Overheard at Next:Economy conference
I had the great pleasure of attending the O'Reilly Next:Economy conference. Here are some comments and statements I heard during the session, in chronological order, with attribution or not.
« Key evolution: job → work & wage → income. »
« One machine learns and all the other machines can benefit from it. Machine will get smarter because they can learn at scale. Machine can learn faster than we can. »
« People should be able to try a job on whim and see if they like it. »
« The evolution: web → website; mobile → mobile app; post-mobile → personal assistant. »
« Never mistake a clear view for a short distance » — Paul Saffo
What about a robot boss? « We are already being evaluated by machines: they decide if and when we can meet the human in the loop. »
« The bar is low: we anthropomorphize everything. » (20M Chinese people in love with Microsoft bot XiaoIce.)
« Automation is not robot replacing humans. Automation is about replacing tasks, not jobs. »
« An AI system who can explain is partner; an AI system who can’t explain is a bully. », @KJ_Hammond
« People fund ideas on KS because they are cool; they don’t have to be a good investment. », Kickstarter CEO.
« Good information is better than advertising. We are an education company with a gift shop at the end. », AdaFruit CEO.
Our business is « commercially solving the most important problems », GE CEO.
« Hyper-lean scheduling breaks social mobility and destroys the American dream. »
« Big corporations exist because of the cost of all the small transactions between smaller firms. But once the cost of these transactions becomes super low, it is not clear that big firms are better. »
« Silicon Valley is the QA department for the rest of the world », Bloomberg Beta.
Advice from Intuit CEO about how to better serve the market: (1) find biggest unsolved pain & (2) follow an on-demand worker and identify pain points.
« `You can make it work if you want it hard enough` is simply not true. » Anne-Marie Slaughter.
« This is not communism, this is common sense. », Nick Hanauer
« GDP = how much stuff gets moved around. », Nick Hanauer.
« Mass production ≠ production by the masses. », Etsy CEO.
« To be the best, you need the best employees; to get the best employees, you need to be the best employer. », Managed by Q CEO.
« Business is a context for doing interesting things. », attributed to Tim O’Reilly.
Some resources
Here are some resources/books/articles mentioned during the conference.
- Shared Security, Shared Growth, by Nick Hanauer & David Rolf.
- Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle
- Serving Workers in the Gig Economy: Emerging Resources for the On-Demand Workforce, by Nick Grossman [ebook]
- Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family Hardcover — September 29, 2015, by Anne-Marie Slaughter.
- Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, by Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic, 2012.
- Driving in the Networked Age, by Reid Hoffman, July 2015.
- Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E. F. Schumacher
- The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits by Zeynep Ton
