Words from Web Worker

We are in for a great disruption and those most disrupted will be the middle and working classes Jobs have been created — but many, in the service sector, are both insecure or what the academic-activist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” — jobs which give neither pleasure to their holders nor benefit to society. More, the service jobs are often wearying, and don’t provide a decent living — especially for those who live in expensive cities like New York, London or Paris. Gone is the era of the lifetime career, let alone the lifelong job and the economic security that came with it, having been replaced by a new economy intent on recasting full-time employees into contractors, vendors, and temporary workers. Work — making sure it’s there, making it meaningful, giving it the dignity of being part-constructed by the worker — will be the largest domestic issue in our economies. #workautomation #futureofwork #jobs #automation #disruptivetechnology http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/0...

702 occupations would soon be computerized out of existence Advances in data mining, machine vision, artificial intelligence and other technologies could, put 47 percent of American jobs at high risk of being automated in the years ahead. Loan officers, tax preparers, cashiers, locomotive engineers, paralegals, roofers, taxi drivers and even animal breeders are all in danger of going the way of the switchboard operator. Since the end of the Great Recession, job creation has not kept up with population growth. Corporate profits have doubled since 2000, yet median household income dropped from $55,986 to $51,017. Somehow businesses are making more profit with fewer workers. Business researchers at MIT, call this divergence the “great decoupling.” In their view, it is a historic shift. The conventional economic wisdom has long been that as long as productivity is increasing, all is well. Technological innovations foster higher productivity, which leads to higher incomes and greater well-b...

Robots won't just be taking our jobs; they'll be forcing us to confront a major existential dilemma: if we didn't have to work anymore, what would we do? Optimists say that more robots will lead to greater productivity and economic growth, while pessimists complain that huge swaths of the labor force will see their employment options automated out of existence. What if both are right? As robots start doing more and more of the work humans used to do, and doing it so much more efficiently than we ever did, what if the need for jobs disappears altogether? What if the robots end up producing more than enough of everything that everyone needs? A future that looks more like Star Trek than Blade Runner, a lot of people could end up with a lot more time on their hands. The answer is both a quantitative and qualitative exercise in defining what makes human intelligence distinct from the artificial kind, a definition that seems to keep getting narrower. Humans will continue to be us...

It becomes tempting to reserve the best of ourselves for the short-term gains of work and “automate” the long game of life. Would you pay someone in the Philippines to answer your email for you — even your personal messages? Or hire strangers on the internet to plan your spouse’s big birthday party? Or throw meat, vegetables, and butter into a blender and call it dinner? These are just some of the actual “life-automating” techniques of busy entrepreneurs today. Maneesh Sethi, best known as the easily-distracted man who paid a woman to slap him in the face every time he checked Facebook. He spoke at South by Southwest in Texas about how he’s now hired a man in Manila (Caleb) to check his email for him. Caleb, who Sethi found through Staff.com, goes through Sethi’s email — both work and personal — every morning and flags important messages for follow-up, as well as categorizing and drafting responses for the rest. By the time Sethi wakes up, his email has already been sorted; and by the...

An Oxford Study shows that 47% of US jobs are at risk of being displaced by automation and computerization   The study from 2013 examined over 700 occupation types to reveal which may be vulnerable in the coming decades and finds that the precarious jobs are not limited to those based on computation and routine tasks. Google's self-driving car, for example, proves that new technology can perform both routine and non-routine tasks, as well as manual and cognitive work, potentially rendering humans redundant to driving and navigation.   As automation and computerization develop, new technologies will disrupt the lives of many workers. But these developments will also create large surpluses of wealth through gains in efficiency. We can choose where and how that wealth is directed. As jobs are displaced, we can pursue policy platforms that strengthen the social safety net and ensure that workers who have been pushed out of the labor force are able to meet their basic needs. If we want ...

In the new world, Full-Time Employees(FTEs) will become APIs Developers are rapidly finding ways to put future developers out of jobs. Much has been made about how the dropping cost of website infrastructure has spurred a boom in startup formation, with Amazon Web Services held up as the prime example. The capital cost of servers has been eliminated, but even more important is the plummeting human cost. How the startup landscape is changing. The knowledge of the world’s leading experts is available as an API for a fraction of their former salaries. A decade ago, a VP of engineering at a startup might have evaluated the resumes of five solid front-end engineers. Five years ago that VP would have looked at GitHub profiles. Today, they are just as likely to evaluate a front-end framework like Ionic, Meteor or Aurelia and build it themselves. It’s not just front-end options. We’ve seen a massive proliferation in frameworks, libraries and other tools that allow a single talented engineer to...

The new coming wave of automation is blind to the color of your collar Kaplan said that in the next decade or two, driverless cars could put many of the more than three million licensed professional drivers around the country out of work. While automation long ago revolutionized the assembly line, advances in big data computing power could soon downsize the traditional white collar workforce as well. "Even what you think of as advanced professions that require a great deal of specialization and expertise, the vast majority of the work is routine, and it's those routine tasks which can be now taken over by computers, so that what used to take the work of 20 lawyers may be done by five lawyers, or 20 doctors may be done by five doctors," Kaplan said. Maybe even journalists. Now computers are creeping into the reporting field. At The Associated Press, approximately 4,000 corporate earning stories are being written by computers. The AP uses a program called Wordsmith, created...

Our endless inventiveness and bottomless desires means that we never get enough, never get enough. There's always new work to do. If you think about it, many of the great inventions of the last 200 years were designed to replace human labor. Tractors were developed to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil. Assembly lines were engineered to replace inconsistent human handiwork with machine perfection. Computers were programmed to swap out error-prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection. These inventions have worked. We no longer dig ditches by hand, pound tools out of wrought iron or do bookkeeping using actual books. What this means for the future of work and the challenges that automation does and does not pose for our society. Despite a century of creating machines to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years. Why hasn't human labor become redundant and our skills obsolet...

Add new messages in a Slack channel as Asana tasks Add action items to a department or individual’s to-do list straight from Slack. When there’s a task to assign, post the task to the dedicated Slack channel, like #Operations or #Finance. Zapier watches for new messages in a channel and posts them to Asana as assigned tasks. That way, new tasks are in front of the right person to get the job done without them needing to switch between apps. #slack #asana #zapier #workautomation https://zapier.com/zapbook/zaps/14165/add-new-messages-in-a-slack-channel-as-asana-tasks