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In July, software engineer Julian Joseph became the latest victim of the tech industry’s sweeping job cuts . Facing his second layoff in two years, he dreaded spending another couple months hunched over his laptop filling out repetitive job applications and blasting them into the void.

Joseph specializes in user interface automation and figured someone must have roboticized the unpleasant task of applying for jobs. Casting about online, he came upon a company called LazyApply. It offers an AI-powered service called Job GPT that promises to automatically apply to thousands of jobs “in a single click.” All he had to fill in was some basic information about his skills, experience, and desired position.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a "robot journalist." (credit: Midjourney)

Google has been developing tools aimed at helping journalists write news articles, reports The New York Times and Reuters . It has demonstrated one tool, dubbed "Genesis," to the Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly, Google is positioning the tool as a personal assistant for news reporters.

According to Reuters, Genesis is not intended to automate news writing but can instead potentially support journalists by offering suggestions for headlines or alternative writing styles to enhance productivity. "Quite simply, these tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating, and fact-checking their articles," a Google spokesperson told Reuters.

Like OpenAI with its ChatGPT AI assistant that can compose text, Google has also been developing large language models (LLMs) such as PaLM 2 that have absorbed massive amounts of information scraped from the Internet during training, and they can use that "knowledge" to summarize information, rephrase sentences, explain concepts, and more. Naturally, both companies have sought to find market applications for this technology, including in journalism.

Enlarge / For those with a mini-split, a TV, a desire to know the temperature, and a real thing for light-grain wood, the Hub 2 is mighty appealing. (credit: SwitchBot)

There are some people who are eager to automate every aspect of their home with the latest smart home gadgets. Then there are some—many of them regular readers and commenters on this site—who could not only care less about the latest white plastic IoT thingy, but actively avoid such things.

I get it: If it connects to Wi-Fi, it requires signing up for an account, and there's a chance the company selling it could go bust at any time. It's also a no-go for anyone who cares about security or who just wants simplicity. The Matter standard is supposed to solve exactly this problem, but its real implementation and impact have been slow and underwhelming.

This is why I'm writing about just one set of gear while it's on sale for the second Prime Day (even if you're not a Prime subscriber): SwitchBot. I didn't use SwitchBot stuff until recently, but now that I have, it's what I'd recommend to anybody who just wants to make a few things in their home easier to turn on, turn off, or automate. There are no voice controls, no AI, just buttons and switches that do what you tell them.

Enlarge / The IBM logo in front of an AI-generated background. (credit: IBM / Midjourney)

IBM Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna has revealed plans to halt hiring for about 7,800 positions that could be replaced by artificial intelligence systems in the near future, according to a Bloomberg news report published Monday.

Krishna said that hiring in back-office functions like human resources will be suspended or slowed, affecting roughly 26,000 non-customer-facing roles. "I could easily see 30 percent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," Bloomberg quoted Krisha as saying in an interview.

The announcement comes at a time when generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT have stirred anxiety about the future of human jobs. In March, Goldman Sachs released a report estimating that generative AI may " expose " 300 million jobs to automation, which means those roles might be reduced or replaced by AI systems.

Enlarge / SwitchBot's new Hub 2 is most helpful for those who already have SwitchBot products in their home, but also those with infrared devices they'd like to automate. (credit: SwitchBot)

The Matter smart home connectivity standard has huge promise and lots of device makers lined up to engage with a theoretically more open, less server-dependent future. And yet, so far, I haven't been compelled to write about any individual products launching with Matter support. Most of them are simply familiar products—light bulbs, turning door locks, wall switches—that now can be set up in a different, cross-platform way ( however painfully ). Most wouldn't compel anyone who already has a functioning version of them to upgrade or expand their setup.

Here's the first thing to make me take notice, and it is, of all things, a hub. The SwitchBot Hub 2 (also $70 on Amazon ) makes the most sense if you already have some SwitchBot products in your home and might want to take them beyond their default Bluetooth range with Wi-Fi connectivity. But I think it might also appeal to someone looking for an entryway to a small, controlled, and useful smart home.

For one thing, the Hub 2 isn't just a puck of plastic that does nothing but coordinate traffic for a subset of devices. I have two of those taking up space in my home, from Phillips Hue and Samsung SmartThings. They hang out within Ethernet distance of my router, eating trickle power and generating a little heat pocket on that shelf. They are quiet, mostly useless roommates who will be evicted by some future upgrade.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Barwick via Getty )

The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs.

The investment bank said on Monday that “generative” AI systems such as ChatGPT, which can create content that is indistinguishable from human output, could spark a productivity boom that would eventually raise annual global gross domestic product by 7 percent over a 10-year period.

But if the technology lived up to its promise, it would also bring “significant disruption” to the labor market, exposing the equivalent of 300 million full-time workers across big economies to automation, according to Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, the paper’s authors. Lawyers and administrative staff would be among those at greatest risk of becoming redundant.