Words from Web Worker

By 2065, the productivity growth that automation could add to the largest economies in the world is the equivalent of an additional 1.1 billion to 2.2 billion full-time workers Today, about half the activities that people are paid to do in the global economy have the potential to be automated by adapting demonstrated technology. All economies, from Brazil and Germany to India and Saudi Arabia, stand to gain from the hefty productivity boosts that robotics and artificial intelligence will bring. The productivity growth enabled by automation can ensure continued prosperity in aging nations and could provide an additional boost to fast-growing ones. #workautomation #futureofwork #robotics #artificialintelligence #automation #productivity #bots #jobs #disruptivetechnology https://hbr.org/2017/04/the-countries-most-and-least-likely-to-be-affected-by-automation

We'll experience a new age of productivity about a decade from now, and it will come from all of today’s advances: AI, robotics, large amounts of data that allow us to better understand our world and our humanity, creating a positive future. Long-promised, long-awaited, and still missing, corporate productivity gains driven by all our technology will be in 2028. Weldon set a target date for achieving the long-promised, long-awaited, and still missing, corporate productivity gains driven by all our technology. 2028. “We’ve quantified when a Digital Age leap in productivity will occur that will resemble the leaps from the previous eras. “The good news is that we will experience a new age of productivity about a decade from now, and it will come from all of today’s advances: AI, robotics, large amounts of data that allow us to better understand our world and our humanity, creating a positive future. “The lack of significant improvement in economic productivity over past 30 years despi...

Artificial intelligence will have a major impact on employment. “Strong AI,” which has as its goal automating all the tasks, cognitive as well as physical, that humans can perform. Strong AI differs from “Weak AI,” which has as its goal simply providing help to humans. Opinions about the societal impact of this rapidly accelerating technological revolution span the spectrum from anticipated utopias to the fear of existential threats to humanity. Indeed AI and automation are already having profound effects on employment, as former assembly line workers, postal employees, and bank tellers will confirm. Also, soon to be affected are even some mid-level professionals such as attorneys, radiologists, stockbrokers, and newspaper writers. I think that the result of all of this automation will be continuing structural unemployment, especially among unskilled and not-sufficiently educated people. The question is, how will all these abundant goods and services be distributed? Just to those few w...

Robots may take our jobs, but they bring us freedom as well The robots and software applications we are building to take away jobs are simply not something we can or should attempt to compete against. We won't win. However, as human beings, we can evolve and be happier and more fulfilled than we've ever been before. The key is a shift in our thinking—and in the value we place in the kind of work we want to do and how we enjoy free time. In the future—with less work and responsibility due to robots taking our jobs and leaving us only to collect our UBI—we might find there is a lot more to life than buying the latest trinkets from Walmart, or zoning out late at night in front of a television, or worrying about how poorly our bosses treat us at work. Let the robots come. They bring us freedom. With that freedom, we can become the best human beings we are capable of—a people full of passion, education, and a newly discovered drive of what it means to be alive. #workautomation #futu...

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...

What makes people more productive and happier at work? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it isn't just money. But it's not exactly joy either. It seems that most of us thrive by making constant progress and feeling a sense of purpose. Behavioral economist +Dan Ariely  presents two eye-opening experiments that reveal our unexpected and nuanced attitudes toward meaning in our work. We are driven by meaningful work, by others acknowledgement and by the amount of effort we’ve put in: the harder the task is, the prouder we are. When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it: meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc. Seeing the fruits of our labor may make us more productive. The less appreciated we feel our work is, the more money we want to do it. The harder a project is, the prouder we feel of it. Knowing that our work helps o...

When we struggle to express ourselves, we use lists. Lists help us to make sense of the world around us. We create lists of the sights we see on vacation, the places we want to visit, the food we need to buy at the grocery store, and the tasks we need to get done. It's a simple habit of increasing our day to day productivity. We pack all the madness and ambiguity of life into a structured form of writing. In short making lists is a great way to increase our overall happiness and feel less overwhelmed. These days, we use lists for productivity as much as anything else: shopping lists, reminders, planning for events, and the to-do list are all variations on a productivity-based list that we use to help us get past procrastinating. The to-do list in particular is one that we spend a lot of time and energy on perfecting. But getting the tasks on our to-do list done is a whole other ball game. 4 Tips for a To-Do List That Will Actually Help You Get Things Done Here are some insig...

In Michael Dearing's The Five Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done presentation , the five distortions are: Personal exceptionalism Dichotomous thinking Correct overgeneralization Blank canvas thinking Schumpeterianism last one sounds difficult to understand, so he outlines Schumpeterianism like this: Definition: sees creative destruction as natural, necessary, and as their vocation Benefits: fearlessness, tolerance for destruction and pain Schumpeterianism means the ability to let go of old ways and embrace teardowns and criticism as a way to improve the way you do things. The processes that lead to change and innovation can never happen without at times criticizing and tearing down the old standard ways of work. On a personal level, this means that learning to embrace criticism well, even if it means an utter teardown of your work and a new approach. Ideally, that new approach will inevitably lead you to better things. If you can embrace that ki...

Way back in March, Google  revealed  plans to shut down eight of its services as part of what it calls an ongoing spring cleaning effort. I was pretty  bummed  to see that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1. Yes, Google Reader my most used app on web is history now. This is one web app(in simple terms it could get a list of all the recent "new stuff" that a site or a user or a channel has published, so you don't have to go anywhere, every new thing came inside Reader), that will be remembered by me forever, it made me the regular reader that I've become by using it almost everyday since last 7-8 yrs. My first reaction was: How am I going to work now? I use Google Reader every day to aggregate and filter news, analysis and research. I cannot  begin  to tell you how big a difference Reader made to  my work flow  by saving so much time and effort. Almost every blog, technology website has a RSS(Real Simple Syn...

Like so many heroes of the startup world, I started early after college. Now, with years of experience in Technology behind me, it has become a lot easier to polish my workflow and get lots of stuff done. Let's talk about my workspace setup, go-to apps, best life hacks, favorite gadgets and tunes. In my free time, I work on a few side projects, including Blogging and managing several  communities  over Google+ . Since launching in Dec 2012, +Project Glass  community has become one of the fastest growing community. With  more than 2500(and counting) users and a thriving community of Glass fans, needless to say, the past few months have been crazy for me.  Last time I went through this , it was 2008. I was using different apps, but did have sort of productivity system that  really  helped me get things done. In last few years, I've picked up a few tips and tricks along the way and I've been making som...

I’m a pretty productive guy(at least I believe so) and I’m often asked from my friends what do I do to get things done. Keeping it simple is kind of key to my whole philosophy. To be productive, you must be able to focus all of your energies on the tasks you have. In my opinion, one of the biggest deterrents to getting things done is having a system that has to be managed. If you’re spending more time looking for new ways to help you get things done you’re missing the point. Remember KISS(Keep it simple stupid) I’ve got a few “rules” and methods that I stick to pretty religiously that make up about 90% of what keeps me productive and here they are: Capture everything important. The first rule: capture everything important. I hardly ever “try” to remember anything. I simply record anything I need or want to remember or I know is important for me to recall or refer. I do this in several ways. I’ve habit of taking notes on my Cell phone, when I am away from my computer for brainstorming...

Most of us are already hip-deep in online efficiency tools like shared calendars , code libraries, and rss feeds; here are 30 simple ways that you can make your life (the real one) easier: At Home Synchronize recurring events. This can be done annually, monthly, or even weekly. As an example, there are many household tasks that really only need to be done annually. Make it easy to remember when they need to be done by doing them all on the same day. The switch to daylight savings time is a good time to check batteries in smoke detectors , clean screens and windows, change air filters , clean fireplaces, etc. You can do the same with your car, by checking your tires , wiper fluid, battery, etc., every time you get an oil change . Sacrificing one day a month to do household chores like laundry, cleaning, and gardening can relieve the burden of having those things hang over your head and follow you around during the rest of the month. Scatter lots of cheap pens and pencils . Distribu...