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Once upon a time, the American dream was built on the ideal that hard work leads to success. But today, with the rise of technology, the message has become: work all the time or you will fail, Melinda Gates argued in her first column on LinkedIn. 

This workaholic culture is particularly harmful to women, Gates writes, because women are still being told by society that home care and child care is up to them as well. She explained:

"We’re sending our daughters into a workplace designed for our dads... The American workplace was set up based on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house. Of course, that wasn’t always true back then, and it definitely isn’t today."

In 2013, Volvo announced a potentially revolutionary approach to designing electric vehicles (EVs). It wanted to replace some of the steel body panels in its cars with carbon fiber composite materials that can store power like a battery.

The rechargeable panels would be composed of multiple layers of carbon fiber, which are insulated from each other by fiberglass inserts. The result is a structural component that can be charged like the battery.

Though this new design would reduce weight problems associated with rechargeable car batteries, it was not without its problems. In the event that the car crashes, emergency crews would essentially be trying to fish someone out of a giant damaged battery. The cost of carbon fiber was also quite high. Due to these issues, Volvo decided not to mass produce its new cars.

Major Japanese agricultural machinery makers are developing self-driving tractors. The government plans to support the introduction of these  tractors amid growing hopes that such machines will help farmers cope with labor shortages at a time when many are aging and face difficulties finding successors.

In June 2017, Kubota Corp. started selling the country’s first tractors with autonomous driving functions on a trial basis. Utilizing the Global Positioning System (GPS), the tractors can keep tabs on where they are operating.

As the machines still need to be monitored, Kubota assumes that farmers will operate two tractors at a time, one with a driver and the other unmanned. Having two tractors operate simultaneously in this way on farmland with an area of 3,000-5,000 sq. meters would reduce the work time by around 30 percent, according to Satoshi Iida, a senior managing executive officer of Kubota.

Algorithms can learn to collude. 

Two law professors, Ariel Ezrachi of Oxford and Maurice E. Stucke of the University of Tennessee, have a working paper on how when computers get involved in pricing for goods and services (say, at Amazon or Uber), the potential for collusion is even greater than when humans are making the prices. 

Computers can't have a back-room conversation to fix prices, but they can predict the way that other computers are going to behave. And with that information, they can effectively cooperate with each other in advancing their own profit-maximizing interests.

Sometimes, a computer is just a tool used to help humans collude, which theoretically can be prosecuted. But sometimes, the authors find, the computer learns to collude on its own. Can a machine be prosecuted?