Rise of the Machines: The Future has Lots of Robots, Few Jobs for Humans

The robots haven’t just landed in the workplace—they’re expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts. One multi-tasker bot, from Momentum Machines, can make (and flip) a gourmet hamburger in 10 seconds and could soon replace an entire McDonalds crew. A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn’t just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp—it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust. And just this week, Google won a patent to start building worker robots with personalities.

Rise of the Robots

As intelligent machines begin their march on labor and become more sophisticated and specialized than first-generation cousins like Roomba or Siri, they have an outspoken champion in their corner: author and entrepreneur Martin Ford. In his new book, Rise of the Robots , he argues that AI and robotics will soon overhaul our economy.

There’s some logic to the thesis, of course, and other economists such as Andrew (The Second Machine Age) McAfee have sided generally with Ford’s outlook. Oxford University researchers have estimated that 47 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated within the next two decades. And if even half that number is closer to the mark, workers are in for a rude awakening.

In Ford’s vision, a full-on worker revolt is on the horizon, followed by a radically new economic state whereby humans will live more productive and entrepreneurial lives, subsisting on guaranteed incomes generated by our amazing machines. (Don’t laugh — even some conservative influencers believe this may be the ultimate means of solving the wealth-inequality dilemma.)

Sound a little nuts? We thought so—we’re human, after all—so we invited Ford to defend his turf.

Critics say your vision of a jobless future isn’t founded in good research or logic. What makes you so convinced this phenomenon is real?

I see the advances happening in technology and it’s becoming evident that computers, machines, robots, and algorithms are going to be able to do most of the routine, repetitive types of jobs. That’s the essence of what machine learning is all about. What types of jobs are on some level fundamentally predictable? A lot of different skill levels fall into that category. It’s not just about lower-skilled jobs either. People with college degrees, even professional degrees, people like lawyers are doing things that ultimately are predictable. A lot of those jobs are going to be susceptible over time.

Right now there’s still a lot of debate over it. There are economists who think it’s totally wrong, that problems really stem from things like globalization or the fact that we’ve wiped out unions or haven’t raised the minimum wage. Those are all important, but I tend to believe that technology is a bigger issue, especially as we look to the future.

Eventually I think we’ll get to the point where there’s less debate about whether this is really happening or not. There will be more widespread agreement that it really is a problem and at that point we’ll have to figure out what to do about it.

Aren’t you relying on some pretty radical and unlikely assumptions?

People who are very skeptical tend to look at the historical record. It’s true that the economy has always adapted over time. It has created new kinds of jobs. The classic example of that is agriculture. In the 1800s, 80 percent of the U.S. labor force worked on farms. Today it’s 2 percent. Obviously mechanization didn’t destroy the economy; it made it better off. Food is now really cheap compared to what it was relative to income, and as a result people have money to spend on other things and they’ve transitioned to jobs in other areas. Skeptics say that will happen again.

The agricultural revolution was about specialized technology that couldn’t be implemented in other industries. You couldn’t take the farm machinery and have it go flip hamburgers. Information technology is totally different. It’s a broad-based general purpose technology. There isn’t a new place for all these workers to move.

You can imagine lots of new industries—nanotechnology and synthetic biology—but they won’t employ many people. They’ll use lots of technology, rely on big computing centers, and be heavily automated.

So in the all-automated economy, what will ambitious 20-somethings choose to do with their lives and careers?

My proposed solution is to have some kind of a guaranteed income that incentivizes education. We don’t want people to get halfway through high school and say, ‘Well if I drop out I’m still going to get the same income as everyone else.’

Then I believe that a guaranteed income would actually result in more entrepreneurship. A lot of people would start businesses just as they do today. The problem with these types of businesses you can start online today is it’s hard to put enough together to generate a middle-class income.

If people had an income floor, and if the incentives were such that on top of that they could do other things and still keep that extra money, without having it all taxed away, then I think a lot of people would pursue those opportunities.

There’s a phenomenon called the Peltzman Effect, based on research from an economist at the University of Chicago who studied auto accidents. He found that when you introduce more safety features like seat belts into cars, the number of fatalities and injuries doesn’t drop. The reason is that people compensate for it. When you have a safety net in place, people will take more risks. That probably is true of the economic arena as well.

People say that having a guaranteed income will turn everyone into a slacker and destroy the economy. I think the opposite might be true, that it might push us toward more entrepreneurship and more risk-taking.

Complex bacterial challenge in fight against deadly amphibian disease

New research from The University of Manchester and the Institute of Zoology has shed light on the complex challenge facing scientists battling one of the world's most devastating animal diseases.

Chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) is thought to be behind the decline or extinction of at least 200 species of frogs. It is also one of the reasons why 31% of amphibian species are currently listed as threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

This latest study used bacteria from frogs in Belize to test the limitations of probiotic treatments. This form of treatment aims to introduce bacteria cultivated from amphibians that aren't affected by the disease to those at risk of infection to boost their immunity.

Dr Rachael Antwis who carried out the study whilst completing her PhD at Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences explains: "Using beneficial bacteria to act as 'probiotics' for disease mitigation is already common in agriculture and human health. In fact, many bacteria that reside on amphibian skin have been shown to inhibit the growth and survival of B. dendrobatidis. However, the reliability of the potential probiotics hasn't been tested against the shifting targets the disease presents."

To assess the effectiveness of probiotic treatments, the team used bacteria taken from frogs in Belize, where the species has shown resilience despite the long term presence of the disease in the area. 56 strains of bacteria were isolated and stored for use in the laboratory.

The team challenged the bacteria against different genetic strains of the disease, and then looked at whether the bacteria had inhibited the growth of the disease in its various forms. They found the bacteria performed in a variety of ways with only a small number inhibiting all forms of the disease. The bacteria that had an impact on one strain of the disease didn't have the same impact on the other genetic variations.

Dr Trenton Garner from The Zoological Society of London's Institute of Zoology explains the results: "Because only a small proportion of the bacteria that could be used as candidate probiotics showed broad-spectrum inhibition against the global pandemic B. dendrobatidis lineage, we believe probiotic treatments are unlikely to be consistently successful when confronting a variety of fungal genotypes. Because of the enormous genetic variability of the disease and its ability to rapidly evolve, it's vital that any treatment takes this into account."

He continues: "We suggest that a variety of bacteria be used when creating probiotic treatments as this is likely to offer more comprehensive protection of hosts from B. dendrobatidis and other threatening amphibian pathogens."

The results of the study have been published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Moving forwards the scientists say that further research is needed to fully understand how bacteria inhibit B. dendrobatidis growth and the ability to infect hosts. Looking at the B. dendrobatidis genome for virulence factors will be fraught with difficulty but this study demonstrates some hope for finding effective probiotic treatments from within the amphibian community.

Dr Antwis concludes: "A lot more work is definitely needed before we can identify an effective cure for this devastating disease. But as a scientist I believe we not only have a moral obligation to keep searching, but an ecological one too. Amphibians inhabit the middle of food chain, making up a vital part of our ecosystem. If they go then that could spell disaster for many more species."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Manchester University . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Ex Machina’s Director on Why A.I. Is Humanity’s Last Hope

Alex Garland has one thought when it comes to the AI revolution: Bring it on. After a career of writing novels (The Beach) and screenplays (28 Days Later, Dredd), he’s moving into the director’s chair with April’s Ex Machina, a movie that pushes the discussion of AI and ethics into discomfiting territory. When an alpha-male tech bro (played by Oscar Isaac) secretly develops a robot named Ava, he asks one of his employees (Domhnall Gleeson) to evaluate her wares using the Turing Test. Things get tense, even dangerous—but unlike film androids who go all cogito ergo slay, Ava is thoughtful, even kind, and may be a better heiress to the world than the human who created her.

Ex Machina isn’t the usual AI movie. How’d you get interested in sentient computers?

I’m 44, and I’ve grown up keeping pace with developments in videogames and computers. When I was 12 or 13, home computers arrived; your parents bought them, expecting there’d be education in them but all you’d do is play videogames. But I did a bit of programming in Basic. I’d do really very simple “Hello World” type programs that would give this machine the very barest sentience. I remember quite well the kind of electric sense that you’d get that the machine was alive—with certain knowledge that it wasn’t.

Years later, I got into a long series of arguments with a friend of mine whose chief interest is neuroscience. He thinks that computers are never going to become sentient, and he has some good, scientific arguments why that is the case. But on an instinctive level, I just didn’t agree with him. I started doing a lot of reading about AI, mind, and consciousness.

You’ve worked with complex themes before, so this isn’t totally new territory.

As far back as The Beach there’s stuff about multiverse theory and stuff like that. I worked on a film called Sunshine, which had at its heart an issue to do with heat death in the universe. Although a tiny bit of the stuff in there was reasonable from a scientific viewpoint, it was largely bullshit—it made about as much sense as putting on the warp drive in Star Trek. It was frustrating. I felt like I’d dropped the ball in some important respect. I’m not tearing the film down—there are things about it I really love—but this was something that bugged me. When I started working on this I thought, “This is something I want which is reasonable.”

What was your AI education?

I’ve got an intellectual limitation in terms of what I’m able to understand. It’s partly intelligence, and partly understanding of mathematics; the two collide together to create a pretty impermeable brick wall for me. But what I can read and understand is the philosophical ideas that surround it.

In particular, I came across a book by a guy called Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College, the UK’s version of MIT. I felt very sympathetic to its argument when I read it. So when I wrote this script I contacted him, and also a couple of other people, and, “I want you to be really tough on this script and make sure it stands up.”

And does it?

There were two conceits we made. One is that you can create a sentient machine and the other is that you have incredibly high-level robotics which let that sentient machine have a face, to have nuance. Now those are huge conceits, and somebody might reasonably say it’s equivalent to the warp drive. But it is science fiction—and within those conceits, I tried to be quite tough about it.

What kind of AI science fiction did you draw on for inspiration?

You can assume a level of film literacy with cinema audiences that you can’t assume with books. People may or may not have read Heart of Darkness, right? However, they’re very likely to have seen Apocalypse Now. So when you’re working on a sci-fi movie that contains within it artificial intelligence and robots, you can be pretty sure people know something about HAL and 2001. You can be even more sure they know about Blade Runner and replicants. So you write it knowing that you’re aiming at a strong literate audience because they almost certainly will be.

And they’ll likely be ready to pick your movie apart, too.

It could create a problem. In designing the robot, I didn’t want people thinking of another movie when she walked onscreen. If she’s colored gold you immediately think of C-3PO, and the feminine aesthetics wouldn’t cancel that out. We had to steer clear of iconic robots: the film Metropolis, or that Bjork video directed by Chris Cunningham [“All Is Full of Love”].

People seem to want to compare Ex Machina to Her—the AI is different, but you play with that theme of creating a “perfect woman.”

There are two totally separate strands in this film as far as I’m concerned. One of them is about AI and consciousness, and the other is about social constructs: why this guy would create a machine in the form of a girl in her early twenties in order to present that machine to this young guy for this test.

How important was Ava’s design to the overall look of this film?

It seems very familiar yet wholly unique. There might be a little bit of Maria from Metropolis, but not much else. It’s super important. It’s crucial because it needed to look beautiful in a particular way. It needed to look really, really beautiful and visually striking.

When Nathan explains why he made Ava look the way she does, it’s kind of creepy.

Yeah, but that’s exactly the point. You’re supposed to think it’s creepy. You’re not supposed to warm to him over that stuff; you’re supposed to feel unnerved and that this is uncomfortable. And therefore she needs to be rescued.

Nathan in many ways is an archetypal Silicon Valley guy. Is his character a commentary on those dudes?

It’s more alpha-male-meets-non-alpha-male. I like the mixture of someone who’s incredibly aggressive and kind of bullying, but is couching everything in this dude-bro speak as if that takes the edge off of what he’s actually doing. I’d suspect you’d find that just as easily on Wall Street as you would in Silicon Valley.

Have you been following the recent debates about AI and ethics?

It’s a big question. I think if you’re talking about nonsentient AIs—the advanced versions of the sort we already have—then it’s a lot to be very concerned about and a lot to be aware of. It’s not hard to imagine a situation where an AI-controlled drone turns out to be more effective on a battlefield than a human-controlled drone, and maybe doesn’t have the problems of post-traumatic stress that humans suffer. What you’ve done is hand the machine a life-and-death decision over a human. The ethical problems contained within that are absolutely obvious.

But broadly speaking, if you create a new consciousness in the form of a machine, that isn’t necessarily too significantly different in my mind from two adults creating a child. You do have a problem if that new machine is more intelligent than the parents, but again we also have some experience with that too. You could have two parents that create Einstein, and another two who create Stalin.

So you’re not worried about Skynet.

I kind of welcome it. Humans are going die on this planet. It might be because of eco-disasters or maybe because of changes that happen within the solar system or the sun. But when it happens, we’re not going to go through a wormhole and go to another galaxy and find an old planet. It’s just not going to happen. What will survive on our behalf is AIs—if we manage to create them. That’s not problematic, it’s desirable.

Ex Machina kind of feels like it was made with that in mind.

I hope that’s implicit in the film. It was definitely conceived of as a pro-AI movie. It’s humans who fuck everything up; machines have a pretty good track record in comparison to us.

It seems like you lucked out with your cast, especially Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson.

Because they’re in Star Wars?

Well, yeah. When I was setting out to cast Ex Machina, the only thing I really knew 100 percent for sure is that it wasn’t going to work to get a “film star.” They could actually sink the whole thing quite easily. So it was mainly just about finding really good actors. The problem we had was not identifying who would be good, but can we get them because there are other people who also wanted them.

So what’s next?

There’s a book [producer] Scott Rudin gave me called Annihilation, a spectacular novel by Jeff VanderMeer. I really loved it, so I’m going to try that. But I have no idea if that’ll work out.

What about another 28 Days Later sequel? 28 Months Later?

Danny Boyle and [producer] Andrew McDonald and I never wanted a third one partly because we didn’t have an idea that we felt excited about, but I think we might now have one.

Can you share the idea?

Are you crazy? I’d get fucking shot if I told you that. [Laughs.] No, I can’t tell you. It’s just at the really early stage. What we have to do is get a writer. What you want is a writer who will subvert the idea, take some ownership of it. Hopefully Andrew will find a writer who says “my idea is better anyway” and rips it to shreds and comes up with something even better. That’s what I’d like.

Watch a trailer for Ex Machina

Angela Watercutter (@waterslicer) interviewed director Michael Mann in issue 23.01.

What Do You Want Me to Do In Lab?

Many introductory physics labs involve a low friction cart on a track. Rhett Allain

Here are some typical questions I get from students in the introductory physics lab:

Do you want me to make a graph?

How many different masses should I measure?

What angle do you want this ramp at?

What units do you want me to use?

Here is the answer. I really just want one thing. I want the students to build a model. What is a model? It could be anything. It could be an expression for the force a spring exerts as it is stretched. It could be an equation that shows the relationship between friction force and other things. A model could be a numerical calculation that shows how an object falls with air resistance.

That’s really all I want from lab students. I want them to explore and build. Oh, I know it’s tough building models. You have to start with simple things like a free falling ball or a cart rolling down a ramp. On top of that, that are other problems. You need to understand how to make a graph and what it means. You need to know how to use different equipment to collect data. You need some data analysis skills. Maybe you need to know how to create a numerical model.

Because it’s not so easy to build models, I try to help. I sometimes will give students a model for them to collect data and compare (like with friction). I will sometimes show students the steps that I would use to build a model so that they can follow.

But in the end, I really don’t want the students to do anything in particular. I want students to be builders, builders of models. Imagine this was an art class and a student asked “what color do you want me to paint this flower?” My answer would be “well, what are you trying to accomplish?” In the end, lab is like art class. The students need to create something and I am there to help.

Students in lab are not my assistants collecting data. I am not training them to follow instructions, I am training them to be humans. If lab was all about following instructions, we could just use robots. Robots are good at stuff like that.

A Legendary Redesign of Helvetica, Reborn After 30 Years

Imagine if, due to some fluke in the development of projection technology, The Empire Strikes Back had only been shown in a couple of movie theaters. Imagine it fading into obscurity and existing for decades as nothing more than a cult film, a historical footnote, an object of fascination among serious movie buffs.

That’s the story of Haas Unica.

If you have eyeballs, you’ve almost certainly seen Helvetica. It’s one of the most widely used typefaces ever created, so popular that it generated a documentary examining its popularity. It’s almost equally certain that you have not seen Haas Unica, the typeface designed to be Helvetica’s sequel of sorts. Introduced in 1980, it was lost to history almost instantly upon its arrival.

Now, after languishing in obscurity for decades, Unica been rescued and remastered. Thanks to an effort by Monotype designer Toshi Omagari, the legendary typeface is finally available as Neue Haas Unica, an 18-font family tuned-up for the digital age. Drawn to be legible at small sizes, it could be a perfect Helvetica-substitute for user interfaces and other on-screen text elements. For designers, though, the new Unica is an exciting visitor from the past. As Pentagram partner J. Abbott Miller puts it, “There is a Rip van Winkle quality of a font having woken up after 30 years of sleep.”

WIRED

A Stillborn Typeface

Helvetica was developed in 1957 by Swiss designer Max Miedinger. Designed as an update of the so-called “grotesque” typefaces developed in Germany in the late 19th Century, it was explosively popular, and by the mid-1970s, it had utterly transformed how the written word appeared throughout modern life. It was the de facto typeface for corporations of the day, employed by Knoll, BMW, American Airlines and hundreds of other companies. It brought a clear, modern look to magazine ads, subway signs, letterheads, and Presidential campaigns. As designer Michael Beirut once remarked, at the height of its popularity, Helvetica simply seemed elemental, like air, or gravity.

For people who scrutinize letters for a living, however, Helvetica’s ubiquity in the 1960s and 1970s offered a great many opportunities to notice its quirks. Designed for short blasts of texts like headlines and advertisements, Helvetica didn’t always look great at small sizes or when used for lengthy blocks of text. And because it had been designed for the hot metal typesetting techniques prevalent in the 1950s, it hadn’t translated perfectly to the phototypesetting process that became popular in the 1970s.

So, in 1974, Haas, the centuries-old Swiss type foundry that had introduced Helvetica in 1957, commissioned a Swiss design team called Team’77 to come up with a follow-up to the world’s most popular typeface. The group—André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt—set out to create something native to phototypesetting that combined the best elements of Helvetica and Univers, another hugely popular sans-serif typeface of the day with a slightly more formal design. Team’77 was rigorous in its analysis of the parent typefaces and meticulous in creating their offshoot. It took them three years to complete the job.

By the time they finished Unica, however, Haas was going out of business. Further, the typographic world was on the verge of being rocked by another new technology: desktop publishing. The advent of personal computers, particularly the Macintosh, would make it possible to experiment with type in tremendous new ways. Phototypesetting, for which Unica had been designed, was quickly losing relevance. As a result, Unica got lost in the shuffle. “People didn’t get to see a lot of it,” says Monotype type director Dan Rhatigan. “It was almost a stillbirth.”

Unica, Found

In the years that followed, Unica slipped into obscurity, accumulating a sort of mythology along the way. It had been digitized in the 1980s by another company—that also promptly folded. “Because it was released by companies who went out of business, there was kind of murkiness for a while about whether or not people could do anything with Unica, which I think added to its legend,” Rhatigan says.

Monotype

In late 2012, Rhatigan was visiting Monotype’s outpost in Germany, which had previously been the office of storied typesetting outfit Mergenthaler Linotype Company. He was rooting around in storage, looking for old material, when he happened upon a box of tracing paper and transparent sheets. The transparent pages each had a single letter, crisp and clean and ten inches tall: The photographic film masters for Unica.

Rhatigan had been dimly aware of the typeface from postings on typography forums, and for a designer who wears his love of typography on his sleeves quite literally, in the form of tattoos of cherished letters, finding the fabled typeface was a thrill. “It was so exciting,” he says. “We tried to find out, does this really mean that we are free to do with this what we want?” A short investigation revealed: Yes, Monotype owned both the name and the rights.

Rhatigan showed the materials to Monotype designer Toshi Omagari, who quickly took up its resurrection as a side project. Omagari redrew the letters from scratch, following the intention of original design but fine-tuning the letters and spacing for modern, digital work. Omagari drew a number of different weights and languages. When he and Rhatigan would mention the project, people would invariably get excited.

“The cult aspect became more and more obvious as we talked to people about working on it,” Rhatigan says. “People knew about Unica. But since it wasn’t widely available, a lot of people did not have a chance to work with it and see if it was as good as the legend that had grown up around it. It really was this sort of lost treasure.”

Closer to the Crystal Goblet

To your eyes and mine, the differences between Unica and Helvetica will be nearly imperceptible. The cross-stroke on the capital Q has been nudged slightly upward. The lower-case t has been shaved slightly at the top. To designers like Omagari and Rhatigan, however, the differences are perfectly obvious. Even looking at the film masters, Rhatigan says, he could see “all the detail, all the intention that was in there.”

Team’77 detailed that intention in an elaborate document from 1980, published in tandem with Unica’s release. The group started by rigorously measuring letters from Helvetica, both in its original metal form and in a second version made for phototypesetting. They then proposed dozens of adjustments. Where Helvetica’s capital letters were blocky and tended towards a uniform width, Team’77 restored Unica’s capitals to more natural proportions. The designers balanced the thickness of strokes throughout the alphabet and tweaked spacing. As a result, the group concluded, Unica had “tighter rhythm in upper case composition” and “improve[d] readability…especially for continuous text.”

Monotype

This second consideration is what draws Rhatigan to the font. Helvetica was designed for use in headlines and advertisements, but when people started using it indiscriminately for larger chunks of smaller-set text, it lost some of its magic. “Helvetica looks so great when it’s handled skillfully and used for these big bold graphic treatments, but as an everyday information typeface, it falls a little flat,” Rhatigan says. Univers “is crisp and clean and it’s great, but it is a little cold,” he adds. “It’s functional but a little bit severe, let’s say.”

Unica hits a sweet spot between the two, Rhatigan says: Not quite as quirky as Helvetica, not quite as dispassionate as Univers. “Unica is beautiful, crisp, and modern and rationalized, but it has that humanity in it,” he says. In a famous essay from 1955, Beatrice Warde argued that good type should be like a crystal goblet, “calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.” Unica nudges Helvetica closer to that mark. Designers’ reactions to the new drawing, collected by Monotype, include descriptions like “beautiful,” “classic,” and “The Holy Grail.”

Rhatigan thinks Unica’s strengths are especially suited to user interfaces, where readability is paramount. When Apple moved to a skinny version of Helvetica for the iPhone’s default font, it reignited debates among type-heads about Helvetica’s legibility. As designer Khoi Vinh wrote at the time, Helvetica’s letters were “optimized for those cases where there’s ample room for the eye to truly travel along their supple curves…To use them as both Google and Apple do, in text settings, in small sizes, in paragraphs, makes reading more visually cramped and more difficult than it should be.”

Might Neue Haas Unica be a better go-to option for the era of screens? “That is certainly the hope,” Rhatigan says.

Hrant Papazian, the designer-founder of The Microfoundry, in Los Angeles, is another long-time Unica zealot. “I guess the main reason I can cling to is that it’s not ‘naive,'” he wrote years ago in a posting to the website Typophile. He made the case for Unica with an evocative, if somewhat odd, analogy. To Papazian’s eyes, older grotesque typefaces—those early sans-serif alphabets from the 19th Century—are like “backwards villagers.” New grotesques, like Helvetica and Univers, are like “urbanites pretending to be villagers,” he wrote.

“Unica is like an urbanite who has had to move in with his villager in-laws, but has decided to make the best of it,” he continued. I tried to get in touch with Papazian in hopes that he would elaborate, but I suspect type designers will know exactly what he means.

Want More Women Working in Tech? Let Them Stay Home

PowerToFly cofounder and CEO Milena Berry, left, and cofounder and President Katharine Zaleski, right. Tory Williams

Everyone has their theories about why there aren’t more women in technology. Some say it’s that women aren’t studying computer science and therefore aren’t applying for jobs in the field. Others say it’s due to a certain degree of bias in an industry where predominantly male leaders hire predominantly male employees because they see similarities between themselves and their hires.

But Katharine Zaleski and Milena Berry say there’s another reason, which is that tech companies aren’t giving women—particularly mothers—the flexibility they need to raise a family and pursue their careers at the same time. “There are two bad choices for women: go back to the office full-time or slowly lose your career because you can’t go back to the office full-time,” Zaleski, a former editor at The Huffington Post, explains.

Which is why the two working mothers decided to launch PowerToFly, a job site that connects women with employers who are willing to let them work remotely. The site launched in August, targeted primarily toward women in tech. Since then, it’s had tens of thousands of women across multiple industries register for the site and apply for jobs with nearly 700 big-name employers like Buzzfeed and Hearst. Just last week the company launched its own app, PowerToFly Connect, which serves as a sort of social network and news site for this new community of remote workers. “We launched strong with our job matching platform,” Berry, former CTO of a non-profit, says, “and now we’re creating a media platform around these issues for women.”

More Than A Hunch

The fact that employer flexibility plays an important role in the persistent gender gap is more than a hunch. There have been plenty of studies showing that despite their move into the workplace over the last several decades, women still feel more pressure than their male counterparts to step back from work once they have children. One 2013 study by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of women said being a working mother made it harder to advance their careers, compared to 16 percent of fathers. That same study showed that 42 percent of mothers had reduced their work hours to care for family, while just 28 percent of fathers said the same.

Meanwhile, a recent study out of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on why women leave the tech field found that one third of women surveyed left to tend to their families “because companies weren’t flexible enough to accommodate work-life concerns.”

“The vast majority of women will become mothers and face the same choices we faced,” Zaleski says. “The amount of women in the workforce peaked in 1999, and that’s because there’s no third way. We see ourselves as creating that option.”

Struggling to Gain Traction

Of course, not all companies are willing to embrace remote employees, no matter what it could do for their diversity numbers. One highly publicized example is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s moratorium on working from home when she took the helm at the tech giant. When Mayer defended the new policy, following much controversy, she argued that people are “more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.”

According to Zaleski, this is not an unusual viewpoint for tech companies, which is one reason why PowerToFly has struggled to gain traction among tech employers. “They want to deal with the issues internally,” she says, referring to issues of diversity in tech. “They’re very focused on setting up committees and talking about the issues, but they’re also very committed to having everyone in the office.”

Still, she says those businesses that are signing up with PowerToFly are already beginning to see results. The company, which vets applicants on behalf of businesses, receives an average of 14 applications per position. While PowerToFly won’t share exactly how many people have landed jobs through the platform, they say they’ve connected BuzzFeed with 20 new hires and Hearst with 16. Meanwhile, PowerToFly has hired its own employees through the platform, growing its headcount to 35 women working in eight countries around the world.

For Zaleski and Berry, this platform is not just a way to get more women into work but a quick way for tech companies that care about the gender imbalance to make an immediate dent. “You hear these guys talk education, education, education,” she says. “Well, that’s 10 years out. Why not invest in the women who are here now?”

The Internet’s Clearly Not Ready to Stream Big TV Events

Saturday night’s college basketball matchup between Wisconsin and Kentucky was the most-watched Final Four game in 22 years. Unless, that is, you were one of a thousand or so Sling TV subscribers who instead got to witness a sputtery mess. It’s the latest in a string of high-profile streaming failures, and it won’t be the last. Being a cord cutter in 2015 is great—until there’s something you actually need to watch live.

The Final Four lapse recalled similar recent outages, notably last spring’s stunted Oscars stream for ABC, and Game of Thrones’ season four premiere collapse for HBO Go. The only thing all three have in common? They’re among the first real tests of how the streaming age handles appointment television. So far, the results aren’t promising.

According to a mollifying Sling TV tweet, the culprit in this case was “extreme sign-ups and streaming,” which sounds like a gaggle of wakeboarders gumming things up. Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch corroborated in a statement, citing “an unprecedented combination of new customer signups and high levels of viewership,” two factors that “stressed our systems.” So, yes, the hiccups were largely due to an onrush of Sling enlistees. But not in the way you might think.

Being able to access big, Twitter-friendly TV moments as they happen was supposed to be the final shove into the streaming future.

By blaming overwhelming traffic for its struggles Sling is trying to convince you that its only failure was being too popular, a prom king who can only invite so many into his court. But according to streaming-media analyst Dan Rayburn, that’s almost certainly not what’s actually going on.

“The whole reason you go to a CDN is because you can handle the traffic whether it spikes,” explains Rayburn. The CDN, or content delivery network, is the third-party company used by services like Sling TV to send you the live video you requested. They’re also built to handle spikes of all sizes; just look at last year’s Olympics, which transpired glitch-free, or even the WWE Network, whose Wrestlemania 31 live stream last week went off without a suplex. (WWE, notably, piggybacks on the infrastructure of similarly glitch-free MLB.) So let’s stop blaming the servers. If there’s such a thing as a critical mass of streamers, we haven’t found it yet.

What we have found, says Rayburn, is that a sudden influx of customers can expose breakdowns in other parts of the ecosystem. Getting live television from a camera to your iPad requires a tremendous amount of synchronization across numerous moving pieces, from transcoding to authentication to tracking to monetization to delivery. Any one of those parts can snag thanks to technical glitches. Or, more often than you might think, to good ol’ fashioned cost-cutting.

“How many people signed up for Sling for 30 days just to get March Madness and tried to cut it?” explains Rayburn. He’s talking about the many Sling customers who sign up for just one streaming event and then cancel their subscriptions immediately afterward. “So Sling has to decide how much money it has to put in place… Everybody’s always making the cost versus quality trade-off on the internet. That’s what you do.” It doesn’t make much business sense, in other words, to ramp up operations to handle the kinds of numbers you’re only likely to see a few times a year.

Ultimately, whether Sling TV—and ABC, and HBO, and a host of others before them—was genuinely caught off guard or simply made a calculated decision not to accommodate a user base that included a few March Madness passers-by ultimately doesn’t matter. The end result is the same: another black mark against the future of television, as yet again, a number of people didn’t get what they paid for.

All of which puts potential cord-cutters in a difficult position. Being able to access big, Twitter-friendly TV moments as they happen was supposed to be the final shove into the streaming future. But it’s those same events that the streaming services are least-equipped (or motivated) to pull off. The Final Four stream may have only affected a fraction of Sling TV viewers, but are you willing to spend a minimum of $20 per month on a bet that you won’t be one of the unlucky the next time?

And that’s before you even get to all of the other malfunctions that can and do disrupt the streaming experience. Your router probably sucks sometimes. Your ISP definitely does. And if they suck in the middle of next season’s Game of Thrones finale, you’re going to regret that HBO Now purchase, whether HBO executes a flawless streaming experience or not.

Sling is trying to convince you that its only failure was being too popular.

At least in Sling TV’s case, help is apparently on the way, hopefully in time for the service’s launch of HBO Now later this year. A spokesperson tells WIRED that the company has plans to update its apps “to improve stability and manage the demand as we prepare for the launch of HBO,” though it’s not clear exactly what those improvements entail. Or whether they’ll be enough to handle the next onslaught. At the very least, the service appears to have stood strong through last night’s NCAA championship game between Duke and Wisconsin.

The point is this: You have more opportunities to sever ties with your cable company than ever. Sling TV and PlayStation Vue are here. HBO Now will be soon, with an Apple-powered streaming service reportedly on its heels. Over-the-top television has never been closer to finding mainstream appeal. But these frequent flame-outs make it hard to embrace. You’d just as soon buy a shovel that disappears whenever a blizzard passes through.

Look, nothing’s perfect. Cable and satellite TV aren’t immune from outages either. But unlike those incumbents, internet TV finds itself most vulnerable during its most important events. Until that’s fixed, live streaming’s going to remain a dead end.