If you can tolerate a degree of ambiguity and ethical gray zones, a startup will buy a digital deepfake copy of your face via which artificial intelligence software will sell people products and education services, according to a recent report from MIT Technology Review. As of writing, the company has roughly 100 composite "faces" lined up. And it wants to add yours. "We've got a queue of people that are dying to become these characters," said Hour One's Strategy Lead Natalie Monbiot, in the report from MIT. To join the small army of brainless faces of the marketing world, deepfake hopefuls can apply on the company's website, where you can submit your Instagram profile, email address, and your (real) name.

The world needs robots that make life better, not just ones that put people out of work. But business attitudes, government policy, and scientific priorities are geared toward replacing workers rather than complementing and enhancing their skills. That's the bottom line of a report by a task force at MIT that was released today. "It's super easy to make a business case for reducing head count. You can always light up a boardroom" by promising to replace people with robots, says David Autor, an MIT economist and co-chair of the task force, who gave an interview about the report.

"Will these developments enable people to attain higher living standards, better working conditions, greater economic security, and improved health and longevity? The answers to these questions are not predetermined. They depend upon the institutions, investments, and policies that we deploy to harness the opportunities and confront the challenges posed by this new era," the report said. The warning signals keep flashing. In the past week alone, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issued a report saying that automation has "contributed substantially" to reducing the portion of national income that goes to US workers over the past two decades, Bloomberg News reported. Technological efficiencies will result in an estimated 200,000 job cuts in the US banking industry in the next decade, according to a Wells Fargo & Co. report, Bloomberg also reported.

The robots are coming, but not necessarily for your job. The likelihood that robots, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will completely wipe out large swaths of the workforce is exaggerated, a new MIT report finds. The report, from MIT's "Work of the Future" task force, examines the relationship between technology and work, drawing on research from more than 20 faculty members. There's no doubt technology will impact jobs, but researchers say there is a larger concern when it comes to the future of work: Increasing inequality. And the impact of that inequality has given workers legitimate concerns about the role of technology in the future.

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working to bring neural networks to handheld devices. Neural networks comprise thousands or millions of simple and densely interconnected nodes that are organized by layers. Each interconnection has a weight and those weights are continually readjusted as the network is changed. All that computation requires a lot of memory and power, so neural networks are better suited to run on servers than smartphones. But last year a team led by Vivienne Sze, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, developed an energy-efficient chip designed for neural networks that might allow them to run on smartphones.