THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT

TOP OF THE NEWS:

- A warning from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking (Medium) "In 2013, policy makers largely ignored two Oxford economists who suggested that 45% of all U.S. jobs could be automated away within the next 20 years. But today that sounds all but inevitable. Transportation and warehousing employ 5 million Americans. If a one-time $30,000 truck retrofit can replace a $40,000 per year human trucker, there will soon be a million truckers out of work. 8 million Americans work as retail salespeople and cashiers. Amazon is testing a type of store with virtually no employees. Automation is accelerating. The software powering these robots becomes more powerful every day. We can’t stop it. But we can adapt to it. Bill Gates recommends we tax robotic workers... Elon Musk recommends we adopt universal basic income..."

- How workforces can prepare for software stealing our jobs (TechCrunch) "We can take advantage of the same technologies that are displacing our workers and point them more aggressively towards education that specifically helps retrain our workforce."

- The Future of Not Working (NYT) "It happened during the summer, when field officers from an American nonprofit called GiveDirectly paid a visit, making an unbelievable promise: They wanted to give everyone money, no strings attached. 'Every registered person will receive 2,280 shillings' — about $22 — 'each and every month. This money, you will get for the next 12 years.' With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income. Silicon Valley has recently become obsessed with basic income for reasons simultaneously generous and self-interested, as a palliative for the societal turbulence its inventions might unleash. Many technologists believe we are living at the precipice of an artificial-intelligence revolution that could vault humanity into a postwork future. In the past few years, artificially intelligent systems have become proficient at a startling number of tasks... Any job that can be broken down into discrete, repeatable tasks...could be automated out of existence. But what does this all have to do with a small village in Kenya? A universal basic income has thus far lacked what tech folks might call a proof of concept. There have been a handful of experiments... But no experiment has been truly complete..."

- Divisions of Labor (NYT) "Why did the working class align itself against its own interests? No wonder that when blue-collar workers were given the choice between job retraining, as proffered by Clinton, and somehow, miraculously, bringing their old jobs back, as proposed by Trump, they went for the latter. The old jobs aren’t coming back, but there is another way to address the crisis brought about by deindustrialization: Pay all workers better. The big labor innovation of the 21st century has been campaigns seeking to raise local or state minimum wages. Activists have succeeded in passing living-wage laws in more than a hundred counties and municipalities since 1994 by appealing to a simple sense of justice: Why should someone work full time, year-round, and not make enough to pay for rent and other basics?"

CLIMATE CHANGE:

- Everything You Know About Carbon Emissions Might Be Wrong (Ozy) "Shifting your diet from meat to plants or buying more secondhand products can make a big difference, says Ivanova, who has taken both measures herself since starting the research."

HEALTH:

- We’re consuming too much media. It’s time to detox our brains (Re/code) "As a result, we find ourselves looking for patterns, trying to simplify issues and giving precedence to opinions that reinforce what we already believe to be true. Psychological research suggests that the brain is also predisposed to attend to negative information. So how can we, as individuals, satisfy our need to know what is going on in the world without being swamped by the ceaseless chatter or distracted by extraneous input?"

- Who Has All the Content? A Taxonomy of Services (Scholarly Kitchen) "In conducting their research, scholars and students find that the voyage from discovery to access can frequently be tortuous. The need to use multiple content platforms adds to their cognitive burden."

News:

- Kansas is imploding. That's bad news for Donald Trump (Mother Jones) "But instead of the miracle growth that Brownback promised, the tax cuts have left a widening crater in the state budget. State economic growth has lagged behind the national pace, and job growth has stagnated. Lawmakers have been left scrambling each year to pass unpleasant spending cuts when tax revenue comes in below expected levels, leading to contentious fights in the legislature and state courts over reduced public school funding. When the state legislature convened last month, it faced a $320 million budget shortfall that needed to be closed before the end of the current fiscal year in June—and a projected additional $500 million shortfall for the next fiscal year."

- The audacious honesty of John Boehner (WaPo) "Boehner has nothing left to lose. And so he is free to speak his mind and speak honestly about the massive policy and political lift that Republicans face when it comes to their promise to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something better."

POTUS CHIEF STRATEGIST:

- What Does Steve Bannon Want? (NYT) "But Mr. Bannon, unlike Mr. Trump, has a detailed idea, an explanation, of how American sovereignty was lost, and of what to do about it. It is the same idea that Tea Party activists have: A class of regulators in the government has robbed Americans of their democratic prerogatives. That class now constitutes an 'administrative state' that operates to empower itself and enrich its crony-capitalist allies. It is through Mr. Bannon that Trumpism can be converted from a set of nostalgic laments and complaints into a program for overhauling the government."

- Steve Bannon has a grand vision for remaking America "But his time as a conservative filmmaker and head of Breitbart News reveals a grand theory of what America should be. Bannon’s political philosophy boils down to three things that a Western country, and America in particular, needs to be successful: Capitalism, nationalism, and 'Judeo-Christian values.' These are all deeply related, and essential. In short, in Bannonism, the crisis of capitalism has led to socialism and the suffering of the middle class. And it has made it impossible for the current generation to bequeath a better future to its successors, to fulfill its Burkean duty."

- Where did Steve Bannon get his worldview? From my book (WaPo) "Beyond ideology, I think there’s another reason for the rising interest in our book. We reject the deep premise of modern Western historians that social time is either linear (continuous progress or decline) or chaotic (too complex to reveal any direction). Instead we adopt the insight of nearly all traditional societies: that social time is a recurring cycle in which events become meaningful only to the extent that they are what philosopher Mircea Eliade calls 'reenactments.' In cyclical space, once you strip away the extraneous accidents and technology, you are left with only a limited number of social moods, which tend to recur in a fixed order. The cycle begins with the First Turning, a 'High' which comes after a crisis era. The Second Turning is an 'Awakening,' when institutions are attacked in the name of higher principles and deeper values. The Third Turning is an 'Unraveling,' in many ways the opposite of the High."

Read This:

- The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World (Brad Stone)

TECHNOLOGY:

- Why Amazon Is The World's Most Innovative Company Of 2017 (Fast Company) "Bezos...emphasizes platforms that each serves its own customers in the best and fastest possible way."

BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:

- A 17-year-old Nokia phone is all anyone’s talking about at Mobile World Congress (Vice) "But this story is more about the stagnating smartphone industry than the rising nostalgia for a simpler time."

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