Last week, I shared a post I had written about how places that are using algorithms to serve up news, like Google News, will soon be useless as the algorithm gets overwhelmed with ChatGPT-written junk on a mass scale.
I came across another post written by Ian Betteridge this week, eloquently titled The information grey goo.
Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. Each week, I’ll share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and important information about privacy, security, and legal tech.
You can find out all about me here - Mike McBride Online.
In the post, Ian also describes the impossibility of sorting and curating the mass of disinformation, spam, scams, trolls, etc., that AI tools are spitting out at a rate most of us probably can’t even imagine. He also added a point that I had not considered—journalistic paywalls.
With reliable information locked behind paywalls, anyone unwilling or unable to pay will be faced with picking through a rubbish heap of disinformation, scams, and low-quality nonsense.
This is a problem. We should be looking to address this now because, frankly, too many people are already being “informed” by the worst of this nonsense. How do we address it, though? We cannot expect news organizations owned by major media conglomerates to give away news for free. We already know what kind of nonsense that is. It will take all of us to make sure that good journalism, good writing, and solid information get spread far and wide as much as possible.
The algorithms won’t do that for us. Big Tech won’t do it for us. (While we are on Big Tech and how much they will not help consumers and users, read through Ed Zitron’s latest - How Tech Overstayed Its Welcome.)
We must do it ourselves—one share, conversation, and a small newsletter at a time.
Careers and the Workplace
It's a Global Economy and a Global Talent Pool For Many Remote Workplaces
I find it interesting that the same people who only want to hire "the most qualified" person also want to limit themselves to hiring only people who live in the vicinity of their office and are physically able to be in the office 8-10 hours per day, five days a week. It seems that leaves out many talented people who might be better qualified. Can your company compete with just that labor pool in a global economy when others search the world for talent?
If foreign companies poach American workers to work remotely, they might know something you don't.
There are some items to consider in this article, including what they call the cost of work and who should bear that cost—things like the expenses and time spent commuting, etc. That one caught my eye, but there’s much more - 9 Future of Work Trends for 2024
It’s not as difficult as some would like you to believe, but it takes effort. - Remote Team Building: How Do I Stay Connected with My Virtual Team?
Training and Development
Four Things You Can Do to Increase Talent Attraction - You know that one of them is growth and development. Of course, it is. Why would anyone stay in a workplace that doesn’t give them that opportunity?
Mental Health in the Workplace
Linked - Can remote work cause depression?
The most important thing is recognizing what works for you. Working from home opens up opportunities to people who can't, for many reasons, travel to an office every day. It can, however, be lonely at times. Finding the right balance is key. Finding the places where you can still connect with people outside of work is key. You're no longer spending a third of your day in the same location as your coworkers and connecting by default. Still, you can connect and be more involved in your community because you're not spending another couple of hours commuting. You can spend more time with your family.
Burnout is a workplace problem, not an individual problem.
Would it change the way you think about it to know that 70% of people might suffer from imposter syndrome?
Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech
Linked - In major gaffe, hacked Microsoft test account was assigned admin privileges
The thing is, I can see where this happened. Sometimes, you need real "stuff" to test against, and the production tenant has all the real stuff. It's very tempting to create the test tenant connected to the production tenant and get lazy about protecting the accounts because it's for testing and likely temporary. Then things get busy, and you forget to disable it. (Or did someone get laid off or leave, and no one else realized it was still connected?)
This is directed at photographers but applies to anyone in any freelance business. - Scams to watch for as a photographer.
If you’re a Google Workspace Admin, the “plus” address in Gmail is a nice feature, but it could also be problematic. - Why is using Google OAuth in work applications unsafe?
Craig Ball wonders if the “Reader’s Digest” version of eDiscovery documents is enough. (And ages all of us who immediately know what that term means!) - Will AI Summarization Disrupt Discovery?
Oh, joy! - Privacy and Data Protection Compliance Will Become More Fragmented in 2024.
That’s all, folks. If you found something interesting in this week’s newsletter, please share it with your friends. It’s the best way to help support the effort I put in each week to share this with you.