"future of work" entries

Four short links: 8 April 2016

Four short links: 8 April 2016

Data Security, Bezos Letter, Working Remote, and Deep Learning Book

  1. LangSecThe complexity of our computing systems (both software and hardware) have reached such a degree that data must treated as formally as code.
  2. Bezos’s Letter to Shareholders — as eloquent about success in high-risk tech as Warren Buffett is about success in value investing.
  3. Good Bad and Ugly of Working Remote After 5 Years — good advice, and some realities for homeworkers to deal with.
  4. Deep Learning Book — text finished, prepping print production via MIT Press. Why are you using HTML format for the drafts? This format is a sort of weak DRM required by our contract with MIT Press. It’s intended to discourage unauthorized copying/editing of the book.

Leah Busque and Dan Teran on the future of work

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Service networking, employees vs contractors, and turning the world into a luxury hotel.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast to track the technologies and people that will shape our world in the years to come.

350px-Ford_Madox_Brown_-_Work_-_Google_Art_Project

In this week’s Radar Podcast episode, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum delves into the economy with two speakers from our recent Next:Economy conference. First, Slocum talks with Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, about service networking, TaskRabbit’s goals, and issues facing the peer economy. In the second segment, Slocum talks with Dan Teran, co-founder of Managed by Q, about the on-demand economy and the future of work.

Here are a few highlights from Busque:

As a technologist myself, I became really passionate about how we mash up social and location technologies to connect real people, in the real world, to get real things done. I’d say in the last two years, it’s become real time, and that’s really the idea about where service networking was born.

It’s certainly our job to create a platform where demand is generated so that our tasker community, our suppliers, can find work, but I think even more than that, it is about building a platform and tools for our taskers to build out their own businesses.

Read more…

Four short links: 10 August 2015

Unionize BigCos, Design Docos, IoT Protocol, and Hackability

  1. Employees at Google, Yahoo, and Amazon Lose Nothing if They Unionize (Michael O. Church) — When a company’s management plays stack-ranking games against its employees, an adversarial climate between management and labor already exists. This is a deeply interesting article, with every paragraph quotable and relevant to The Next Economy. Read it.
  2. Design Documentaries — a really nice index of design documentaries, many with YouTube links.
  3. MQTT — IoT connectivity protocol designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium.
  4. Camp for Apple II Fanatics“I invested a lot of time and knowledge into the Apple II, to the point where I really understood all of what the system is doing. All 64K of memory and what’s happening in RAM and ROM, the firmware the programs are using when they run on the Apple II,” he said. “With today’s machines, you get farther away from the metal the thing’s running on. Things change so fast, your phone is a million times more powerful than the Apple II was, but you can’t do things on the metal.” The micros were invented by the people who built and ran the minis and mainframes of old, and gave people the same insight. Tablets and mobiles were invented by the people who built and ran micros, and took away that same insight.
Four short links: 14 July 2015

Four short links: 14 July 2015

Future of Work, Metrics and Events, High-functioning Dev, and Concept Calendars

  1. What’s the Future of Work (Tim O’Reilly) — Tim’s been exploring how technology is changing what work is and how we build our society around it. New conference coming!
  2. Monitoring 101: Collecting Data — the world-view behind instrumenting modern software is just as interesting as the tools to make it possible.
  3. Building a High-Performance Team: It’s Not Just About Structure — move beyond copying Spotify’s structure and work on your company’s Habits, Values & Culture, and Leaders & Management.
  4. Google Calendar Concept ArtIn the future … your content will be available directly within your calendar.

The WTF economy is transforming how we do business

Our Next:Economy event aims to inspire industry leaders to rebuild the economy by solving the hard problems.

Make_a_Break_York_Berlin_Flickr

Request an invitation to Next:Economy, our event aiming to shed light on the transformation in the nature of work now being driven by algorithms, big data, robotics, and the on-demand economy.

WTF?! In San Francisco, Uber has 3x the revenue of the entire prior taxi and limousine industry.

WTF?! Without owning a single room, Airbnb has more rooms on offer than some of the largest hotel groups in the world. Airbnb has 800 employees, while Hilton has 152,000.

WTF?! Top Kickstarters raise tens of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of individual backers, amounts of capital that once required top-tier investment firms.

WTF?! What happens to all those Uber drivers when the cars start driving themselves? AIs are flying planes, driving cars, advising doctors on the best treatments, writing sports and financial news, and telling us all, in real time, the fastest way to get to work. They are also telling human workers when to show up and when to go home, based on real-time measurement of demand.The algorithm is the new shift boss.

WTF?! A fabled union organizer gives up on collective bargaining and instead teams up with a successful high tech entrepreneur and investor togo straight to the people with a local $15 minimum wage initiative that is soon copied around the country, outflanking a gridlocked political establishment in Washington.

What do on-demand services, AI, and the $15 minimum wage movement have in common? They are telling us, loud and clear, that we’re in for massive changes in work, business, and the economy.

Read more…

Four short links: 13 July 2015

Four short links: 13 July 2015

Improving Estimates, Robot Bother, Robotics Nations, and Potential Futures of Work

  1. Kalman Filteran algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time, containing statistical noise and other inaccuracies, and produces estimates of unknown variables that tend to be more precise than those based on a single measurement alone.
  2. Interview with Bruce SterlingSingapore is like a science fictional society without the fiction. Dubai is like a science fictional society without the science. […] Robots just don’t want to live. They’re inventions, not creatures; they don’t have any appetites or enthusiasms. I don’t think they’d maintain themselves very long without our relentlessly pushing them uphill against their own lifeless entropy. They’re just not entities in the same sense that we are entities; they don’t have much skin in our game. They don’t care and they can’t be bothered. We don’t yet understand how and why we ourselves care and bother, so we’d be hard put to install that capacity inside our robot vacuum cleaners.
  3. Japan’s Robot RevolutionFugitt said Japan’s weakness was in application and deployment of its advanced technologies. “The Japanese expect other countries and people to appreciate their technology, but they’re inwardly focused. If it doesn’t make sense to them, they typically don’t do it,” he said, citing the example of Japanese advanced wheelchairs having 100 kilogram weight limits. […] South Korea could be a threat [to Japan’s lead in robotics] if the chaebol opened up [and shared technologies], but I don’t see it happening. The U.S. will come in and disrupt things; they’ll cause chaos in a particular market and then run away.
  4. A World Without Work (The Atlantic) — In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “If men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.” […] Technology creates some jobs too, but the creative half of creative destruction is easily overstated. Nine out of 10 workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5% of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from “high tech” sectors like computing, software, and telecommunications.
Four short links: 25 June 2015

Four short links: 25 June 2015

Enchanted Objects, SE Blogs, AI Plays Mario, and Google's Future of Work

  1. 16 Everyday Objects Enchanted by Technology (Business Insider) — I want a Skype cabinet between our offices at work.
  2. Software Engineering Blogs — ALL the blogs!
  3. MarI/O (YouTube) — clear explanation of how an evolutionary algorithm figures out how to play Mario.
  4. Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work (New Yorker) — But it turns out that future-proofed life looks a lot like the vacuum-packed present. […] Inside, it is about turning Google into not only a lifestyle but a fully realized life. The return of the Company Town.
Four short links: 25 May 2015

Four short links: 25 May 2015

8 (Bits) Is Enough, Second Machine Age, LLVM OpenMP, and Javascript Graphs

  1. Why Are Eight Bits Enough for Deep Neural Networks? (Pete Warden) — It turns out that neural networks are different. You can run them with eight-bit parameters and intermediate buffers, and suffer no noticeable loss in the final results. This was astonishing to me, but it’s something that’s been re-discovered over and over again.
  2. The Great Decoupling (HBR) — The Second Machine Age is playing out differently than the First Machine Age, continuing the long-term trend of material abundance but not of ever-greater labor demand.
  3. OpenMP Support in LLVMOpenMP enables Clang users to harness full power of modern multi-core processors with vector units. Pragmas from OpenMP 3.1 provide an industry standard way to employ task parallelism, while ‘#pragma omp simd’ is a simple yet flexible way to enable data parallelism (aka vectorization).
  4. JS Graphs — a visual catalogue (with search) of Javascript graphing libraries.
Four short links: 23 April 2015

Four short links: 23 April 2015

Medical Robots, Code Review, Go Lang, and Ambient Weather

  1. Future of Working: Real World Robotics, Medical & Health Robotics (YouTube) — interesting talk by Kiwi Foo alum, Jonathan Roberts, given to a Future of Working event. New class of tools, where the human uses them but they won’t let the human do the wrong thing. (via RoboHub)
  2. On Code Review (Glen D Sanford) — Pending code reviews represent blocked threads of execution.
  3. Four Days of Go (Evan Miller) — Reading Go’s mailing list and documentation, I get a similar sense of refusal-to-engage — the authors are communicative, to be sure, but in a didactic way. They seem tired of hearing people’s ideas, as if they’ve already thought of everything, and the relative success of Go at Google and elsewhere has only led them to turn the volume knob down. Which is a shame, because they’ll probably miss out on some good ideas (including my highly compelling, backwards-incompatible, double-triple-colon-assignment proposal mentioned above). Under this theory, more of the language choices start to make sense. There is no ternary operator because the language designers were tired of dealing with other people’s use of ternary operators. There is One True Way To Format Code — embodied in gofmt — because the designers were tired of how other people formatted their code. Rather than debate or engage, it was easier to make a new language and shove the new rules onto everyone by coupling it with Very Fast Build Times, a kind of veto-proof Defense Spending Bill in the Congress of computer programming. In this telling, the story of Go is really a tale of revenge, not just against slow builds, but against all kinds of sloppy programming.
  4. TempescopeAmbient weather display for your home. In my home, that’s a window. (via Matt Webb)
Four short links: 19 February 2015

Four short links: 19 February 2015

Magical Interfaces, Automation Tax, Cyber Manhattan Project, and US Chief Data Scientist

  1. MAS S66: Indistinguishable From… Magic as Interface, Technology, and Tradition — MIT course taught by Greg Borenstein and Dan Novy. Further, magic is one of the central metaphors people use to understand the technology we build. From install wizards to voice commands and background daemons, the cultural tropes of magic permeate user interface design. Understanding the traditions and vocabularies behind these tropes can help us produce interfaces that use magic to empower users rather than merely obscuring their function. With a focus on the creation of functional prototypes and practicing real magical crafts, this class combines theatrical illusion, game design, sleight of hand, machine learning, camouflage, and neuroscience to explore how ideas from ancient magic and modern stage illusion can inform cutting edge technology.
  2. Maybe We Need an Automation Tax (RoboHub) — rather than saying “automation is bad,” move on to “how do we help those displaced by automation to retrain?”.
  3. America’s Cyber-Manhattan Project (Wired) — America already has a computer security Manhattan Project. We’ve had it since at least 2001. Like the original, it has been highly classified, spawned huge technological advances in secret, and drawn some of the best minds in the country. We didn’t recognize it before because the project is not aimed at defense, as advocates hoped. Instead, like the original, America’s cyber Manhattan Project is purely offensive. The difference between policemen and soldiers is that one serves justice and the other merely victory.
  4. White House Names DJ Patil First US Chief Data Scientist (Wired) — There is arguably no one better suited to help the country better embrace the relatively new discipline of data science than Patil.