Automation And Innovation Quotes

One of the biggest mistakes we made was trying to automate things that are super easy for a person to do, but super hard for a robot to do.

The logic of the meritocracy is leading us to ruin, because we are collectively primed to ignore the voices of the millions getting pushed into economic distress by the grinding wheels of automation and innovation. We figure they’re complaining or suffering because they’re losers.

Automation won’t take your job, but the self-inflicted imprisonment of industrial isolation will.

Whereas automation is the use of technology to support this traditional model, innovation enables ways of making practical expertise available that simply were not possible (or even imaginable) without the systems in question.

Sending e-mails and texts is an automated version of writing letters, whereas social networking is an innovative technology, by which we mean, in this context, that it gives rise to ways of communicating that were not possible in the past.

Specialists will continue to lose not because of automation, but because of the imprisonment of industrial isolation. Leaders and innovators who stay relevant see the interconnectedness of a broad use of skillsets that specialists can’t see and use creativity to solve problems in times of complexity.

Kensi Gounden, Highly innovative new technologies can be both disruptive and transformative, but technology adoption can also be incremental, such as simply automating a manual process. So introducing business technology innovations, either incremental or step-change, may embrace increasing online connectivity across the business, strategic technology acquisition and use or using time-saving technologies to improve internal communication.

America's poor and working-class people have long been subject to invasive surveillance, midnight raids, and punitive public policy that increase the stigma and hardship of poverty. During the nineteenth century, they were quarantined in county poorhouses. During the twentieth century, they were investigated by caseworkers, treated like criminals on trial. Today, we have forged what I call a digital poorhouse from databases, algorithms, and risk models. It promises to eclipse the reach and repercussions of everything that came before. Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hid poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. The digital poorhouse is part of a long American tradition. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.

We have such high levels of automation and we still wonder why we are suffering. We walk around in our robotic states and we don't understand why we don't feel the passion, gratitude and bliss we have always desired.   Your brain is the most powerful piece of machinery here on earth. It can be your greatest helper or your greatest enemy. Whether it is the first or the latter depends on the meanings you have created and are creating at any given point in time.   Most people are running completely outdated and negative beliefs on a machine that was built to innovate, create and explore.

An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her again patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress’s map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps… Whether the subject was a community librarian or a prophet, almost every librarian obituary contained some version of this sentence: “Under [their] watch, the library changed from a collection of books into an automated research center.” I began to get the idea that libraries were where it was happening - wide open territory for innovators, activists, and pioneers.

Have Enjoyable Swimming with the Indoor Pool by Patio Enclosures Whatsoever be the climate outside the craving for swimming always puts you jump into the swimming pool. And if you have an Indoor Pool then the enthusiasm gets doubled. For this you can make your pool inside the area of home. Or if you are already having an open pool then too there is nothing more to worry. These days the technology has made such advancements that can modify your home constructions without even doing any damage to it. This is well illustrated with the pool enclosures available in the market. You can get them to make your pool come into enclosed area to enjoy the enthusiasm fully. It is a well-known fact that weather has three natures but the most furious is the winter when the chillness is almost killing to roam outside. In that case you forget to swim or can say that miss swimming. There the pool enclosures come to be a supporting property that makes your outer pool to be an indoor swimming pool. With this convenience the Patio Enclosures are helpful in making you home look more extravagant with wonderful finishing touch. It is also known as an inexpensive way to decorate your home. There are various materials that can be made use of making these enclosures. The materials that are used in making enclosures most commonly are fiber, glass, timber, plastic, etc. These days many companies are keen in doing fabrication and installation of variety of enclosure present in their stock. So you need not worry for having construction or reconstruction of pools. They supply with most proficient workers expert in their performance. In the time of technology when every small thing you can get as automated then why not these. You can have the eccentric innovation of automatic pool covers present in the market provided by many companies. With the expected feature of covering and uncovering the swimming pool automatically this type of enclosures are in demand mostly. Through this feature you can have swimming in enclosed area in winters along with enjoying the open pool in summers too as required. You can even make the maintenance costs low by covering the pool not to come in contact with dust or dirt. Indoor pools are fabulous but if you have open pools then make them covered with the patio enclosures. This makes you enjoy swimming throughout the year and also makes the maintenance costs for swimming pools lower.

For example, there’s an uncharacteristic explosion of creativity among accountants. Yes, accountants: Groups like the Thriveal C.P.A. Network and the VeraSage Institute are leading that profession from its roots in near-total risk aversion to something approaching the opposite. Computing may have commoditized much of the industry’s everyday work, but some enterprising accountants are learning how to use some of their biggest assets — the trust of their clients and access to financial data — to provide deep insights into a company’s business. They’re identifying which activities are most profitable, which ones are wasteful and when the former become the latter. Accounting once was entirely backward-looking and, because no one would pay for an audit for fun, dependent on government regulation. It was a cost. Now real-time networked software can make it forward-looking and a source of profit. It’s worth remembering, though, that this process never ends: As soon as accountants discover a new sort of service to provide their customers, some software innovator will be seeking ways to automate it, which means those accountants will work to constantly come up with even newer ideas. The failure loop will

Agile and DevOps are for harnessing integration, interaction, and innovation.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a systemic approach for capturing, designing, executing, documenting, measuring, monitoring, and controlling both automated and non-automated processes to meet the objectives and business strategies of a company. BPM embraces the conscious, comprehensive, and increasingly technology-enabled definition, improvement, innovation, and maintenance of end-to-end processes. Through this systemic and conscious management of processes, companies achieve better results faster and more flexibly.

In some circumstances manual testing becomes more efficient than automated testing; it takes much more time to generate automated test scripts compared to running test cases manually. Especially in time-sensitive, fast-track projects, this results in a weird situation of coding around bugs instead of finding and fixing them. Project managers and QA managers should consider this issue as a project risk. They should mitigate this risk by determining the right level of test automation. Shelfware

The world in which I grew up, the old industrial economy, was radically transformed by the last wave of innovation. The story is by now well worn: technology, automation, globalization.

3. What do employees expect as an experience? 69% of employees expect that automation will give them more time to do their primary job duties, and 86% of employees think the use of automation in the workplace will let them think of work in new and innovative ways.55 The question is then, besides removing tedious tasks, what would make people happier and more engaged at work? Studies have found that people like to have opportunities to solve problems in their work. Also, variety among tasks at work leads to increased happiness and higher productivity.56 Based on these findings, the promise of IA to change how people work seems a welcome development. Based on our research, the employee experience would be improved by switching to the “ideal” daily division of activities,

The future of the labor market as we know it is contingent on many different things. It is by and large an iterative process in which we may only know the true outcome by repeated evaluations and followups of each implemented change and/or innovation. Therefore, securing a system of necessary checks-and-balances will be of paramount importance to ensure a successful digital transformation.

The declining rate of profit To shore up our understanding of the declining rate of profit it is helpful to represent capital production with the formula c + v + s. The value of c is not increased in production but merely preserved by it, whereas v is the only part of capital that enables the capitalist to increase the value of their capital. s is the portion of the newly created value appropriated by the capitalist. The rate of surplus value is therefore s / v and the rate of profit is the ratio between surplus value and total capital, that is s / (c + v). The organic composition of capital, c / v, measures the difference between the rate of surplus value, s / v, and the rate of profit – ie, in general, the higher the organic composition of capital, the more capital-intensive the industry, and the lower the rate of profit; the more labour-intensive, the higher the rate of profit. Because the demands of capital accumulation, as well as the need to stay ahead of or keep up with competitors, compels capitalists to innovate in order to raise productivity, the fundamental tendency of the capitalist system is to increase the ratio of constant capital to variable capital. But when the organic composition of capital, c / v, increases, other things being equal, the profit rate, s / (c + v), declines.

But the contradiction remains and the cycle repeats itself: the capital investment needed to raise productivity through innovation means constant capital grows relative to variable capital and also, therefore, the surplus value produced by variable capital. Surplus value is converted into capital faster than it is produced and so capital once again over-accumulates. And because the overall mass of capital is now even greater than before, an even greater magnitude of surplus value is required alongside an even greater devaluation of capital in order to reproduce and expand it yet further. Crisis is therefore inherent to the system, as increasing magnitudes of capital become dormant while waiting for profitable conditions to return, and cannot be put down merely to ‘greed’, hoarding or the ‘bad’ or ‘erroneous choices’ of capitalists, politicians, economists and civil servants. Private and public debt rises not because of arbitrary overspending but in order to make up for the insufficient production of surplus value.

Today’s innovations are only enough to make a dying economy a bit more efficient. . . . They don’t create a new economy that launches into a new era, as did the mushrooming of steamships, railroads, autos, and the Internet—all 45 years apart. That said, artificial intelligence is on the road to becoming a disruptor. It’s still too early to change the game altogether, but it will increasingly automate almost all left-brain, white-collar work and free up more people to do creative things, like entrepreneurial creation of new and better products and more customized service for customers. That is the modern-day equivalent of the assembly line.

Subsidy dependency has been coupled with the huge upturn in the so-called ‘financialisation’ of industry, whereby a company’s funds are increasingly dedicated to repurchasing their own shares in order to boost their stock price. In 2010, for example, the US American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) asked the US government to triple state spending on clean energy to $16bn a year, at the end of a decade in which the companies comprising the council had spent $237bn on stock repurchases.477 From 2008 to 2017, 466 S&P 500 companies distributed $4 trillion to shareholders as buybacks, equal to 53% of profits, along with $3.1 trillion as dividends.This is explained away on the social democratic left as shareholder greed. But it is driven by the need to valorise capital. We did not cover it earlier, but Marx identified the increasing role of share capital as one of the main counter-tendencies.

To explain how a dApp works, we’ll use an example from the company Etherisc, which created a dApp for flight insurance to a well-known Ethereum conference. This flight insurance was purchased by 31 of the attendees.23 Figure 5.1 shows a simplified diagram. Using Ethereum, developers can mimic insurance pools with strings of conditional transactions. Open sourcing this process and running it on top of Ethereum’s world computer allows everyday investors to put their capital in an insurance pool to earn returns from the purchasers of insurance premiums that are looking for coverage from certain events. Everyone trusts the system because it runs in the open and is automated by code.

Creativity is the DNA of innovation, the virus of evolution, the antidote to automation

PayVida's innovative technology is designed with flexibility in mind and allows users to turn their computers into payment processing terminals with its web-based payment processing software and simple invoicing system that automates payment collection and processing.

The second is the stressor to come – the much-heralded fourth industrial revolution where, according to some reports, up to 60 per cent of all jobs will become automated, and work as we know it will disappear. In the past, technological innovation was framed with optimism for huge improvements in standards of living, today the prevalent narrative seems one of fear and dystopia.

Pierce was thinking about the New York fair around the same time that a modest display of Bell Labs innovations was being demonstrated at Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, which was being marked by the construction of a huge “space needle” on the city’s fairgrounds. At the Seattle fair visitors could ride a monorail to a Bell exhibit intimating a future of startling convenience: phones with speedy touch-tone buttons (which would soon replace dials), direct long-distance calling (which would soon replace operators), and rapid electronic switching (which would soon be powered by transistors). A visitor could also try something called a portable “pager,” a big, blocky device that could alert doctors and other busy professionals when they received urgent calls.2 New York’s fair would dwarf Seattle’s. The crowds were expected to be immense—probably somewhere around 50 or 60 million people in total. Pierce and David’s 1961 memo recommended a number of exhibits: “personal hand-carried telephones,” “business letters in machine-readable form, transmitted by wire,” “information retrieval from a distant computer-automated library,” and “satellite and space communications.” By the time the fair opened in April 1964, though, the Bell System exhibits, housed in a huge white cantilevered building nicknamed the “floating wing,” described a more conservative future than the one Pierce and David had envisioned.

Successful AI initiatives start with the right problems, but the right problems don’t necessarily come from your data scientists. They can come from leaders, domain experts, and innovators who sit close to the daily business challenges in your organization. Still, it takes practice to develop the vision for spotting AI opportunities...

In his speeches in the 1950s, Shannon seemed to make the point that he was not necessarily interested in automated machines per se. He was interested in how machines interact with other machines (as in the telephone switching system) and how they interact with human operators (as in a chess machine). In the latter instance, there was a psychological aspect that seemed curious to him: “We hope that research in the design of game playing machines will lead to insights in the manner of operation of the human brain.

The secret to surviving and thriving in the automation revolution is in what computers can’t replace: human creativity, empathy, and critical thinking—especially in unpredictable environments.

The fourth category of invention consists of new methods of production, operation, and management, ranging from marginal but economically rewarding improvements to fundamentally new and highly automated ways of mass-scale manufacturing, information gathering, and data processing.

Every day is a new opportunity for start-ups and established businesses to automate products and solutions or identify and solve problems for internal and external stakeholders. We must always continue to innovate and improve efficiency.

Invent, innovate, automate.

As the Fourth Industrial Revolution continue to evolve, the winners will be those who are able to quickly adapt to change, upskill themselves and fully participate in entrepreneurship and innovation-driven ecosystems, providing new business models and ideas rather than those who can only bring certificates to the table or only offer low-skilled labor.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is not about new Apps or new technologies. It is about a new era, new ways of thinking and new ways of doing business.

In the past, businesses were built on the brick and mortar model, transactions were done in triplicate, using carbon paper, and success was based on educational background and certificates. Fast forward to today. The internet, connectivity and emerging technologies have completely changed the game. To compete and survive in this new era requires a disruptive approach.

Those who don’t adapt become victims of disruption, trapped in the downward spiral of recycling their problems.

At some point, something or someone is going to disrupt your entire life. Shouldn't it be you? The ability to disrupt yourself is critical in today’s volatile economic environment that's changing faster and more furiously than ever.

In a world where everything is connected, where machines can talk, learn and mimic humans, a world where machines are employable, where performance is at its peak, innovation at its finest and job loss at its highest. There is only one spot left to transform and that is YOU.

Disrupt Yourself Or Be Disrupted provides answers that translate far-future thinking into insights and strategies to stay relevant and unlock opportunities in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

You cannot stop the Fourth Industrial Revolution but you can influence its direction and impact in your life.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution does bring a sense of gloom and doom but don’t focus on the threats; focus on the opportunities!

Our world is changing fast, but all is not lost in the race to automation. With the rise of the robotic, the focus is shifting from people power to intellectual capital. With or without a certificate, a disruptor’s mind can foresee limitless opportunities in the newly emerging economy. You can create your own path using the power of the internet.

The future will not seem so scary if talent is put to use.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence. the future certainly has the potential to draw more on an individual’s talents than certificates.

Many of us bought into society’s social contract of success, which states – go to school, get good grades, get a job and live happily ever after. But this doesn’t work anymore. At the most basic level, disrupting yourself will demand that you breach this contract of social conditioning and conformity.

Put your future in good hands – your own! Personal disruption means not waiting for the government or your family members to hand something to you. It means rethinking the parameters of your life, and perhaps even of your community, maybe even your country.

Which company is best for using construction Project work? The Shree Siva Balaaji Steels project is a significant endeavor that encompasses the establishment and operation of a modern and advanced steel manufacturing facility. This project represents a fusion of innovation, cutting-edge technology, and industrial expertise, aimed at delivering high-quality steel products to meet the growing demands of various sectors. Key Features: State-of-the-Art Manufacturing Plant: The project involves the construction and operation of a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant equipped with the latest machinery, automation systems, and environmentally friendly processes. This allows for efficient production and reduced environmental impact. Diverse Product Range: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels aims to offer a diverse range of steel products to cater to different industries such as construction, automotive, infrastructure, and manufacturing. This versatility enables the company to meet the varying needs of clients and partners. Quality Assurance: A cornerstone of the project is its commitment to delivering high-quality steel products. The facility adheres to strict quality control measures and follows international standards to ensure that the end products are durable, reliable, and meet or exceed industry specifications. Sustainability Focus: The project places a strong emphasis on sustainability and environmentally conscious practices. Energy-efficient processes, recycling initiatives, and waste reduction strategies are integrated into the manufacturing process to minimize the ecological footprint. Employment Opportunities: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels contributes to local economies by creating employment opportunities across various skill levels, from skilled labor to technical experts. This helps stimulate economic growth in the region surrounding the manufacturing facility. Collaboration and Partnerships: The project fosters collaborations with suppliers, distributors, and clients, establishing strong relationships within the steel industry. This network facilitates efficient supply chain management and enables the company to provide tailored solutions to its customers. Innovation and Research: The project invests in research and development to constantly improve manufacturing processes, product quality, and the development of new steel products. This dedication to innovation positions the company at the forefront of the steel industry. Community Engagement: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels is committed to engaging with local communities and implementing corporate social responsibility initiatives. These efforts include supporting education, healthcare, and other community-centric projects, fostering goodwill and positive impact. Vision: The Shree Siva Balaaji Steels project envisions becoming a leading name in the steel manufacturing sector, renowned for its exceptional quality, technological innovation, and sustainability practices. By adhering to its core values of integrity, excellence, and environmental responsibility, the project strives to contribute positively to the industry and the communities it operates within.

Bitcoin is not a smart network. Bitcoin is a dumb network. It really is a dumb network. It is a dumb transaction-processing network. It’s a dumb network for verifying a very simple scripting language. It doesn’t offer a complete range of financial services and products. It doesn’t have automation and incredible features built in. Bitcoin is simply a dumb network, and that is one of its strongest and most important features. When you design networks, when you architect network systems, one of the most fundamental choices is this: do you make a dumb network that supports smart devices, or do you make a smart network that supports dumb devices? 5.1.1. The Smart Network - Phones The phone network was a very smart network. The telephone at the end of that network was a very dumb device. If you had a pulse-dialing phone, that thing had maybe four electronic components inside it. It was basically a switch on a wire with a speaker attached to it. You could dial by flicking the hook up and down fast enough. 
The phone was a dumb device; it had no intelligence whatsoever. Everything the phone network did was in the network. Caller ID was a network feature. Call waiting was a network feature. And if you wanted to make the experience better, you had to upgrade the network but you didn’t need to upgrade the device. That was a critical design decision because, at that time, the belief was that smart networks were better because you could deliver these incredible services just by upgrading the network for everyone. There is one small disadvantage with smart networks. They have to be upgraded from the center out. And that means innovation occurs at the center, by one player, and requires permission. As a result of smart network design, innovation only happens when a feature is needed by all of the subscribers of the network, when it is compelling enough to disrupt the function of the entire network to upgrade it. 5.1.2. The Dumb Network - Internet The internet is a dumb network. It’s dumb as rocks. All it can do is move data from point A to point B. It doesn’t know what that data is. It can’t tell the difference between a Skype call and a web page. It doesn’t know if the device on the end is a desktop computer or a mobile phone, a vacuum cleaner, a refrigerator, or a car. It doesn’t know if that device is powerful or not. If it can do multimedia or not. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care. In order to run a new application or innovate on a dumb network, all you have to do is add innovation at the edge. Because a dumb network can support smart devices, you don’t need to change anything in the network. If you push intelligence to the edge of the network, an application that only has five users can be implemented so long as those five users upgrade their devices to implement that application. The dumb network will transport their data because it doesn’t know the difference and it doesn’t care. 5.1.3. Bitcoin’s Dumb Network Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge. It doesn’t care if the bitcoin address is the address of a multimillionaire, the address of a central bank, the address of a smart contract, the address of a device, or the address of a human. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care if the transaction is carrying lots of money or not much money at all. It doesn’t care if the address is in Kuala Lumpur or downtown New York. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care. It moves money from one address to another based on a simple locking script. And that means that if you want to build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can upgrade the

We are Google Cloud Premier Partners who help small businesses with their IT infrastructure and digital footprint. We offer clients a better way of growing their business through technology and innovative strategies. Our proven methods help clients to build a strong digital footprint, which helps to both automate day-to-day systems and supercharge the way they do business.

This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.

Economics professor Chris Doucouliagos from Deakin University reported in 2017 that poverty does not, in fact, encourage people to 'strive more' and compete for wealth. Rather, economic inequality impedes access to education and training. Poverty - or the threat of it - removes the material means required for people to experiment and innovate in jobs or with businesses, or discourages them from taking that kind of financial risk. Insecure work conditions exacerbate this effect, as workers fight changes - like automation, or climate transition mechanisms - they perceive as threatening their income stream.

March 2012, a month before Charlie found his investors, the Federal Reserve had held a daylong conference about consumer-payment systems at which there was a lot of grousing about the fact that despite all the technological innovation going on in the world, the infrastructure for moving money around the country was still based on technology from the 1960s and 1970s. The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, which facilitated payments between bank accounts, was created in the 1970s and had not changed much since; this helped explain why bank transfers took at least a day to go through. For most Americans, the easiest and fastest way to send money to a friend or family member was still the old-fashioned paper check. This problem was not just in the United States. A week before New York Tech Day, the Canadian government announced the launch of a new digital currency effort, called Mint Chip, that it hoped would spur innovation in payments.

In a world that’s getting ever richer, where cows produce more milk and robots produce more stuff, there’s more room for friends, family, community service, science, art, sports, and all the other things that make life worthwhile. But there’s also more room for bullshit. As long as we continue to be obsessed with work, work, and more work (even as useful activities are further automated or outsourced), the number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow. Much like the number of managers in the developed world, which has grown over the last thirty years without making us a dime richer. On the contrary, studies show that countries with more managers are actually less productive and innovative.15 In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission.16 Another recent poll revealed that as many as 37% of British workers think they have a bullshit job.17

the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. The digital poorhouse is part of a long American tradition. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.

This is what happened when I cofounded LinkedIn. The key business model innovations for LinkedIn, including the two-way nature of the relationships and filling professionals’ need for a business-oriented online identity, didn’t just happen organically. They were the result of much thought and reflection, and I drew on the experiences I had when founding SocialNet, one of the first online social networks, nearly a decade before the creation of LinkedIn. But life isn’t always so neat. Many companies, even famous and successful ones, have to develop their business model innovation after they have already commenced operations. PayPal didn’t have a business model when it began operations (I was a key member of the PayPal executive team). We were growing exponentially, at 5 percent per day, and we were losing money on every single transaction we processed. The funny thing is that some of our critics called us insane for paying customers bonuses to refer their friends. Those referral bonuses were actually brilliant, because their cost was so much lower than the standard cost of acquiring new financial services customers via advertising. (We’ll discuss the power and importance of this kind of viral marketing later on.) The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/ CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks. But if we had waited until we had solved this problem before blitzscaling, I suspect we wouldn’t have become the market leader.

faster. Now, when new technology is brought in, your coworkers have a different calculus. If they can produce 20 percent more per employee, why not decrease the workweek to twenty-eight hours? (For all sectors, legislation dictates the required workweek cannot exceed thirty-five hours.)13 There is still market competition, and firms still fail, but the grow-or-die imperative doesn’t apply when your enterprise’s goal is no longer to maximize total profits but rather to maximize profit-per-worker. And instead of a race to the bottom, there’s pressure to make sure janitorial and other “dirty jobs” are well compensated. In time, many of these tasks will be automated. People used to fear that machines would bring about mass unemployment, but now you and most others look forward to the social impact of technological innovations.14

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