Bytes: What’s new in tech
The ‘startup nation’ call-up
As many as 15 percent of Israeli tech workers might be called to war, said Ivan Levingston in the Financial Times. Israel has fashioned itself as “startup nation,” thanks to the strength of its tech and innovation sector, which is “spread across hundreds of startups and major offices for multinationals such as Intel and Microsoft.” All told, technology “accounts for roughly 15 percent of all jobs” in the country. As Israel prepared for a ground invasion of Gaza last week, tech founders said, large portions of their workforces were the among 360,000 reservists drafted for the war, “representing a sudden and significant disruption for relatively small companies.” Still, business leaders emphasized that “whatever the impact on their companies, Israel’s war effort came first.”
A focus group of AI bots
AI chatbots are now being used in focus groups, said Will Knight in Wired. Fantasy, a New York company that consults with businesses such as LG, Ford, Spotify, and Google, creates what it calls “synthetic humans” using machine-learning technology combined with “dozens of characteristics drawn from ethnographic research on real people.” The company designs focus groups for businesses filled with synthetic humans and real ones. “BP, an oil and gas company, asked a swarm of 50 of Fantasy’s synthetic humans to discuss ideas for smart city projects,” and praised the bots’ indefatigability. Fantasy says that the bots often prompt the “real humans to be more creative”—though having anthropomorphic chatbots coming up with ideas by talking to one another raises obvious concerns.
Hacking into your own workforce
Employers are sending simulated phishing emails to their own workers to test for cybersecurity holes, said Ann-Marie Alcántara in The Wall Street Journal. JuSong Baek got an email purportedly from Ticketmaster saying “he was officially off the waitlist” and could finally buy tickets to Taylor Swift’s show. He later realized “it was a phishing test from his employer.” Another person said she was nearly duped by an email asking her to click a link to see her annual bonus. Both tests were sent from templates created by KnowBe4, a security-awareness company. According to KnowBe4, “after a year of phishing training and simulations, a company’s likelihood of employees clicking on an email or suspicious link drops to 5.4 percent from 33.2 percent.”