Link and Think (Mar): how to fire people, curb your ego, and compete with AI for a job
Every month we vote and comment on top 5 (well, sometimes 4) links that are worth sharing with the rest of the world. In this digest:
- How to fire people so that they don’t hate you for the rest of your life?
- What happens when corporations become more powerful than nation states?
- How will people earn money when all jobs are taken by AI?
Unintuitive Lessons on Being a Designer
Ji-Hye Park, Design Director at Kwamecorp: “The piece has inspiring and insightful tips, many of which I empathise with from my own reflections.
“Always seek out the most critical person you know in a particular dimension… to get their feedback on your work.”
Julie’s advice is seemingly obvious but we all struggle to ‘walk the walk’. Ultimately, it’s about acknowledging our own egos and tactfully putting them aside. As creatives, everyone has egos, and in fact it is important to have some; above all for one’s self-confidence. That being said, we see all too often how ego gets in the way of just about everything in life. Worst of all, when it gets in the way of our ability to evolve.
Having moved from a ‘pure’ consultancy to a venture building company, Kwamecorp leads clients to build internal startups in parity with our talents. In this journey we have found that the end users, not clients, became the harshest and most direct critics of our design works. Users pass judgement without knowing any of the discussions or endless debates our team went through to pick the path that we thought was the ‘most good/least bad’.
As Julie puts it: “The only thing that matters is whether your design works for them in solving the problem you intended to solve.” It really is quite simple.”
These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries
Mo Raja, Business Developer at Kwamecorp: “Nation states grew out of the ashes left by the cinders of empires. The emergence of nation states led to the promotion of culture, language, currency, borders and trade. Taxes became the bedrock of how nations funded themselves. They became powerful, managing, nurturing and motivating their citizens to serve the national interest. When people paid their taxes, they knew who was in charge and who to hold to account. Over the past century we witnessed the emergence of a new power base: the “corporation” and its growing influence on national governments. In this article Parag Khanna brings us to the present day where corporations’ pride of their national roots is being replaced by a new model of a stateless corporation referred to as “metanational”. Many governments find themselves subservient to these global companies. The wealth, size and reach of metanationals are staggering.
Apple holds cash in reserve that exceeds the GDP of 2/3rds of the world’s countries. Walmart would be the 12th largest economy if it were a nation. These metanationals have used their power to avoid paying local taxes by moving money to low tax or tax-free zones. Nations are powerless to stop revenue once collected in taxes going to shareholders. In this article Parag is trying to show how power is shifting from nations to metanationals, and that this trend will possibly lead to the irrelevance of the state. Those interested in this angle will find several examples that indicate the nation state model may have already failed. Our politicians have long served the interests of the corporation at the expense of citizens. In many countries, those rich on the benefits from metanationals’ dominance now fund political campaigns.
The article in my opinion does not address the biggest challenge that metanationals will pose. People have served empires, nations and now corporations. What happens when an Uber- or Amazon-like company dominates a global sector and then decides to replace humans with autonomous vehicles or some other robotics innovation such as drones? Who picks up the pieces? How do governments fund the nation state when trillions are being held off-shore by stateless corporations? This article provoked many a discussion in my own household, and when you think this through deeply, the future looks challenging for humans as much as it does for the nation state. On the whole a good article, but lacks the analysis on the implications of the struggle for power between the nation state and metanationals.’’
Filipe Gonçalves, Software Developer at Kwamecorp: “Getting fired is hard. Regardless of the reason or the circumstances involved, it is a blow to one’s self esteem. Zach Holman describes his personal experience of being fired from Github, portraying different perspectives of everyone involved and offering advice on how each aspect of firing should be handled. His thoughts are insightful and his tone reasonable, even though he talks of a very emotional experience, which still carries its weight on him one year after what happened. Zach could’ve bitched about his employer, about the Silicon Valley mentality of glorifying success and sweeping unpleasantness under the rug; instead, he tries to create a basis for future discourse, a starting point for discussing the firing process.
In short, he makes us aware that in the land of unicorns and dreams come true some things are still very wrong, and we should fix them.”
Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines
Victoria Ivanova , Marketing and Communications at Kwamecorp: “There is a lot of discussion now about AI “stealing” our jobs. Opinions on this range broadly from pessimistic to optimistic, but no one is arguing anymore about whether it’s going to happen. If humanity doesn’t exterminate itself by then, the AI revolution will happen. The only question is when.
For now manual work has been widely adopted by machines, and everyone seems to agree it’s only for the best. My grandmother worked at a textile factory for 30 years, and all she got afterwards were deafness, lung problems and varicosis. If machines can take away jobs that are making us sit in front of a computer 8 hours a day 11 months a year (gaining obesity, heart problems and poor eyesight), I will be all up for it.
For me it’s not the matter of how humans will get paid when all work will be done by AI (this is covered in the article). More interesting is, will we still be able to produce anything that can be done exclusively by humans and impossible to copy by machines?
The first (and most naive) thought is art. A computer will be able to paint like Van Gogh, or Goya, even better. Much, much better. But when we go to the art gallery to enjoy the paintings of our favorite artist, it’s not so much the techniques or accuracy that we are going for. It’s about why he used that paint, what this half-smile means, what was going through his head as he was painting it. Was he nuts? We are looking for the context and its interpretation by the artist. We don’t need his opinion to be correct, or balanced. We are looking for a personality, however faulty and troubled it is.
Now, will this be something that a machine can mimic? On the other hand, will there be machines at all? What if AI becomes a part of us, and the line between human brain and artificial intelligence will blur, just as the line between Internet and “reality”? The society will transform into something completely unimaginative, and I wish the living generation found a way to live longer so that we could witness this transformation.”
If you like what you’ve just read, you will be no less satisfied after reading “The Anti-Trends for 2016” and “Link and Think (Feb): bad doors, dummy phones, and a secret of happiness”.
