smil

The real threat is not Artificial Intelligence but Artificial Stupidity.

The more you try to emulate reality, the farther from reality you get. That's why interviewing practices are so absurd today -- cognitive tests, personality tests, whatever work test that tries to assign a quantifiable score to an applicant.

Instagram deserves the Unicorn title. It is very useful for both personal and professional ends, and has changed photography fundamentally.

The problem is with its business model - that it will monetize people's attention via ads - and that Instagram is "media." In my view, both Instagram and Twitter are communication networks and should be monetized as such. Advertising is adversarial to the user (privacy) and will kill the networks.

So it's the same as in, for example, the United States or Sweden.

Fun fact: The average mortgage repayment time in Sweden is 120 years.

Even if this person was not rich as measured by capital, he is somehow privileged in other ways. Like running in the right social circles and knowing the people who hand out these rental contracts. Typically, people in media, the culture sector, and politics, know each other and do each other these kind of favors. It's how corruption works in a society where power and influence have been consolidated over decades.

Me, I moved to China.

It is the same in Stockholm, or worse even. Because of rent control, nobody builds rental apartments because it isn't profitable. Most rental apartments have been sold due to unprofitability and have been turned into owners apartments. The few rental apartments that still exist are rent controlled and you pay with a different type of capital to get those -- social capital. Or you can spend 15 years of your life in the housing queue. There literally is no rental market, rental agencies don't exist.

As a result, Sweden has the world's largest housing bubble and by some measures the highest private debt of any country.

You can not find a more segregated, class-based society in the developed world.

A country can have open borders or a social safety net, not both. If you choose the latter, you're effectively denying the existing population the services they have already paid for, for themselves and their offspring, through their taxes.

So, in an open border society, it would make no sense to pay taxes because they wouldn't give you as a tax payer anything.

For this reason, global corporations who want zero tax rates and the supply of the entire world's population to hire from and effectively pay slave wages, and these "progressives" are united in their wish to dismantle the welfare state.

Fail.

Harj is not really interested in creating a service that "measures" a person's ability or "predicting" their future performance, because that's impossible to do.

What they're really doing is creating a cargo cult tool that gives the illusion of being "objective" and using "data", so that they can sell the serivce based on this appearance, and later get bought out by LinkedIn or something.

Perhaps they're doing a startup themselves because they had problems finding jobs due to hiring practices such as these.

>I'm all for automating jobs that technology deems unnecessary. The solution isn't to push everyone into some multi-disciplinary creative class. Many people would be very happy as uber drivers, or any other menial job, if they were treated with respect by their employer. I'd say the solution begins with treating workers with dignity and respect.

I agree, but the problem is not a moral problem but a business problem. How do you design a product, and then the process of making that product, so that you can afford to treat employees well in a competitive, global market? I'd even put it like this: How can you turn paying employees more into a competitive advantage?

>Because of incumbent banks’ endless surcharges, late fees and other abuses, “there’s room for a product by young people for young people,” Levchin, 39, said in a phone interview this week. “That’s what Silicon Valley’s good for, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Levchin is not young, so I guess his startup is DOA.

That labor is a commodity is not an "idea", but in the case of Uber drivers and the Foxconn workers who assemble iPhones, a fact. It is a fact because that's how those jobs and service/production processes have been designed. The work has been broken down into their smallest parts, so that it will require no special skill or intelligence to perform them. As anyone can do those jobs, they have been de facto commoditized.

For someone who cares for the wellbeing of people at the bottom of the enterprise pyramids, the goal should be to design new organizations, with jobs that have latitude for learning and development, that is multi-disciplinary and creative. And many of the worst jobs today should be automated because they are not fit for human beings.

Highly Artificial Intelligence http://research.modesvu.com/post/118179144182/highlandvalley