Original Content
Last week, I was on Al-Jazeera’s The Stream, talking about the oncoming robot apocalypse (joking! kind of), along with Vivek Wadhwa from Stanford, the founder of Automated Insights (aka, the robot journalist platform), and a man who wrote a book comparing humans in the digital age to cockroaches… You know you NEED to watch this.
What’s Going on in the Workforce?
“Change is hard and we shouldn’t be naive about it.” Will software bots result in large scale white collar unemployment?
Last week, Tesla software principal—this week, partner at Union Square Ventures (a VC firm) tells you why this time, technological unemployment is real. Key point: “The question is can you get *paid* for whatever it is that you do.”
“The problem with the techno utopians…is they have no plan for the messy problems between now and Xanadu.”
Do 40% of US workers have contingent jobs? It’s not just the Freelancers’ Union that thinks so. It’s also the US Government.
Reputation, reputation, reputation
“In order not to be tracked, you have to be constantly paying attention to what every page is doing.” The ineffable Quinn Norton, on how every journalist is contributing to surveillance. On you.
I’ve been known to not be the biggest fan of Facebook. So I thought I’d give them credit for doing something good—enabling Open PGP encryption, for user emails.
Organizing Theory
Don’t say the system is broken. The Knight Foundation has a new report, studying why millennials don’t vote in local elections.
Geeking Out
“Any time you put your phone into your pocket, you have a smart jacket…the only problem is they don’t talk to each other.” I dunno, if my phone starts talking to my bra, we’re going to have issues. Google, I’m not in favor of wearables with underwire. Just sayin’.