More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A 10 per cent increase in robot adoption by a firm was associated with a 2.5 per cent decline in employment at its competitors.38 It was not automation itself driving job losses, but the difficulties faced by the companies that didn’t automate.
Each individual robot displaced around 5.6 workers and reduced wages by up to half a per cent.
A European study on industrial robots, again mostly concentrated in the automotive sector, concluded that each additional robot per 1,000 workers increased overall employment by 1.3 per cent.
two-fifths of gig workers earned less than the equivalent of £8.44 per hour, only a little over the British national minimum wage.
Platform workers in Germany make 29 per cent less than the local statutory minimum wage, while workers in France make 54 per cent less than its minimum wage.
One study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that the average Uber driver makes a profit of $3.37 per hour.
2019, researchers found that American workers for DoorDash, a food delivery service, made $1.45 an hour after expenses, or about a fifth of the then national minimum federal wage.
Arriving at the decision, the judges concluded that the drivers were not self-employed entrepreneurs in any sense of the word.
Japanese tech giant Hitachi created name tags with sensors, designed to measure who employees speak to and for how long, to track and measure their movements, and to feed the data into the ‘organisational happiness’ index.66 In November 2020, Microsoft updated its Office software – the most widely used of its kind in the world – to include ‘Workplace Productivity’ scores which monitor how employees use everyday apps like Word.67
‘100,000 hours of interviewing time and roughly $1m in recruiting costs each year’ by delegating job interviews to video analysis software.69
2018 Gartner report found that half of 239 large corporations were monitoring the content of employee emails and social media accounts.
Those who are well-educated and lucky can thrive. Those who aren’t might find themselves trapped in an increasingly punitive workplace.
Between 1980 and 2014, labour’s share of national income – the percentage of GDP paid out in wages, salaries and benefits – declined on average by 6.5 per cent, as measured in 34 advanced economies.
In the US, the decline has been even more staggering. In 1947, workers received 65 per cent of the national income in America; by 2018, this had declined to 56.7 per cent.
By 2018, US economic productivity was 255 per cent higher than it had been in 1948; but workers’ pay was only 125 per cent higher – barely a third more than it had been in 1973.
A $1,000 iPhone contains less than $400 in parts. The remaining three-fifths of its original sticker price are the intangibles – the design, the orchestration and the brand.
This emergent gap between the rich and poor worlds will be exacerbated by the shift to localised manufacturing.
3D printing will put downward pressure on the value of world trade.
Analysts at the Dutch bank ING reckon it might eliminate up to 40 per cent of...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The Hsinchu Science Park, which covers 14 square kilometres (about five square miles) – about a quarter of the size of Manhattan, and less than one-thousandth the size of London – generated more than $40 billion in 2020.30
Geoffrey West, the complexity scientist introduced in Chapter 4, characterises cities as one big positive feedback loop.
By 2030, nearly 9 per cent of the world will live in just 41 cities.33
Take the Greater Bay Area, a megalopolis – a cluster of megacities – which includes Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and whose population exceeds 70 million people.
In 2018, when measured across 24 European countries, the earnings gap between urban and rural was 45 per cent.
By 2018, the number of non-state conflicts tracked by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program exceeded 70, more than double the number a decade earlier.
In that period, the number of false claims increased by a factor of 30. Falsehoods, the study found, spread across the network six times faster than the truth.31
Russia topped the league table, responsible for 72 per cent of all foreign disinformation operations between 2013 and 2019.
the US had, by the end of 2020, no coordinated counter-disinformation strategy steered by any branch of government.44
It takes the realisation that expensive planes – like America’s Lockheed F-35 fighter, which will cost nearly $2 trillion over its life – are no match for cyberattacks:
Much of the digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century is owned and run by private companies. This means that the sites of attack are privately controlled; and it means that identifying, responding to and recovering from an attack will often fall to private corporations.
the NSO Group, a private firm which develops software purportedly used as spyware by malicious actors.73 Their blockbuster product is Pegasus, which allegedly targets individuals’ phones and then takes them over.
It is hard to call for a moratorium of a particular tactic when you yourself engage in it with aplomb.
private organisations increasingly dominate that public sphere. They, rather than elected parliaments, make the laws that govern our lives.
Lessig’s prediction – that, in the absence of considered government action, tech elites would become the rule-makers of the digital world – has largely come to pass.
What is now Facebook started as FaceMash, the result of a teenage college student’s peccadillo. Mark Zuckerberg and some of his friends built a website to judge the attractiveness of female students.
in 2018, army generals in Myanmar were fomenting violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority using Facebook as their primary communication tool.
A day before Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two unarmed protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a Facebook page he had visited was urging people to take up arms. Facebook users reported it more than 455 times, but the company left it visible.14
Trump had used social media to promote a racist conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, amplify tweets from far-right and white supremacist accounts, and falsely allege widespread voter fraud in a series of fair elections – to name only a handful of many, many examples.
where the photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc is censored but anti-Rohingya hate speech isn’t – reveal the power exponential platforms hold.
Carissa Véliz, a philosopher at Oxford University, argues that this is fundamentally an issue of power. Privacy, she says, is power. Knowing personal details about someone is a very particular kind of power, because it can be transformed into economic, political and other kinds of power.
Data is certainly used to profit from us; it is often used to track us; and it might be used to control us.
it transformed Google’s fortunes. The company’s revenues leapt from $220,000 in the year before AdWords to $86 million the year after – allowing Google’s executives to successfully take the company public just three years after launch.
when our social bonds are formed solely through Exponential Age platforms, homophily is at risk of spiralling out of control.
On services like YouTube and Facebook, recommendation algorithms are designed to get increasingly bored users to stay on a website.28 The best way to do that, the algorithms have discovered, is to promote progressively more borderline and extreme material.
Tufekci argues, ‘YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.’
Befriending one ISIS supporter leads Facebook to recommend a dozen other pro-ISIS accounts. ‘Facebook, in their desire to connect as many people as possible, have inadvertently created a system which helps connect extremists and terrorists,’ concluded the researchers, Gregory Waters and Robert Postings.31
Facebook’s own research corroborated these findings. In the words of a leaked memo from Facebook vice president Andrew Bosworth, written a year before Waters and Postings’s paper, ‘Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people.’32
64 per cent of people who joined extremist groups joined ‘due to [Facebook’s] recommendation tools’.
In 2018, an internal presentation concluded that the algorithms exploit ‘the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness’, noting that Facebook would present ‘more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform’.33 It was what many outsiders had seen first-hand, and was now validated by the firm itself.
Interoperability is kryptonite to the winner-take-all power of network effects. In an interoperable world, I can stop using a particular provider but continue to reach all of my friends still using the original service.
