Notes from Oreilly Next: Economy Conference Day 1

Changes are Coming

Book Recommendation: No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends.

“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” — John C. Maxwell

• We can act and drive the change.
• Historically, jobs have changed, and we have adopted (e.g. in the last 50 years, agriculture has moved from employing 50% the people to 2% and manufacturing has moved from employing 30% ppl to 11% manufacturing).
• However, this time lot of things are changing. It might work out but there might be lot of pain.

James Manyika

• Is capital sitting in financial markets without been used to build things? GE figured that they can make more money by financing the washing machine ( give a loan) than building one!! * example is from a different talk.
• Wage as a percentage of National income ( US) has reduced
• The rate of investment on human capital has reduced
• Economics is about incentives: Economics has focused on decision based on 2–3 variables, but may be more complex 20–50 variable models are needed.
• McKinsey Report: Poorer than their Parents: 20–30% has supplement income, some by choice and some by necessity. Some likes it and some does not.

Jeff Huber

• Startup trying to build a blood test for cancer. ( in cancer stage 1–2 chances are 80–90 while in stage 3–4 changes are low as 8%??)
• Works by sequencing DNA leakage added to blood by cancer. Other biomarkers does not work as well. This method uses a terabytes of data per each case. Goal is to build a routine test people can apply often.

Four goals

1. Yes/ No answer
2. Location of the cancer?
3. How aggressive?
4. Give best path to treatment?

New treatment: immunotherapy ( use virus to kill cancer. You will get a flu which will attack the cancer). Still early, only work on some (<20%).

Keller Rinaudo (using Drone to Deliver blood and medicine)

• Called from Ruwanda. In Rwanda ( land of thousand hills) ,transportation is pretty bad. Need 65K blood units every day and about 80% is urgent. Drones brings down time from 4h->15m. Drones are launched via a catapult
• They ate Planning to do a pilot in US soon
• Use cases: disaster relief, war zones

Ageing with Honour

• The startup matches elderly caregivers with people needed. One founder is a from a “union” background ( Srinath’s Note: which IMO help design the respect part).
• Why workers like it: Get more money for workers, give them flexible working hours and respect. Also training raises the quality.
• Ratings is not just based on customer feedback, but by tracking via a App ( e.g. time went in). They follow up and find details (e.g. someone rated the worker less because she did not let him drink).
• Match based on the skill, and remove the bias as possible ( e.g. photo affects the selection)
• Partnership with Walmart for training on elderly care

US Secretary of Commerce (bjaycooper)

Government role: data collection, cleanup, connect data, expose

She argued for TPP strongly

• trade is fundamentally good, need to handle the affected ( minimum wage, tax and redistribute)
• TPP is done to compete with China for the Asia pacific market ( 500m middle class growing to 3.2B). China has a competing treaty.
• Let US shape the trade in Asia pacific
• TPP helps in national security

US has a skill gap. Make jobs accessible, retrain people, teach and direct towards new jobs.

Our world in data

see — https://ourworldindata.org. In Overall, things has gotten better in last few years.

Universal Basic income

• People needs money for the system to work. Worth a serious look
• Trying a 5 year 1000 people study (in Finland). Pretty hard to give away money legally.
• Some work has done before by negative income tax studies with mix results
• Questions: how to fund? what will people do with basic income? will they continue to work

Uber

• An Average driver drives < 10h/ week and 1/3 has other jobs
• gives flexibility
• idle time for taxi has reduced from 35%-20% after uber. End of the day, drivers makes more money.
• Background check ( tricky)
• Tim talked about giving some part of ownership to drivers based on amount they have driven. Otherwise ppl in gig economy are just cogs.

Jack Conte (CEO Patreon)

• Problems: not all work of arts pay well.
• Most work of art are done through patronage ( rich guy funding the artist)
• idea is to outsource the patronage ( pledge few $ per month for your favourite artist)
• Have few artists who make 25k/month, blog “wait but why” makes about 10K/month.

James Nord (Founder, Fohr Card )

• discussed different way to monitize the influence ( some get paid 30K per histogram post)
• Key is how many people/ minds you can change

“Does (only) growth based markets work?” — douglas rushkoff.

• Very passionate talk
• Stock market only value growth ( e.g. twitter is stuck about 2B revenue and might die or brought off)
• Startups over commit ( taking too much capital). e.g. if a company has taken a 10m in investment, to provide 10X returns it needs to need to sell at 400m.
• Investors rather let the company die rather than slow growth
• You are managed by your debt structure
• Hence, good useful companies die
• Profit has gone down overall and we have a economy that overall burn cash.
• Local economics vs Extractive economics
• Circulating money is also good: e.g. steel workers decided to invest in construction companies to make opportunities to them

Book: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Shinola

• The company has build a brand only working from US ( builds high end watches (500$), leather stuff e.g. bag 1000$, bike etc)
• built from the ground up, some time can give cheaper version than the outsourced version (e.g. journals)
• Srinath’s note: not sure it can work for not high end stuff
• Obama brought 300 watches and gave to international delegates to raise awareness

PokemonGo

• Inspiration — Books: Snow Crash and Mirror worlds
• Several parks are upset about PokemonGo
• It was built to get his kids to go outside and play
• Ingress is the early version
• Idea is to connect data with real world and let people see and interact.
• Helps understand the history

Airbnb

• Funny to come to a hotel to talk about abnb
• The idea is to use data about people to connect them

Local is coming: big organisations will be replaced with local. People like to buy things locally, eat at local place, human connection. It will undo Walmart effect

• Understand before regulating and be very clear on what is the problem you are solving with regulation
• Regulations are best built in to platform itself
• Disaster response with abnb

Deepmind (250 phd and postdocs, open publications)

• How AI is different this time? good datasets, computers, new algorithms
• General AI is the goal ( no use case specific assumptions, remove the need to feature engineer).
• Do not see human been replaced. Idea is to assist and empower humans
• Use the game as a way to learn how to do general AI as game provide simple problems to get started with
• Got about 40% reduction in google data centre electricity use

Having a discussion with Million People ( Colin Megill, pol.is)

• Idea is to use AI to understand and regulate
• AI can talk with million people
• Build opinion maps, ask questions, analyse, and visualise
• Case study: vTaiwan, http://civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/

Additional Reading Recommendation: The Human Company Design Manifesto by Sara Holoubek

Argues companies should make value by investing on ppl…