Canning Spam: Getting Rid of Robocalls

06/20/19 • 30 min

More than 48 billion robocalls bombard American phones each year, taking the ‘phone’ out of ‘smartphone’ for many consumers. Yet while the problem has drastically worsened over the past several years, there may be hope on the horizon. Private, third party companies are giving consumers ways to divert or even combat robocalls. And the FCC has finally cleared up the regulatory confusion that contributed to phone carrier reluctance to directly address the problem themselves. We can hope that in ten years, the robocall scourge will seem as quaint as worries about spam email do today, despite being just as seemingly intractable an issue in the 1990s.

What is spoofing? What is audio fingerprinting? Why don’t cell phone carriers prevent robocalls? How serious is the problem of spam calls? How has email spam become more manageable? How did email change the world?

The Social Consequences of Multilevel Marketing, written by Pamela J. Hobart

Has Your Phone Hacked Your Brain, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

The Automation Revolution is Upon Us

How will people respond to artificial intelligence taking their jobs? The rise of political radicalism on both Left and Right in the early twenty-first century is in part a reaction to rising income inequality and slower wage growth despite the increasing automation of jobs and gains in productive efficiency. We are in an ‘Engels pause,’ the lag between new technology that benefits whole economies and the moment those gains filter down to the families of displaced workers. Something similar happened during the industrial revolution during the 19th century, the moment that birthed Marxism. Paul interviews economic historian Carl Frey to discuss what we can learn about our present moment of technological innovation and the social reaction to it from the history of industrialization.

What is the technology trap? Why didn’t the industrial revolution happen earlier? Who are the beneficiaries of technological progress? Can algorithms be creative? What is the difference between originality and creativity?