The scourge of robocalls flooding our phones has gotten scarier with the advent of voice spoofing and other tactics that can make it harder to tell if you’re getting scammed in real time. But some technologists say AI can be used to defeat the very campaigns it’s spawning.

It’s all a matter of learning to “think like a bad guy,” Alex Quilici, CEO of spam-blocking service YouMail, told Tech Brew in an interview.

Driving the conversation around the intersection of robocalls and artificial intelligence is a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) inquiry, opened Nov. 15, that seeks to understand how AI can aid (or frustrate) efforts to crack down on “illegal and unwanted robocalls and robotexts.”

The FCC’s move is preliminary, Quilici said, but he noted that the telecom industry is already employing AI in some sophisticated ways, like pattern recognition, to help discern and break spam cycles—or “understand when numbers are misbehaving,” he said.

Carriers and platforms commonly feed algorithms information about calls that their customers receive to determine an individual call’s “risk factor,” he said. YouMail uses AI in another way, to flag voice messages that could be linked to known scams.

YouMail’s program “classifies a new message to find the closest message that’s out there and says, ‘Oh, OK, this is the health insurance scam,’” Quilici said. “All the calls from numbers doing this can be blocked.”

Keep reading here.—KG

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The FCC is making a list and checking it twice—at least when it comes to internet availability.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel recently announced that the third iteration of the agency’s national broadband map is now live, offering more detailed insights into where high-speed web service is and isn’t available.

The improved data has both a consumer angle—which ISPs service your house?—and a policy angle. Eventually, the maps will be used to direct federal broadband subsidies to the least connected areas.

The latest version “continues to build on our efforts to add new information, refine data, and incorporate lessons learned, all of which helps to improve the map’s accuracy,” Rosenworcel wrote.

The data, reflecting coverage data through June 30, indicates that the number of locations that lack access to high-speed internet service decreased by 1.1 million since the last update in May, according to the blog post.

Steady improvements: Mike Conlow, director of network strategy at Cloudflare, observed that fresh government funding for broadband projects and improved carrier record-keeping likely contributed to the narrowing gap. He wrote in a blog post that several states notched significant gains in their documented connectivity.

Keep reading here.—KG

The latest wave of AI may not be coming for your job, but it might ultimately hit you in the paycheck.

That is the conclusion reached in a new paper this week from the European Central Bank, which sought to take stock of the evidence for and against AI’s potential as a job killer thus far. The title of the study gives a pretty good indication of where the authors came down on that question: “Reports of AI ending human labor may be greatly exaggerated.”

The economists did find, however, that AI-related automation might slightly hurt wages, though they noted that the data isn’t quite clear yet.

The paper comes as companies have been scrambling to put new large language model AI to the test on everything from coding to customer service, leading to a fresh round of hand-wringing over a potential AI job apocalypse. So far, that outcome hasn’t come to pass. In fact, labor markets in Europe and the United States remain tight even in spite of recessions in some European countries this year.

The authors found that, in Europe, rather than subtracting jobs, AI-enabled automation was more likely to create more high-skill roles and lead to more employment for younger workers. Those findings stand in contrast to previous technology waves, which have tended to reduce medium-skill jobs, the paper notes.

That echoes some previous findings on the subject of generative AI and jobs, which have suggested that generative AI could create new roles at a rate that might outnumber those displaced.

What all this means for wages is less clear, however.

Keep reading here.—PK