More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 11 - July 11, 2020
Second, we also have to build trust directly into our technology.
And third, all of the technology we build must be inclusive and respectful to everyone, serving humans across barriers of culture, race, nationality, economic status, age, gender, physical and mental ability, and more.
First, robots should never harm a human being through action or allow harm to come to a human being through inaction. Second, they must obey human orders. Third, they must protect themselves.
In software development terms, AI is becoming a third run time—the next system on top of which programmers will build and execute applications. The PC was the first run time for which Microsoft developed applications like the Office suite of tools—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the rest. Today the Web is the second run time. In an AI and robotics world, productivity and communication tools will be written for an entirely new platform, one that doesn’t just manage information but also learns from information and interacts with the physical world.
We want not just intelligent machines but intelligible machines; not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic intelligence.
AI must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people. It should preserve cultural commitments, empowering diversity.
EMPATHY—Empathy, which is so difficult to replicate in machines, will be invaluable in the human-AI world.
EDUCATION—Some argue that because life spans will increase, birth rates will decline, and thus spending on education will decline as well.
CREATIVITY—One of the most coveted human skills is creativity, and this won’t change. Machines will enrich and augment our creativity, but the human drive to create will remain central.
that we business leaders must replace our labor-saving and automation mindset with a maker and creation mindset.
“Just as we can envisage machines with increasing degrees of autonomy from human oversight, we can envisage machines whose controls involve increasing degrees of sensitivity to things that matter ethically. Not perfect machines, to be sure, but better.”
Today we don’t think of aviation as “artificial flight”—it’s simply flight. In the same way, we shouldn’t think of technological intelligence as artificial, but rather as intelligence that serves to augment human capabilities and capacities.
Too often they focus on trying to attract Silicon Valley companies in hopes they will open offices locally. They want Silicon Valley satellites. Instead, they should be working on plans to make the best technologies available to local entrepreneurs so that they can organically grow more jobs at home—not just in high-tech industries but in every economic sector. They need to develop economic strategies that can enhance the natural advantages their regions enjoy in particular industries by fully and quickly embracing supportive leading-edge technologies. But there is often an even bigger
...more
Economically handicapped by its minimal landline telephone infrastructure, Malawi leapfrogged directly to cellular beginning in 2006 by creating a National ICT for Development policy that encouraged investment in mobile infrastructure and removed barriers to adoption—for example, by eliminating import taxes on mobile phones. As a result, mobile phone penetration has dramatically risen, which in turn has enabled the growth of local mobile payments businesses. With 80 percent of the population “unbanked,” this has made such payments all the more important. Today, Malawi has a higher penetration
...more
They found that, on average, countries tend to adopt a new technology about forty-five years after its invention, although this time lag has shortened in recent years.
David McKenzie of the World Bank puts it another way. He finds “the need for more intensive training programs that have larger effects on business practices.” Small firms with fewer than ten employees outnumber large enterprises in developing countries, and their likelihood of surviving and growing is greatly enhanced when they know how to perform better stock-keeping, recordkeeping, and planning, which may result in less spoilage and less downtime that comes from not having the right parts or goods. That, too, is intensity of use.
Unfortunately, in many underserved parts of the world, public and private attention is focused on attracting Silicon Valley companies rather than on growing local tech entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs in developing nations often tell me they can’t even get meetings with their president or prime minister. Yet those same heads of state routinely meet with Western CEOs like me, looking for very near-term, foreign direct investment.
Gini coefficient, which measures the difference between a society’s division of income and a perfectly equal division of income.
If 100 percent of a given population were to earn $1 per day, that would be absolute equality. If 100 percent earned $1 million per year, that too would be absolute equality. But when only 1 percent earn $1 million while everyone else earns nothing, we’re approaching absolute inequality.
The Gini coefficient for an advanced European country like Germany has hovered around .3 for decades, while the figure for the United States has risen for years, now matching that of China and Mexico at over .4.
Capitalist economies reward qualities like innovation, risk-taking, and hard work—qualities that generate value, produce wealth, and usually lead to benefits for many people throughout the society. When rewards flow to the people who exhibit those qualities, unequal income distribution is the inevitable result.
perverse
Marx described as late-stage capitalism—a theoretical time when economic growth and profits collapse—and get back to the returns enjoyed in early stage capitalism. But how? That’s the question most heads of state around the world are also grappling with.
(Education + Innovation) × Intensity of Tech Use = Economic Growth
As Professor Comin told me, you don’t have to invent the wheel, but you should adopt it quickly, because “societies that utilize new tools quickly are likely to be more productive.”
Seattle, for example, has become the center of excellence for cloud computing as the home of both Amazon and Microsoft.
He found that new intelligent machines, particularly industrial robots, could have very consequential effects on the labor market. His estimates suggest that, on average, each additional industrial robot reduces employment by about three workers.
“Although automation tends to reduce employment and the share of labor in national income, the creation of more complex tasks has the opposite effect.”
“The creation of new complex tasks always increases wages, employment and share of labor. But when automation runs ahead of the process of creation of new, labor-intensive tasks, technological change will bring lower employment.” We need a balanced growth path. We need to invent a new social contract for this age of AI and automation that fosters the equilibrium between individual labor—one’s agency, wages, sense of purpose, and fulfillment—and the return on capital.
In fact, The New Yorker magazine has written about LinkedIn’s vision of making labor markets work better for all 3 billion members of the global workforce by making those markets more efficient and open.
Hoffman writes about the forces of competition and change that brought down Detroit as an economic powerhouse: “No matter what city you live in, no matter what business or industry you work for, no matter what kind of work you do—when it comes to your career, right now, you may be heading down the same path as Detroit.”
We also need to think about the impact of our actions on the world and its citizens long into the future.
Finally, as leaders, what is our role? At the end of the day, leaders of any company are evaluated based on their ability to grow the business, to clear the way for innovations that inspire customers. As CEOs, we’re accountable for generating the best returns to shareholders. But I also subscribe to the notion that the bigger a company is, the more responsibility its leader has to think about the world, its citizens, and their long-term opportunities.
What does it mean to Hit Refresh? I encourage you to answer that for yourself. Start the conversation in your institution. Start the conversation in your community. And please, share with me what you learn, and I’ll continue to do the same.
I’ve often said that the best lines of computer code are like poetry.
