Tag: business

Job Automation

By 2030, what kinds of capabilities will computers have; how well will those capabilities prepare them to do jobs currently done by humans; and what proportion of the workforce might be displaced or rendered unemployable? The results are rather scary. After looking at trends in machine vision, speech, reasoning, and movement, and estimating how important these are for doing various kinds of work, the author estimates that displacement rates could be over 80% in some fields– sales, administrative support, food preparation, and personal care. These are also the sectors that employ the largest number of people. The safest fields for humans? Law (6%), medicine (10%), science (10%), and engineering (11%)– fields which currently employ the smallest number of people.

ha! the sectors of the economy that are just adding transaction cost but not creating anything will be replaced by computers by > 80%. invest in warm bodies at your own peril.

I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!

I remember a time, it must have been the early 1980s, when it was common to ban phones with direct dial facilities. Why? Because people might talk to their friends and family during work time. It took a while for firms to figure out that this was a stupid thing to do, but most carried on with a limited ban, usually on international direct dialling. That lasted a little longer. Then, by the early 1990s, when internet e-mail emerged, it too was banned. In fact there are stories about the banning of corporate e-mail as well, continuing into this century. Soon it was the turn of Instant Messaging to bear the wrath of Corporate Policy. Then came blogs and wikis and social software in general. Now it’s about social networking.

only companies with already low productivity would think about banning social networks. how about working on the real problem: people running around looking busy and doing nothing?

Collaborative Mapping business models

Let’s start by fast forwarding to a future where we have economically successful collaborative maps. Then from there we can look back and see how we might get there, what tipping points would be involved. it is possible to decouple the function of ‘ownership’ of a set of geospatial data from the functions that are needed for its upkeep. Indeed such a decoupling could easily lead to a more efficient market around the upkeep of the data. One thing we neglected to mention as well is that a collaborative map opens up the potential for non ‘expert’ contributors to do valuable work, as long as the structure is set up to minimize vandalism and the like.