Continuations

I let meetings take over my life. For reasons that I might get into some other time I said yes to way too many meetings. My schedule became ever more packed, often running back-to-back for entire days. It became harder and harder to find time to read, think, and write. I also had virtually no time to deal with emergencies when those came up. My attention was no longer mine to direct. It had been hijacked by meetings. Having had a break from meetings on a six week voyage across the Atlantic, I...

Planes fly differently from birds. Cars move differently from horses. And computers think differently from humans. That had always been my assumption but if you needed more proof, Google’s AlphaZero program, which had previously shown novel ways of playing Go, has just learned how to play chess incredibly well. It did so in 24 hours and without studying any prior games. Instead it just played games following the rules of the movement of pieces and learned from that. I encourage everyone to ch...

I have been writing a lot about the impact of technology on the labor market, arguing that we need a Universal Basic Income. My basic premise is that technological progress is making it harder and harder for people to earn enough to cover their basic needs. Across these posts I have encountered a set of objections to the idea that technology can cause under- or even unemployment. While I have addressed these elsewhere in separate posts I thought it would be a good idea to pull them together h...

There was a fun Twitter convo about strong AI between Patrick Collison and Marc Andreessen. I also love speculating about this topic but before I engage in that I want to point out that from an employment perspective this is a red herring. A car is not a horse. And yet cars replaced horses in transportation. A tractor is not a horse. And yet tractors replaced horses in agriculture. A tank is not a horse. And yet tanks replaced horses in war. It is irrelevant from an employment perspective as ...

Last Friday morning I appeared on a panel about the future of work. This is of course a topic I have covered extensively here on Continuations and is a central subject of my draft book World After Capital. One of the key recurring themes that I hear in this context is some version of “We just don’t know what’s going to happen.” This comes up for instance with regard to how quickly some jobs will be automated and where possible new jobs might come from in the future. This strikes me as a huge ...

Too many people seem to be having a moment of Schadenfreude in the wake of the Ashley Madison hack – what were “those” people thinking of having an affair (estimates for the overall percentage of married adults having affairs range from 30-60%) or at least of being so “dumb” as to use a service to arrange their affair. But this is just the latest instance of information being disclosed that people thought would be private. Just shortly before it was disclosed that 4.5 million medical records ...

Yesterday Hilary Clinton mentioned the “gig economy” in a speech. She said Meanwhile, many Americans are making extra money renting out a small room, designing websites, selling products they design themselves at home, or even driving their own car. This on-demand, or so-called gig economy is creating exciting economies and unleashing innovation. But it is also raising hard questions about work-place protections and what a good job will look like in the future.This is of course a topic I have...

In venture capital we come across startups all the time that are building something that has been tried in the past and failed. It would be very easy to dismiss these opportunities based on a naive “pattern matching” approach to investing. Instead at USV we always ask ourselves “what is different now?” to understand whether the lessons from the past do in fact apply or something profound has changed. This is important because things that failed in the past tend to eventually succeed due to ch...

Marc Andreessen recently wrote a post titled “This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs …” – like all of Marc’s posts it is full of good ideas and worth reading. I agree with many of the points including the benefits of technology driven deflation and being long on human creativity to find interesting things for us to do. There is, however, a critical distribution question that Marc mostly avoids but is at the crux of the transition. Marc writes:Ima...

Last week I posted a draft outline for my planned book on “The Coming Information Age” with a proposed chapter on the “Unbundling of the Job.” This is an idea that first occurred to me when I attended a workshop at MIT on Work and Value in the Digital Economy at MIT in late 2012. At the time here is what I wrote:Do people need jobs or can we deliver what jobs provide some other way and in a potentially unbundled fashion? The “jobs of a job” include income, structure, social connections, meani...