by
Tim O'Reilly
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These firms thus use technology to eliminate the jobs of what used to be an enormous hierarchy of managers (or a hierarchy of individual firms acting as suppliers), replacing them with a relatively flat network managed by algorithms, network-based reputation systems, and marketplace dynamics. These firms also rely on their network of customers to police the quality of their service. Lyft even uses its network of top-rated drivers to onboard new drivers, outsourcing what once was a crucial function of management.
outsource to customers AND making them cops in one go. Investing customers with that kind of power which they didn’t ask for and often don’t want: tension, desire to treat other human beings well, vs being honest? Also: jobs are indeed displaced transformed but don’t focus on the jobs, focus on the workers. Who will provide for them? Stat about them employing more drivers: yeah but what else do they do? Can’t survive on just Uber etc. Also look at the bigger picture, more nuanced than Uber is good bad, look at the context and whether Uber is a piece in a larger problem and you have to change that. Like Brexit - unidimensional condensed to scalar when really complex vector
Random thought: he talks about maps a lot. I feel like understanding left critiques of tech really opens up your map. Wish he would see that
Similarly, robots seem to have accelerated Amazon’s human hiring. From 2014 through 2016, the company went from having 1,400 robots in its warehouses to 45,000. During the same time frame, it added nearly 200,000 full-time employees. It added 110,000 employees in 2016 alone, most of them in its highly automated fulfillment centers. I have been told that, including temps and subcontractors, 480,000 people work in Amazon distribution and delivery services, with 250,000 more added at peak holiday times. They can’t hire fast enough. Robots allow Amazon to pack more products into the same warehouse footprint, and make human workers more productive. They aren’t replacing people; they are augmenting them.
make human workers more productive. The ideal is: more neisurely. More skilled jobs. Like sysadmin with a well functioning system. The reality: overwork the shit out of them. Management by stress toyota model
also this really does not age well in light of the recent spate of articles about amazon workers being injured and overworked af
Over time, as networks reach monopoly or near-monopoly status, they must wrestle with the issue of how to create more value than they capture—how much value to take out of the ecosystem, versus how much they must leave for other players in order for the marketplace to continue to thrive.
the very way he frames it makes it so obvious that there's something wrong with this picture. WHY SHOULD THEY HAVE THE POWER TO DECIDE HOW MUCH VALUE TO CAPTURE, vs how much to leave for the "others". fuck that
A traditional organization has high alignment but low autonomy, because managers tell people what to do and how to do it. In the kind of organization parodied by the comic strip Dilbert, neither the manager nor the workers know why they are doing what they are doing. This is a low-alignment/low-autonomy organization. A modern technology engineering organization (or an entire organization like Amazon or Spotify) seeks to have high alignment and high autonomy. Everyone knows what the goal is, but they are empowered to find their own way to do it.
yeah ok but "alignment" still means the goal is handed down from on high
[...] In the SRE approach, by contrast, the humans inside the machine who keep it going augment themselves by constantly teaching the machine how to duplicate what they do, at ever-increasing scale.
agreed with this. sres augment themselves. Good description for high value engineering (not as a moral judgment but in terms of worth to management/produvtion)
Each charges for its services. On a private platform like the App Store, developers have accepted that 30% is the tax they have to pay to Apple for all the services it provides to the economy it supports. People also take for granted that platforms like Uber and Lyft take a cut from their drivers, and Amazon a cut from its resellers. So too, in a democratic society, people tax themselves to pursue common goals, to finance the platform upon which society builds. In a closed society, those in power extract rents from those who use the platform. But one way or another, we must pay. The question is how much, and whether we think what we get for what we pay is worth it.
this guy is an idiot lmao. tax is not about charging for a service, it's about redistribution ya fuckin moron
[...] A number of the startups spun up by Code for America fellows have been acquired; others have received significant venture funding. Remix, the app that was started as a way for citizens to reimagine transit routes in their city, developed into a powerful tool for urban planners and was funded by top VCs who gave it a valuation of $40 million.
christ, the way he says that as if it's a good thing
When Google introduced its pay-per-click ad auction in 2002, what had started out as an idealistic quest for better search results became the basis of a hugely successful business. Fortunately, unlike other advertising business models, which can pit the interests of advertisers against the interests of users, pay-per-click aligns the interests of both.
more like it incentivises clickboat you absolute tool
Perhaps the most important question for machine learning, as for every new technology, though, is which problems we should choose to tackle in the first place. Jeremy Howard went on to cofound Enlitic, a company that is using machine learning to review diagnostic radiology images, as well as scanning many other kinds of clinical data to determine the likelihood and urgency of a problem that should be looked at more closely by a human doctor. Given that more than 300 million radiology images are taken each year in the United States alone, you can guess at the power of machine learning to bring down the cost and improve the quality of healthcare.
how does this dude not realise that healthcare is expensive because it's a for-profit system with thousands of middleman????? jesus
This notion of “the creep factor” should be central to the future of privacy regulation. When companies use our data for our benefit, we know it and we are grateful for it. We happily give up our location data to Google so they can give us directions, or to Yelp or Foursquare so they can help us find the best place to eat nearby. We don’t even mind when they keep that data if it helps them make better recommendations in the future. Sure, Google, I’d love it if you could do a better job predicting how long it will take me to get to work at rush hour. And yes, I don’t mind that you are using my search and browsing habits to give me better search results. In fact, I’d complain if someone took away that data and I suddenly found that my search results weren’t as good as they used to be.
But we also know when companies use our data against us, or sell it on to people who do not have our best interests in mind. [...]
These people are privacy bullies, who take advantage of a power imbalance to peer into details of our private lives that have no bearing on the services from which that data was originally collected. Government regulation of privacy should focus on the privacy bullies, not on the routine possession and use of data to serve customers.
hmmm should think about this more, but this line of reasoning feels very naive. how does this handle power balances that can result from a company having all this data, which may not feel "creepy" to direct customers but could have ripple effects elsewhere? or is he just saying that it should be one tool