Amazon recently stopped testing its Scout sidewalk delivery robot and made other decisions indicating that it's scaling back its experimental projects. Looks like its delivery drone development for Prime Air is still going strong, though, because the e-commerce giant has just released a sneak peek of its next-gen machine. The MK30 was designed to be lighter than the current model dubbed MK27-2. It will still have six rotors like its predecessor, based on the images the e-commerce giant has shared, except it no longer has a full hexagonal frame.
The e-commerce giant is slated to start drone deliveries in College Station, Texas and Lockeford, California later this year to help it gauge people's interest in getting their orders flown over and dropped into their yards. Amazon will be using MK27-2 for those tests — this model won't be in service until 2024. The company says MK30 has a longer range than the MK27-2, has a higher temperature tolerance and has the capability to fly in light rain. In addition, Prime Air's Flight Science team has designed new propellers that will apparently reduce the new drone's perceived noise by around 25 percent.
The company's drones aren't that noisy to begin with —according to the FAA's draft environmental assessment (PDF) of drone package deliveries in College Station, the noise MK27-2 makes would be unlikely to cause disturbance and is "not expected to affect wildlife behavior..." Amazon treats reducing the noise its drones make as an important engineering challenge, though, and it believes all of the MK30's qualities combined would enable customers to "choose drone delivery more often. The company didn't reveal a specific plan for drone delivery expansion in its post, but it promises to make the service available "to more customers in the months and years to come."
Eventide declared the H9 the "one pedal to rule them all." But that was over eight years ago. It was the definition of cutting edge digital effects 2013. Things change though, and in 2022 the company is finally introducing a proper successor — the H90 Harmonizer.
The H90 is built on the same high-end ARM architecture as Eventide's $8,000 rack mount H9000. While the company doesn't get any more specific about the tech specs than that, it's safe to assume it's not the same exact setup in this $900 stompbox. There are 62 effects algorithms built-in to the H90 and, unlike the H9 (which has only 52 algorithms) you can run two of them simultaneously for more exotic and extreme effects.
You'll still find all the sounds from Eventide's TimeFactor, ModFactor, PitchFactor, and Space pedals, as well classics from the company's older rack mount units like the SP2016 Reverb. Headlining the new effects is probably Polyphonic Pitch Shifting, which uses Eventide’s SIFT (Spectral Instantaneous Frequency Tracking) tech. This isn't the first effects processor to do polyphonic pitch shifting, but it's not super common (and it's quite difficult from a technical perspective).
The six other new algorithms exclusive to the H90 include Prism Shift, which turns chords into arpeggiated synth delays; Even-Vibe, a Uni-vibe emulation with envelope followers; and Wormhole, a massive modulated reverb with pitch warping.
Eventide
The other huge upgrade over the H9 is that the 90 has actual on board controls and a much cleaner UI. The original had one large knob and basically required you to use the companion app for anything beyond switching presets. The H90 on the other hand has five knobs, a trio of foot switches and a handful of buttons that should make it not just feasible, but simple to customize and tweak effects settings. But, there is still a companion app for macOS and Windows.
There's connectivity galore here too. Four mono audio ins and outs, two expression control ports, 5-pin MIDI in and outs, plus USB for MIDI and software updates. Those audio jacks offer a lot of flexibility too. You can process two audio signals independently, or set them up as sends and returns to put other effects pedals in between two algorithms on the H90.
Netflix has released an interactive experience that you can fire up and play with the trivia-loving members of your family these holidays. It's called Triviaverse, and it was designed to throw rapid-fire questions at you, which you'll then have to answer within a time limit. You can play it alone and contend with three rounds of increasing difficulty per try, but you can also play with a friend in a turn-based bout with two rounds each. The one who's entered the more correct answers within the time limit wins the match.
The company says the show pulls its questions from any topic "you can imagine," from science to history to pop culture, so it would help having a wide variety of interests. You'll unlock badges the higher the score you get, including Bird Brain while you're just starting out. Keep at it for fun or for bragging rights, and you may just get the ultimate Triviaverse God title.
The streaming service has been exploring subscribers' interest in interactive content over the past few years, releasing shows and episodes you can play an active part in, such as Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Last year, it took a big step towards achieving its gaming ambitions and rolled out games to all Android and iOS users. And just this September, it announced that it's forming an in-house gaming studio in Helsinki, Finland to create original games that don't have ads or in-app purchases.
Netflix already has a trivia game: It launched its first interactive daily quiz show Trivia Quest earlier this year. Triviaverse has a simpler format, however, and seems like something you could do in between tasks or play with friends in between other games. The experience is available in English, Spanish (LatAm), Portuguese (Brazil), French, German, Spanish (Spain), Italian, Korean and Japanese. It's also accessible from all devices that can run Netflix's interactive experiences, including smart TVs, streaming media players, consoles, browsers and mobile devices.
Amazon is having a sale on its latest Watches, with a particularly good deal on the Series 8 cellular model. You can grab one of those in multiple colors for just $389, for a savings of $110 off the regular $499 price (22 percent off). If its a Watch LE model you're after instead, those are on sale too in both cellular and GPS versions for as little as $290 ($39 off) and $220 ($29 off) respectively.
The Series 8 isn't a huge update over the Series 7, but it does carry some useful new features. The main one is a temperature sensor tied to women's health, giving female users an estimate on when they may be ovulating. It's meant to be used overnight, sampling your wrist temperature every five seconds so you can see shifts from your baseline
The other is Crash Detection. Much as current watches can detect a fall, the Series 8 can detect car crashes via a pair of new accelerometers. It works in concert with other sensors to detect four different types of crashes, including rollovers, front impact, back impact and side impact. And of course, all of these Series 8 models have a cellular function, giving you internet connectivity, calls and texts for running, hiking and other activities that don't require a smartphone. The Series 8 cell models are fairly pricey at $499, but $389 is much more palatable.
Meanwhile, the Watch SE 2nd generation offers a performance boost of up to 20 percent and the same crash detection feature as the series 8. It also has a lower starting price, so taking an additional $39 and $29 off the cellular and GPS models brings the prices down to a very affordable $290 and $220, respectively.
The impact of Japanese RPGs on pop and gaming culture cannot be overstated. From Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star to Chrono Trigger, NieR, and Fire Emblem — JRPGs have spanned console generations, bridged the Japanese and North American markets, spawned entire universes of IP and delivered critical commercial hits for nearly four decades. Modern gaming simply wouldn't exist as it does today if not for the influence of JRPGs.
In his newest book, Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs, Aidan Moher takes a wondrous in-depth look at the history of Japanese role playing games, their initial rise in the East, the long road to acceptance in the West and ultimate cultural impact the world over. In the excerpt below, Moher explores how Pokemon grew from Gameboy screens to become a multi-billion dollar entertainment juggernaut.
Though it takes many cues from Japanese games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Genshin Impact was developed and published by Chinese developer/ publisher miHoYo. Thanks to gorgeous visuals, free-to-play accessibility, multi-platform release, and easy-to-pick-up-impossible-to-put-down gacha-based gameplay, it took the gaming world by storm after its 2020 release.
Game Boy not only provided greater access to video games thanks to its low price, but it subsequently changed the way we play games. About the size of a mass-market paperback novel, and just barely pocketable, the Game Boy leaned heavily on Nintendo franchises, including Mario and Donkey Kong, and—equally important for a device marketed for children—a ton of tie-in games for popular television shows and movies like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jurassic Park, and Star Trek.
The appeal for kids? Gaming where mom and dad couldn’t see the action — a private world of adventure. The appeal for adults? Appealing puzzle games, fewer back spasms from sitting cross-legged on the floor two feet from the TV, and a smaller, quieter way to keep the kids distracted before dinner.
“Game Boy had the advantage of being the first on the market before other major competitors,” explained Smithsonian Magazine. Though Sega and Atari soon followed with their own consoles, complete with color screens, they faced an uphill battle against Nintendo’s aggressive strategy of leaning into tech that was older, but also more efficient, affordable, and reliable. Like many ’90s kids, my first game console was the Game Boy. I was a computer game fiend, and we’d rent a NES with a couple of games now and then, but those were ephemeral promises of living room gaming that wouldn’t become reality for a few more years.
After its debut, the Game Boy was rife with puzzle games and character platformers, but by 1993, it had blossomed into a full-fledged adventuring machine thanks to familiar franchises like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and even Wizardry. The game that really sold the system’s capabilities, however, was a new entry in Nintendo’s ambitious The Legend of Zelda series. And, like many others, I was already a big Zelda fan by the time Link’s Awakening released in August 1993 thanks to its Super NES predecessor The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
What living room game consoles offered in scope, visual pop, and impressive technology, portables matched with their flexibility, bite-sized content, and on-the-go possibilities. Every morning, my friend and I would meet under a blanket of dew at our elementary school. Sitting side by side for warmth, Game Boys clutched in chilled fingers, we’d explore Koholint Island on individual journeys to waken the Wind Fish. The intimacy of this youthful bonding cemented Link’s Awakening as a core gaming experience in my life, all made possible by the Game Boy.
Though A Link to the Past and the entire Legend of Zelda series no doubt influenced a lot of JRPGs, especially puzzle-based games like Wild Arms or Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, its categorization as a JRPG is debatable. Personally, I don’t quite consider it a JRPG due to its lack of customizability, but there’s definitely enough overlap in mechanics, pacing, story construction, and so on to create an overlapping Venn diagram of fans.
Imagine the giddy power rush of being a kid with a whole universe in your pocket, out of sight of parents and siblings, with no lobbying for TV screen time required. At first blush, the handheld’s small screen might be considered a flaw, but the paradoxical reality was that the smallness leant to the understanding that it was a personal-sized portal to another world. Only room for one. Plus, you could pop in the cheap Nintendo-provided headphones and the world outside disappeared entirely.
Link’s Awakening was a revelation, a journey into the unknown that belonged only to me.
Wake up.
A dream.
Wake up.
It was euphoric.
Wake up.
And then . . . there was Pokémon.
In a video review of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (discussed in Chapter 6), YouTube channel Austin Eruption examined Square’s failed attempts at catalyzing the Western JRPG market during the early ’90s. “The concept of the entry RPG would be more successful . . . not with Square, but with Nintendo’s wildly popular Pokémon,” they said. “It turns out kids are super down to play RPGs, they just gotta have cute and cool monsters to collect.”
In 1996, Japanese schoolyards were buzzing thanks to the new Game Boy game published by Nintendo called Pocket Monsters. Kids traded tips, creatures, and blows across Game Boys connected by a link cable. These newly trained Pokémon trainers, as they’re called in the game, couldn’t get enough of the 151 unique, cute, and catchable creatures.
Before it was about catching monsters, however, Pocket Monsters was conceptualized by its insect-obsessed creator, Satoshi Tajiri, as a bug-catching simulator. Known to his classmates as “Mr. Bug,” Tajiri spent his childhood dreaming of becoming an entomologist and studying bugs for a living . . . that is until he discovered arcade games like Space Invaders. Though his professional ambitions shifted focus to bits, bytes, and programming scripts, his love for bug collecting remained, and at just twenty-four years old he came up with the idea for what would eventually become Pocket Monsters.
Before his buggy dreams became a reality, Tajiri founded Game Freak in 1989 with Masuda and artist Ken Sugimori, and released his first game, Mendel Palace, the same year. A grid-based puzzler, this game was completely unlike Pocket Monsters, but its success encouraged Tajiri and helped solidify Game Freak. The following year, Tajiri saw two Game Boys tethered by a link cable, and his concept for a bug-catching simulator sprang to life. He saw opportunity not only for players to be able to share and collect bugs, but to competitively face off against one another on their linked Game Boys.
It took over two years after its Japanese release for Pocket Monsters to reach western shores, finally releasing in September 1998 as Pokémon. With its release on the ten-year-old handheld and with the more powerful Game Boy Advance on the horizon, Nintendo released Pokémon on a whim, expecting the series to arrive as a chunky, but relatively unnoticed, oddity before the Game Boy Advance took over. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the weird little Japanese phenomenon appealed to kids in the West just as much as it had to children in its home country. Playgrounds across the United States and Canada were suddenly crawling with kids obsessing over Pikachus, Charmanders, and Mewtwos.
“Although it was made in Japan,” wrote culture writer Matt Alt for the BBC, “for a moment at the turn of the 21st Century, no corner of the world was immune from what came to be called ‘Pokémania.’” Scrambling in the wake of this unexpected success, Nintendo quickly localized the anime spinoff for an American audience to further capitalize on the video game’s hype. A short year later, the follow-up movie adaptation was so popular that phone boards were overwhelmed as tens of thousands of parents and fans sought tickets.
Pokémon’s defining feature was its dual-cartridge release: PokémonRed Version and PokémonBlue Version. The catch was that while each version had most of the same Pokémon available to catch, there were a few dozen available only in one version or the other. To “catch ’em all,” as the game’s tagline implored young Pokémon trainers, you had to find another player who owned the other cartridge. I chose PokémonBlue, and with a set of fully charged AA batteries powering my Game Boy, I started a new game and settled on Bulbasaur as my starting companion. What followed was an experience that made Link’s Awakening feel like The Hobbit—and now I was playing Lord of the Rings. I soon caught more Pokémon for my party: a cute bird called Pidgey, a caterpillar that ensnared foes in silk webbing, and a bucktooth rodent known as Rattata. By the end of my first play session, these little critters became so much more than characters in a game; they tapped into that Tamagotchiesque sense of ownership and quickly became as beloved as my childhood pets.
This wasn’t a party of adventurers; it was a family.
Pokémon put players in the role of a newly minted trainer named Red. (Or anything else they chose to name him within the seven-character limit. My first name fit with room to spare.) Alongside rival Blue, Red arrives at Professor Oak’s Pokémon lab to choose one of the three starter Pokémon: the aforementioned Bulbasaur and Charmander, and the terrapin-like Squirtle. New Pokémon in tow, you leave your hometown on an adventure through Kanto region—a fictional game universe based loosely on Japan’s own Kanto region. With the goal of becoming the region’s greatest Pokémon trainer, you visit Kanto’s eight gyms, wherein you challenge their leaders, powerful Pokémon trainers who focus on particular types of Pokémon, like water-type or electric-type, to earn badges. Conquering the gym leaders then gives you the right to challenge the Elite Four. Defeat them, and the title of Pokémon Champion awaits.
Pokémon combined the sprawling adventure of the JRPG with a narrative focused on personal conflict and growth—not the end of the world. If anything, Kanto felt idyllic, a Star Trek–esque utopia where humans had moved beyond such pettiness as war or raising vengeful gods to destroy their enemies. With nothing else to do, Kanto’s inhabitants could spend their days training the critters crawling through tall grass, prowling in dark caves, and lurking beneath the waves.
Link’s Awakening felt like a limitless adventure at the time, but in reality, there was one critical path to victory, and each player solved the game by following the same steps in roughly the same order. Pokémon was different. Placing the player in a vast world populated by 151 collectable Pokémon, it created an experience that was as unique and individualized as each of its players. Love cute Pokémon and want to fill your team with Pikachus and Eevees? It’s possible. Want to overpower your starter Pokémon, grind your way through the game, and defeat the Elite Four through brute force? Go for it. Obsessed with Psyduck? Um, sure. I guess.
Pokémon offered so much variety and customization for how the player approached building and training their team that each kid could play it in their own way, opening the door to a new style of accessibility lacking in similar games. Kids cared for their Pokémon, and being able to show off a rare or powerful catch on the playground was a badge of honor. And because of its portable nature, Pokémon was able to experience the same social dynamics that drove other popular schoolyard phenomena. It was like Tamagotchi—without the midnight wake-up calls. While other JRPGs gave the player some customization options for their party characters, it was nowhere near the endless possibility of Pokémon’s gotta-catch-’em-all depth.
Square Enix has revealed that Symbiogenesis, an upcoming project that was widely rumored to be Parasite Eve-related, is actually something else — and it's centered around NFTs (non-fungible tokens). The publisher described Symbiogenesis as "its first digital collectible art project designed from the ground up for Web3 fans."
Symbiogenesis takes place in a self-contained world containing a large cast of characters that can be collected as NFTs. Square Enix says you'll be able to use these digital artworks as profile pictures on social media accounts, something you definitely wouldn't be able to do by simply taking a screenshot.
In addition, you can use your character "in a story that takes place in an alternate world where the player can ’untangle’ a mystery by completing missions that revolve around questions of the monopolization and distribution of resources," Square Enix said in a press release. That's somewhat ironic, given that the entire perceived value of NFTs is derived from artificial scarcity.
The publisher will start selling NFTs (which will likely be on the Ethereum blockchain) in spring 2023, alongside the debut of "a free browser service" on Google Chrome. The browser-based approach makes some sense. Symbiogenesis wouldn't make it onto Steam, which banned NFT games last year.
This is one of the highest-profile stabs at an NFT-driven gaming experience yet. However, the NFT market has cratered this year. Gamers have largely rejected NFTs too.
Last December, it emerged that Ubisoft had sold barely any NFTs in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the first title in which it employed blockchain tech. A few weeks later, an Ubisoft executive claimed players would benefit from having a marketplace where they could buy and sell NFTs of in-game items, "but they don't get it for now." In April, Ubisoft announced that the game wouldn't receive any more content updates, effectively putting the game on ice and diminishing whatever value Ghost Recon Breakpoint's NFTs had.
It seems Square Enix is facing an uphill battle to make Symbiogenesis a success. It's not a surprise that the company is moving in this direction after announcing in January that it would invest in blockchain games. Square Enix sold off some of its more notable Western studios this year and it initially planned to plow much of the proceeds into the blockchain and other tech before walking back on that plan.
Meanwhile, Square Enix may have to try to placate fans who were convinced that Symbiogenesis was actually a revival of 1998's Parasite Eve. After the publisher registered Symbiogenesis as a trademark last month, some pointed out that the term means “the merging of two separate organisms to form a single new organism" — which is one of the foundations of Parasite Eve's story. While that connection is somewhat tenuous, it's hard to blame fans for beingupset and disappointed that the project is ultimately an NFT grift.
You're not alone if you're unable to check your Instagram feeds. Instagram has confirmed that some users are "having issues" accessing their accounts. The social network hasn't identified a cause as of this writing, but some users have received notices that their accounts were suspended, while others have seen their follower counts drop.
We've asked Instagram for further comment on the outage and will let you know if we hear more. Reports of failures started spiking on Downdetector shortly before 9AM Eastern. They're not consistent, however, as many users (including here at Engadget) aren't running into problems.
We're aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We're looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience. #instagramdown
This isn't the first significant outage in the past year. Meta's social networks suffered a major outage roughly a year ago after a bug disconnected key parts of the social media giant's backbone network. More recently, Instagram fixed a bug in early October that prevented iOS users from accessing the service. These hiccups aren't frequent, but they suggest Instagram still has teething troubles as it continues to grow.
Use of live facial recognition (LFR) by UK police forces "fail[s] to meet the minimum ethical and legal standards," according to a study from the University of Cambridge. After analyzing LFR use by the Metropolitan (Met) and South Wales police, researchers concluded that the technology should be banned for use in "all public spaces."
LFR pairs faces captured by security cameras to database photos to find matches. China and other non-democratic regimes have used the technology to as part of their state surveillance tools.
UK police have been testing its use in multiple situations to fight crime and terrorism. In two cases, LFR was used by MET and South Wales police to scan crowds and compare faces to those on a criminal “watch list." In another, officers used FRT smartphone apps to scan crowds and identify "wanted individuals in real time," according to the paper.
In those cases, the team found that police "kept from view" information about how they use the data and information about demographics. That has in turn made it difficult to determine whether the tools are promoting racial profiling, while raising questions about accountability. "Police forces are not necessarily answerable or held responsible for harms caused by facial recognition technology," said lead author Evani Radiya-Dixit.
The Met has claimed that the latest algorithms have improved LRF accuracy, with false alerts less than .08 percent, according to The Guardian. They boasted of a 70 percent success rate up to 2020, but an expert from the University of Essex hired by the police force found it was actually just 19 percent. "That the court of appeal explicitly stated in 2020 that South Wales police use of this technology was 'unlawful' makes it difficult to argue this technology should be used," he said.
However, the Met said its work was supported by law. "LFR is regulated by a number of sources of law. These sources of law combine to provide a multilayered legal structure to use, regulate and oversee the use of LFR by law enforcement bodies," it told The Guardian. UK's parliament has yet to weigh in, even though it's created legislation around internet privacy.
Women have faced gender-based discrimination in the workforce throughout history, denied employment in all but a handful of subservient roles, regularly ignored for promotions and pay raises — and rarely ever compensated at the same rates as their male peers. This long and storied socioeconomic tradition of financially screwing over half the population continues largely unabated into the 21st century where women still make 84 cents on the dollar that men do. In her new book, The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future, Professor of Law and founding member of the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Markets at the University of San Diego, Dr. Orly Lobel, explores how digital technologies, often maligned for their roles in exacerbating societal ills, can be harnessed to undo the damage they've caused.
For years, the double standard was glaring: employers demanded secrecy about salaries while asking prospective employees for their salary histories. Now, we can tackle both ends of this asymmetry. Just as digitization is helping to reverse information flows to foster more transparency in the market about employees’ worth, new laws are also directing employers to not rely as much on past pay levels, which can be tainted by systemic inequality. In 2016, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a law prohibiting employers from asking job candidates about their salary histories. Since then, more than a dozen states have followed suit.
Barring employers from asking prospective job candidates about their salary histories has two goals. The first is breaking the vicious pay gap cycle, which emerges when women are paid less at a previous job and that gap is then replicated by the next employer. The second is addressing gender differences in the negotiation process Salary figures are plagued by gender disparity, and they can perpetuate and further exacerbate existing market disparities. When a woman discloses that she currently earns less than a man, she could be harming her salary trajectory — both in the applied-for position and for the rest of her career. Each time she discloses her current salary to a potential employer, that gap is likely to grow, as recruitment efforts and promotions are often offered as a percentage increase in relation to current base salary. Rather than relying on biased figures, bans on salary history inquiry induce employers to use other ways to determine a potential employee’s worth, including a shift to automated computation. Employers using market and internal data can consider merit-related characteristics when determining pay, such as experience, training, education, skill, and past performance.
And yet, as we have seen, human bias can creep into our algorithms, and an algorithm that is fed data tainted by salary bias is likely to perpetuate that bias itself. Feedback loops are digital vicious cycles that can result in self-fulfilling outcomes. Once again: bias in, bias out. The risk is that an algorithm will learn that certain types or categories of employees are on average underpaid, and then calculate that into salary offers. This is the wrong that recent policy has been designed to eliminate — and that we can program AI to avoid. Removing the anchored numerical figure encourages employers to proactively assess pay based on the company’s needs and the candidate’s fit rather than on a tainted number. At the same time, having pay scale information for a job but not having a salary history on the table can embolden women to ask for more.
What’s more, AI can also help in the future — maybe not even the distant future — by replacing some of the negotiation that takes place in unequal settings. Empirical studies on negotiation differences between men and women have repeatedly shown that women on average negotiate less, and that when they do, employers react negatively. Women don’t ask for higher salaries, better terms, promotions, or opportunities nearly as frequently as men do. In my research, I’ve called this the negotiation deficit. In one study at Carnegie Mellon University, 93 percent of female MBA students accepted an initial salary offer, while only 43 percent of men did. In another study, female participants simulating salary negotiations asked for an average of $7,000 less than male participants. Economists Andreas Leibbrandt and John List have also found that while women are much less likely to negotiate with employers over salary, this difference disappears when all job seekers are explicitly told that pay is negotiable, mitigating the pay gap. My own experimental research with behavioral psychologist and law professor Yuval Feldman, my longtime collaborator, has found that women in some work environments act less as “homo economicus” — that is, as rational economic actors — and more as altruistic social actors, such that women do not demand for themselves as much as men, and are more likely to value non-monetary benefits, such as good corporate culture.
Can these research insights offer us clues for developing new software tools that will spur women to negotiate? Digital platforms can serve employees by providing advice and information on asking for a raise or preparing for an interview. Information on pay—and especially an explicit expectation that pay can and should be negotiated—can empower applicants to negotiate higher salaries before accepting job offers. The digital platform PayScale conducts annual surveys asking thousands of job seekers whether they disclosed their pay at previous jobs during the interview process. PayScale’s 2018 survey found that women who were asked about their salary histories and refused to disclose were offered positions 1.8 percent less often than women who were asked and disclosed. By contrast, men who refused to disclose when asked about salary history received offers 1.2 percent more often than men who did disclose.
Even when women do negotiate, they are treated differently. In my research, I call this phenomenon the negotiation penalty. Women are told to “lean in” and make demands, but the reality is that for centuries, women have been universally viewed as weaker negotiators than their male counterparts. In one series of experiments, participants evaluated written accounts of candidates who did or did not initiate negotiations for higher salaries. The results in each experiment showed that participants penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations, deeming women who asked for more not “nice” or too “demanding.” While qualities such as assertiveness, strength, and competitiveness culturally benefit male negotiators, women who display such characteristics are often considered too aggressive. Another study looked at data from a group of Swedish job seekers and found not only that women ended up with lower salaries than equally qualified male peers, but also that they were often penalized for negotiating like them. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have shown that attractive avatars lead to more intimate behavior with a confederate in terms of self-disclosure and interpersonal distance. In a second study, they also observed that tall avatars lead to more confident behavior than short avatars in a negotiation task. They term it the Proteus Effect (the Greek god Proteus was known to have the ability to take on many self-representations). The Proteus Effect suggests that the visual characteristics and traits of an avatar are associated with correlating behavioral stereotypes and expectations, including those that affect the way we negotiate.
The eleventh annual competition for artificial intelligence that has been trained to negotiate — the Hagglebot Olympics, as it’s been termed in the popular media — was held in January 2021. Universities from Turkey and Japan won this time. In some experiments involving negotiations with bots, most people did not even realize they were talking to a bot rather than another person — the bots had learned to hold fluent conversations that completely mimicked humans. Using game theory, researchers are increasingly improving the ways bots can negotiate on behalf of humans, eliminating some of the aspects in which we humans are fallible, like trying to factor in and weigh many different aspects of the deal. AI can now predict the other side’s preferences quite fast. For example, an AI listening by microphone to the first five minutes of negotiation is learning to predict much of the eventual deal just from the negotiators’ voices. Following these speech patterns through machine learning, it turns out that when the voice of a negotiator varies a lot in volume and pitch, they are being a weak player at the negotiation table. When the negotiating sides mirror each other, it means they are closer to reaching an agreement. Using AI also has helped uncover the ways in which women are penalized at the negotiation table. A new study out of the University of Southern California used a chatbot that didn’t know the gender identities of participants to evaluate negotiation skills. The study showed that most of us — both men and women — do quite badly at negotiating salaries. Over 40 percent of participants didn’t negotiate at all, and most people left money on the table they could have received. Women valued stock options less than men did as part of their compensation package, affecting women’s likelihood to accumulate wealth over time. These advances can also help with negotiation disparities across different identities. A group of Israeli and American researchers looked at how a smart computer can negotiate with humans from different cultural backgrounds. Without telling the machine anything about the characteristics of people from three countries — Israel, Lebanon, and the United States — they let the AI learn about the patterns of cultural negotiation differences by engaging in negotiation games. They found that the computer was able to outperform people in all countries. These developments are promising. We can envision bots learning about negotiation differences and ultimately countering such differences to create more equitable exchanges, level the playing field, and achieve fair outcomes. They can be designed to tackle the specific distributive goals we have.
If you've been trying to send messages via WhatsApp and they're not going through, you're not alone. The messaging app has been down for many users around the world for at least 30 minutes. Based on information from Downdetector — and from Engadget editors' reports — the service isn't working in several countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, India and the Philippines. WhatsApp users either can't connect to the service at all or their messages get stuck with the loading wheel and aren't being delivered. Instagram and Facebook appear to be fine and unaffected.
