9 TED Talks About Robots Taking Our Jobs: The idea that A.I. and robots are taking over seems to be a regular theme in social media. But what do thought leaders have to say about it? This week we highly enjoyed these 9 TED Talks on the theme – including: What happens when computers are smarter than us; How we’ll earn money in the future without jobs; and How we can build A.I. to help humans, not hurt us. It’s increasing a digital world, and we’re just working in it. (LINK)
Insta Stories Soundtracks: This week Instagram not only launched a new emoji slider feature, it also leaked they are preparing to let you add music to your Stories. “Music Stickers” could let you search for and add a song to your posts, thanks to new licensing deals with major record labels. Instagram is also testing a way to automatically detect a song you’re listening to and display the artist and song title as just a visual label. If this launches, look for way more “sound on” adoption of Stories moving forward. (LINK)
Google @ I/O: At this week’s Google I/O, the tech giant announced a number of pretty amazing inventions – including a more human-sounding voice assistant (everything can sound like John Legend now), new visual enhancements – like turning your watch to the ice cream shop into a video game, Google News improvements, and the introduction of a Waymo autonomous car service that will pilot in Phoenix, AZ — without a human driver. We’ll have more on I/O next week! (LINK)
I Wish I Knew How to Quit You, FB: Remember that whole Cambridge Analytica scandal and the Zuckerberg testimony and all of your friends promising to delete their Facebook accounts? Well, a new Reuters/Ipsos Poll shows about half of Facebook’s American users said they had not recently changed the amount that they used Facebook, and another quarter said they were using it more. So basically those using Facebook less were balanced by those using it more, with no clear net loss or gain in use. Oh, and Facebook’s stock is back up from the dip, too. This is just further evidence of how sticky social networks are and how few people every really boycott or quit anything, despite what they say online. (LINK)
Tweet of The Week: You will never look at a calendar the same way after you watch this
GREG SWAN 