.

"Though it is not about a direct tax on robots, it can be interpreted as a similar kind of policy considering that both involve the same issue of industrial automation," an industry source told the Korea Times.

Korea is the first country to implement a robot tax, but it is not the only one to have proposed a technology levy.

Bill Gates has previously called for a tax on robots to balance the Government's income as jobs are lost to automation. He said the levy could help slow down the pace of change and provide money to hire additional employees in sectors that require people, such as health care.   

"Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things," said Gates in February. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level."

Companies and robotics companies have criticised such proposals, saying a tax on robots would be detrimental to businesses and impede innovation.

Industries most at risk from automation include transportation, manufacturing and waste management, according to PwC. Robots are less likely to replace humans in roles that require critical thinking and creativity.

British firms have already started trialing robots in the workplace, with roles including food delivery, receptionist and office management.  

Is Snapchat – the social media app famous for its disappearing messages – in danger of doing a vanishing act of its own? It’s a question some are asking after investors turned on the company again this week following a second set of poor results which have turned a once-hot tech company into a stock market casualty.

The losses alone were steep. Snapchat’s parent, Snap Inc, lost $443m over the last three months, compared with $116m in the same period a year ago. Young tech companies are expected to burn through cash at a prodigious rate as they chase customers, but the main worry for shareholders was anaemic user growth, missed revenue targets and the threat from Facebook and Google – both of which have copied some of Snapchat’s key features. Imitation may well be the most sincere form of flattery, but in this case it could also be the most deadly.

On top of these woes, Snap has a money problem. Wall Street cares about revenues in a way that Silicon Valley doesn’t. Life has changed for Snap Inc and its newly minted billionaire co-founder, Evan Spiegel, since the company went public in March.

According to market watchers, the Los Angeles-based business has to work out a way to make money – fast – before rivals eat its lunch. “There is a lot of heavy competition and the company has not figured out how to monetise its audience yet,” said Salvatore Recco, of the advisory firm 50 Park Investments. “Until they do, investors will likely continue to be disappointed.”

Investors want to know how much money the company will make, and when. This quarter they were let down again. With its young, mobile-obsessed users, Snap offered advertisers a way to reach the all-important millennial market. But the business, whose main offering is a messaging service where people can use filters to change their faces and voices, is not growing the amount of money made per customer as quickly as investors had hoped. Shares in Snap were trading at $12.26 on Friday – nearly half their opening price of $24 when the business floated in March.
Advertisement

Shareholders are always scouring the tech industry for the next Facebook, and Snap is the latest contender for the crown – or at least that was the case when it floated on Wall Street. The only problem is that Facebook is crushing all newcomers. In the second quarter of the year, Snap reported that it had 173 million daily active users. Not only did this undershoot analysts’ expectations of 175 million, but it paled in comparison with the 250 million users of Facebook’s Instagram Stories, where users and businesses can post a string of photos and videos that – like Snapchat messages – disappear after 24 hours.

Snap sees itself as two things: a technology firm reinventing the camera (hence the rebrand to Snap Inc and the creation of its Spectacles camera-glasses), and an MTV for the 21st century, exemplified by its Discover offering, where media brands post mobile phone-friendly content aimed at millennials. But investors don’t really care about the lofty goals that Spiegel reels out in analyst calls. Being the next MTV is all well and good but investors want the next Facebook and all the profit-making opportunities that entails.

The flaw in the plan is that Facebook will not sit back and watch Snap steal its thunder, and after three years of trying to alternately buy, clone and undercut its upstart rival, Facebook’s fightback is starting to have an effect.

Snapchat’s most promising recent launch was Stories, a feature that allows users to post their snaps to a feed that can be viewed multiple times for 24 hours after they’re uploaded. It turned the app from a photo messaging service, still (unfairly) saddled with the brand image of teen sexting, to a fully fledged social network.

In the process, it also managed to appeal to users who had grown up wary of posting images to services which catalogue and archive them indefinitely: no employer will find incriminating Snapchat stories from a decade ago, and no date will scroll through a year’s worth of pictures to spy on ex-lovers.

So Facebook copied it. The company now has four separate clones of Stories, in WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook itself. Three of them are far from popular, but Instagram Stories has soared. According to the data firm Snaplytics, “while Snapchat has had a downward-going slope in terms of influencer activity, Instagram Stories is gaining more and more traction.”
Advertisement

But it is not all doom and gloom: Snapchat still has far deeper engagement, with the average user spending more than twice the time in the app than the typical Instagrammer. It is also making it easier for advertisers to use the app, analysts say.

This is just as well, because the dream-big plan is struggling. Snap is not taking off as a camera company: the company sold 42,000 camera-spectacles, down 35% on the quarter before. That includes almost a month when the gadget was available outside the US for the first time, leading to vending machines standing forlornly ignored outside tourist attractions in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

However, Snapchat’s augmented-reality “lenses” – which superimpose special effects like cartoon dog features on users’ faces – remain genuinely popular and have a greater appeal than similar products from Facebook. Even if you are not on Snapchat, you have probably seen someone’s selfie doctored with dog ears.

Now, Snapchat has a third breakthrough filter: a dancing hotdog, that has gyrated virtually on people’s screens around the world. It has been viewed, according to Evan Spiegel, by 1.5 billion people, making it “the world’s first virtual reality superstar”. If grooving meat can be monetised for millions, then Snapchat still has a way out of the doldrums.

Source:theguardian.com

The European Union is spending millions of euros on developing a robot that can make pizza.

China says it is investigating its largest social media platforms - Weibo, WeChat and Baidu Tieba - for alleged violations of cyber security laws.

The NHS has finally agreed to fund a controversial HIV prevention treatment from September following a High Court battle over who would pay for the drug.

A 140 million-year-old bloom bearing a striking resemblance to a water lily was the mother (and father) of every flowering plant living today, scientists believe.

The British computer expert who stopped the WannaCry ransomware attack that wreaked havoc around the world and hit NHS computers has been detained by the FBI in Las Vegas, according to reports.

Cyber-thieves have made at least $25m (£19m) from ransomware in the last two years, suggests research by Google.

As part of efforts to assist in tackling graduate unemployment in the country and develop local content, GNPC-Technip Engineering Services Limited(GTES), a subsidiary of TechnipFMC, welcomed its sixth batch of Interns into the company.

An innovator and lecturer at the University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR) at Sunyani in the Brong Ahafo Region, Dr Mark Amoo Boateng is seeking a $300,000 grant to enable him to develop a program to monitor the country’s ocean systems.

A 19-year-old Ghanaian University student Gabriel Opare has built a new search engine to rival Google and Youtube.

When it comes to communication on social media platforms, animated GIF images are perhaps as important as emojis.

Retail drone delivery seems to have been on the cards for years now. But how realistic is the prospect of drones flying autonomously through the sky and dropping off parcels direct to your doorstep?

Coordinator of a new Ghanaian satellite project, Dr. Richard Damoah has said Ghana’s first satellite launched into space provides an avenue for the fight against illegal mining.

European Union regulators slapped Google with a record €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion) antitrust fine on Tuesday, the latest broadside fired at big American tech companies doing business in the region.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s new mission on Thursday.

Google says it is stepping up its efforts to identify and remove videos related to terrorism and violent extremist content, particularly on its YouTube platform.

Apple's iOS 11 mobile operating system will not be available for the iPhone 5 and 5C or the iPad 4 when it is released in the autumn.

Adding abiraterone to hormone therapy at the start of treatment for prostate cancer improves survival by 37 per cent, according to the results of one of the largest ever clinical trials for prostate cancer presented at the 2017 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Six years ago, it was the first major tech company with a voice assistant.

With the rise of LG, Hitachi among others in the home electronics appliances market, some who only knew of Panasonic only as a TV manufacturer have possibly thought it had been long kicked out of business.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg features in a long line of university dropouts who became millionaires after founding technology companies - Bill Gates and Steve Jobs among them.

Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone vendor, is all set to launch the successor to the Mi Note 2, dubbed - Mi Note 3 later this year.

Google is planning to track billions of credit and debit card sales to compare online ad clicks with money spent offline.

Today the largest social media platform on earth with over one billion users, Facebook, epitomizes everything that one hears over folktales of the American Dream.