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Tim O'Reilly and the 'WTF?!' Economy (Video)
This is a conversation Tim Lord had with Tim O'Reilly at OSCON. Tim O'Reilly wrote an article titled "The WTF Economy,", which started with these words: "WTF?! In San Francisco, Uber has 3x the revenue of the entire prior taxi and limousine industry." He talks about Uber and AirbnB and how, with real-time measurement of customer demand, "The algorithm is the new shift boss." And then there is this question: "What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines?"
My (late) father was an engineer. Politically, you could have called him a TechnoUtopian. He believed -- along with most of his engineer, ham radio, and science fiction writer and reader friends -- that as machines took over the humdrum tasks, humans would work less and create more. O'Reilly seems to have similar beliefs, even though (unlike my father) he's seen the beginnings of an economy with self-driving cars and trucks, factory machines that don't need humans to run them, and many other changes the 1950s and 1960s futurists didn't expect to see until we had flying cars and could buy tickets on Pan Am flights to the moon. Listening to these conversations, I remember my father's dreams, but O'Reilly isn't as optimistic as a full-blown TechnoUtopian. He takes a "Something's happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear" view of how work (and pay for work) will change in the near future. Please note that Tim O'Reilly has been called "The Oracle of Silicon Valley," so he's totally worth watching -- or reading, if that's your preferred method of taking in new information.
NOTE: Today we have a "main video," plus a "bonus video" that is viewable only with Flash. But we have a transcript that covers both of them. Enjoy!
My (late) father was an engineer. Politically, you could have called him a TechnoUtopian. He believed -- along with most of his engineer, ham radio, and science fiction writer and reader friends -- that as machines took over the humdrum tasks, humans would work less and create more. O'Reilly seems to have similar beliefs, even though (unlike my father) he's seen the beginnings of an economy with self-driving cars and trucks, factory machines that don't need humans to run them, and many other changes the 1950s and 1960s futurists didn't expect to see until we had flying cars and could buy tickets on Pan Am flights to the moon. Listening to these conversations, I remember my father's dreams, but O'Reilly isn't as optimistic as a full-blown TechnoUtopian. He takes a "Something's happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear" view of how work (and pay for work) will change in the near future. Please note that Tim O'Reilly has been called "The Oracle of Silicon Valley," so he's totally worth watching -- or reading, if that's your preferred method of taking in new information.
NOTE: Today we have a "main video," plus a "bonus video" that is viewable only with Flash. But we have a transcript that covers both of them. Enjoy!
People have been asking this question for literally 150 years or so. Even if we restrict our horizon to things published in the last month, there's quite a bit. Do we need another take on this? And from... Tim O'Reilly?
No, this is exactly what they expected to see. The main thing they were wrong about is that they expected to see it within 20 years.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't use Flash, so is it not all in the transcript?
Life is not for the lazy.
or maybe because Taxi cabs companies have never had competition before, have been slow to embrace new technology, and have never invested in improving service at any time in the past 50 years, while making drivers fork out a massive amount of pay for their medallions and leasing fees. Getting a cab is an unpleasant experience in my town (a very large metropolis in the US)...getting an Uber is anywhere from decent to pretty nice...getting a Lyft is usually even nicer.
The algorithm is the new overseer
TFTFY, Tim.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Only if we're lucky will we be able to automate all the tasks and scrap the need for human labour. We will also need a socialist or communist system of wealth distribution if we scrap all the paid jobs. The biggest fear is a partial but not full automation occurs, where millions to billions of people get put permanently out of work, but there's still a worker class. Assuming we kept the current economic models, we'd be driving millions of people into poverty and creating a super stratified ultra-rich class.
I think your grandfather who worked 16 hour days 7 days a week with no job security would disagree with you. Fox news might not. Regardless, your opinion is neither new nor enlightened.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The last time I've had to use a taxi, I called to see about a cab to pick me up at one of the more notable hotels, waited about 30 minutes with no vehicles other than the people loading/unloading, then got a text that I owed them a no-show fee.
Uber/Lyft seem a lot more friendly than that. They might even bother to show up.
Im curious, you boycott flash for what reason? It sucks... I get it. I can't watch a flash video and run a Windows virtual machine without a new i7 processor. It's seriously brutal. But to go far as to not have it all seems a bit extreme. Are you worried about security? If you work at the pentagon you might have an argument.. although you probably shouldn't be browsing slashdot on your work computer regardless.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
...while we can make machines do just about anything, it will almost always be cheaper to have people do them so why would the corporations who make these decisions do anything else?
And the moment you start talking about someone other than the corporations making these decisions the cries of "welfare state" and "socialism" will be deafening.
Without some sort of massive political/social upheaval I dont see us ever getting to a point where "the people" benefit from time saving devices to the extent TFA is suggesting.
The reason they're doing better than taxi and limousine industries is because they're not involved with unions and tons of bureaucracy. Simple as that. Been proven time and time again, unions and red tape kills productivity and innovation. SOLVED. You're welcome.
...and you don't think that it has anything to do at all with the fact that the new business involves a convenient app connected to an efficient centralized planning service, whereas the old business usually involves things like trying to wave down any empty yellow cars that might happen to pass by? Either approach could be implemented with or without unions.
If I was making a new civ tech tree, the "wtf economy" would be right before tech singularity. Doesn't end well.
Do they apply for hack licenses: No
Do they maintain a fleet of vehicles: No
Do they pay any employee benefits: No
What they do is organize unlicensed taxi drivers through a website and take a sizable chunk of the profit off the unlicensed driver taking all the risks
Virtually no operational costs and no risk to themselves, well except legal ones which will fall on the corporation and the slimes who run it will scurry under new rocks when the law finally catches up to their scumbaggery
What transcript? The video is totally different than the text below, and the lower flash-only video I assume is also different.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It sucks, it drains battery, it's a vector for ads, its an attack surface,its a vector for malware, is uses bandwidth, and it constantly wants to update which is annoying. (And given that its a big vector for malware... it needs to be updated.)
Does the flash updater try to install crapware too unless you opt out every single time? I just can't be bothered with it.
I do still have flash on one of computers, but not most of them. I find I don't miss that much that I actually want to see.
And job displacement and an ever growing class of people who cannot get jobs no matter how educated they are and how much student debt they take on, and increasingly useless job retraining programs that just give false hope and let the politicians claim they're doing something ... that's the dystopian picture painted in many sci-fi stories, the only mistake they made was thinking it would take longer to happen.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Open any book by any publisher. Editing and quality control are now "cost centers" that don't "make money", so nobody wants to spend money on it. For the cost of a good editor they can pick up another monkey for their army of typewriters. And that's what's committed to paper. Look upon my ebooks ye
might
y and de-spair.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Im curious, you boycott flash for what reason?
Because the web as a whole works better without it now.
I had click-to-flash installed for a while, but the websites I use most regularly (including my bank) work better if they think I just plain don't have Flash at all and have to give me something else.
The real question is why the hell would you keep Flash around when it's so easy to do without now? You don't have to work for the pentagon to find it desirable that your bank credentials will not be scraped (though again that's not my primary reason).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So you're saying the little link under the video that says "Hide/Show transcript" is half lying? Perhaps it should have read "Hide/Show some text partially related to the video"?
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
A minority taking more than their share. I would love to work less but still have a secure lifestyle which is what mechanization and Taylorism was supposed to bring use. But if wealth accumulates into the hands of a fewnot due to any hard work or cleverness on their part but accident of birth, all it leads to is unemployment and eventually starvation.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You think that is isn't already the case? Most people need to work for corporations just to give their money back to them for food, clothing, transportation, retirement, credit rating, medical care, etc. We live in an oppressive corporate culture as bad as any of the dictatorships or oligarchies in fictions.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I would like to see what data you are analyzing for that conclusion. It seems to me the periods of highest economic growth rates have coincided with higher rates of union membership in the US, certainly higher than we see today. Correlation does not imply causation, but it would exclude your conclusion.
Of course, the idea of using evidence to reach conclusions rather than ideology may be foreign to you.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Imagine how little you would need to work without the overhead of HR, legal departments, management, and governments? These are things that can be automated away over time. If you need a task and can just pay for that task everyone would be so much wealthier and have more time.
Most people on a salary job do very little actual work. Lots of time is wasted doing useless things. You could choose more money or leisure. The more specialized we all get the better.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Editing and quality control are now "cost centers" ... Look upon my ebooks ye
might
y and de-spair.
You owe me money to replace my overloaded irony detector.
But your point is valid. Someone I know told me she was writing science fiction books that were being sold on Amazon, I think it was. I went to get a preview and my God, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't understand it because, like, every three, words there was, a comma, or so. A copy, editor could, have cleaned it, up so easily.
Didn't see that since it was undertake Flash video I couldn't play...
But the transcript is only for the main video, which I was able to watch fully - not the bonus content. I can see where you might also have been confused on that point, since it was below the Flash video (though it you'd watched the main video you would have known).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's exactly why I no longer have Flash installed at all, because half-measures like "flash approval" (I used to use a plugin called Click-To-Flash that was similar) still lead the server to understand you CAN use flash, so they require it instead of just letting you see content...
By not having Flash at all, instead the server realizes it must give me HTML5 video or I'll see nothing - which is why I could watch the first video, but not the second.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
C'mon Dice, making Slashdot Videos require proprietary software?!
(This is my first time voicing a Dice-era complaint.)
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
The Uber one was the only one that surprised me. 3x more revenue is probably partly due to not have to worry about things like employee benefits, fleet maintenance, etc., but with that big a difference surely quite a few more people are using cabs than before.
The others... meh. Expedia has more "rooms for offer" and fewer employees than all the major hotel chains put together, AND as many airline seats as all the airlines! That's because, just like AirBnB, they don't actually have any rooms for offer. They're a booking service.
Some union dude getting attention in the court of public opinion, Kickstarters, data analysis... meh. No surprises there.
Sure, except that's not what Uber does.
"as machines took over the humdrum tasks, humans would work less and create more"
No, what happens is humans work less, and spend more time looking for work in order to survive. The problem with the utopian ideal is that they keep pinning it on the idea that you'll be able to survive with little or no money, which is star trek bullshit that will never happen.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
And that's exactly why I still have flash and click-to-play installed, because I don't want them to autoplay flash bullshit OR autoplay html5 bullshit.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The 8 hour work day 5 day work week was started by Henry Ford, not unions. Ford did that as an incentive to attract permanent employees. It proved to be very successful and caught on.
Unions were at no point making any kind of demand for that. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, and up until Ford, typical hours were 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Prior to the industrial revolution, most people were farmers and worked seasonally, typically less than 30 hours a week during planting season and about 30 hours a week during harvest season, with less than 10 hours a week in between seasons.
Interesting book by Paul Mason is saying something similar but in a broader context. Things are changing due to technology and better access to information. It's hard to control information. Technology is eroding the price of information. Non-market social organizations are replacing capitalist organizations.
"The neoliberalist capitalist model has resulted in civil wars and economic disaster, and it’s only going to get worse. Unless, Paul Mason argues, we take advantage of the technological revolution we are living through and create a postcapitalist sharing society. If we let prices fall and delink work from wages, we can save the world from disaster"
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
"There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx."
http://www.theguardian.com/boo...
"The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next."
It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
You. I like you. That was well done.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
...and you don't think that it has anything to do at all with the fact that the new business involves a convenient app connected to an efficient centralized planning service, whereas the old business usually involves things like trying to wave down any empty yellow cars that might happen to pass by? Either approach could be implemented with or without unions.
Hardly any cabbies or limo drivers belong to unions or get benefits or even salaries. When I drove a cab I rented it for $75/day(in Baltimore) and took it home with me. I could have had it on a 12-hour shift for less. After a while I bought my own cab. I didn't have a permit/medallion, so I rented one from a friend. Did I make a living? Sure. But I worked a lot of hours.
Limousine: I drove for Maryland Limo, the BWI airport franchisee for a few months to learn the businehss. Then I got my own limo -- and drove it happily and profitably until Andover.net offered me a considerable salary to dump the limo and be their full-time editor in chief.
TODAY, I'd probably drive for Uber, even though it's a shoddy company. Remember when they decided to cut fares? BAM! Every driver who had invested in a nice car got burned. But I would maybe stay with Uber for a year, then go off on my own once I had a decent "book" of private customers built up. I assure you, this is what the smarter Uber drivers are doing. Also: there are people in the big cities who buy Uber-qualified cars and rent them to drivers either for a fixed rate or on a percentage split -- just like a cab company.
Also, Uber may have a nice app, but others are catching on. Read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08...
Uber is cute, but it's purely pump and dump. You just wait and see.
Please accept my apologies - Somehow I managed to *not* paste in the second half of the transcript. Usually -- really, almost always -- the transcripts have *more* info than the videos. So I slammed in the rest just now, with a little less polishing than usual, but it's all there.
And Flash. Everybody who actually works on the site (and reads your comments) agrees with you.We tell them over and over, but I've been working on Slashdot since it was brand new and shiny (UID 357), so what do I know? Obviously not as much as a young marketing go-getter. Sigh.
that also corresponded to the time when most of the industrialized world was rebuilding their economies with US made goods & services as well as surge of R&D and production needed for the Cold War & the Space Race.
Unfortunately it's a pipe dream because the people who have the most power over laws and policies are also the ones who control the majority of the wealth. I'm sure there are some wealthy people with enough sense to understand that balancing out financial inequality is a good idea, but most will fight it tooth and nail.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
3x more revenue is probably partly due to not have to worry about things like employee benefits, fleet maintenance, etc., but with that big a difference surely quite a few more people are using cabs than before.
Well, if that was the case, the the 3X more revenue is due to the news not knowing the difference between revenue and profit. I expect that Uber has 3X the profit, because they are screwing over their drivers, not being properly licensed, and several other illegal cost saving measures.
As for 3 times the revenue, that is simply not possible, unless literally 3 times the number of previous livery passengers have suddenly started taking livery services. I find that unlikely to the point of impossibility.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They should get licensed. Perhaps the law needs to be changed to legalize it. In the mean time, I say amend the law so those earning under $2,000/year only need personal (not commercial) auto-insurance. Why? I figure if someone is earning less than $166/month, they're not "really" doing anything that crosses into commercial territory, if you know what I mean. At that point, it's more hobbyist than making a living.
If I were to use the service, I don't care how much they earn from being a taxi, they had better have insurance that will cover me if they crash. It is not fair to make the consumer bear the risk based on how many dollars the cabbie makes.
If they are only driving a few hundred miles per year commercially, their insurance will be far cheaper than a full time cabbie.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Ridesharing is also a different market from the traditional cab market in many ways. It's people getting together as individuals to carpool tp the palces they want, with the added convenience of a common app interface to link up drivers and riders. It's not ideology that causes Uber to not take out taxi licenses, but the fact that they are offering a new product to a new market. Bureaucrats and old-line cab companies scramble to understand what's going on in the same way that RIAA scrambles to make sense of the evolving music market.
So basically like a bulletin board for hooking up people going somewhere and other people wanting to go there? Sounds great. Uber should do that instead of running a for hire taxi service like they do now.
Uber could even still make money (finder's fee) for hooking people up. The drivers would lose less money going to their destination because the riders could share some of the cost. However, legally the rider can only pay up to their pro rata share, so regardless of the number of riders, the driver cannot legally ever recover 100% of the cost, let alone make a profit. His maximum savings is 1/(number of passengers + 1).
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The video adds nothing. It is useless fluff trying to garner ad dollars.
Beats me. I didn't watch it. I prefer to read it. A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but it takes 10,000 words worth of data to store it. A video takes 1 millions words worth of space to store it. Give me the 1,000 words, please.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
...Uber and Lyft will make more and more money because taxi companies refuse to keep up with the times. The last time I took a taxi, long before uber and lyft came onto the scene, I was so overcharged for the short little ride I took that I vowed to walk before I take a taxi again. Long live Uber and Lyft!
Once they have killed off the taxi industry, what is their incentive to keep prices down? Basically, if Uber and Lyft take over they will be replacing a competitive marketplace with a duopoly, or a monopoly if only one of them survives. Less competition is always worse for the consumer.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
As for 3 times the revenue, that is simply not possible, unless literally 3 times the number of previous livery passengers have suddenly started taking livery services. I find that unlikely to the point of impossibility.
The CEO of Uber claims that it is true. Prior to Uber the taxi market in SF was $140M. Today, Uber alone has revenue of $500M in SF. He claims that by making the process convenient and frictionless, and bypassing the government imposed artificial scarcity of taxis, Uber has drawn in many new customers.
... not knowing the difference between revenue and profit.
Both the CEO of Uber, and Tim O'Reilly (another very successful CEO) are well aware of the difference between revenue and profit. They are clearly talking about revenue, not profit.
"What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines?"
The future is lower prices until everything is free. Human effort is the only thing that needs to be compensated. You know? Really! WTF?!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Something's happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear
This is just latest class warfare incarnation.
"employee benefits, fleet maintenance, etc" come out of revenue. All it means is Uber has more inflow of money, nothing to do about profits.
This is certainly the case in Austin. I don't know the numbers, but way way way more people use Uber and Lyft than ever used taxis. And the streets are safer for it (less drunk driving).
I seem to be in contact with people who simply are blind to what is happening right under their noses. Change and the degree of change and the rate of change are dramatic and will cause huge chaos if we do not as a society prepare in advance for what is already happening. Yet everyone I meet seems to believe that the type of change that more literate people tend to see is book stuff that will never happen. And you can bet if they are in denial about climate change they are totally lost when it comes to automation, robotics and computing. They see a world in which they will go to work and work about like their grandfather worked in 1930. These folks think 3D printing is some sort off science fiction story. Somehow it makes me want to blow my brains out. people just can not confront the world as it is and as it is about to be.
Your math is off; it should be:
S = 1 - 1/(N+1)
At N=0, S=0. As N increases, S approaches, but never reaches, 1.
sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree
I am an Opera user. I could do it through a GUI but, really, it is just faster to type it into a terminal. I have that one memorized. *sighs* It's a long story.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The O'Reilly books that I've read look as if they've been skim-read by someone and then sent to the printer.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You and he keep telling yourselves the good, little people will win against the corporate Military-Surveillance cabals. It really is an enjoyable fairy tale, akin to that of David.
Like this French company who has been steadily growing for 9 years with little trouble : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is real ridesharing, where drivers are explicitly forbidden to make a profit. Of course, the service has its opponents, and yes, a few drivers break the rules and manage to make a profit but it is nowhere near the controversy that surrounds Uber.
Good point. Revenue may well be affected by those things though. If you're a cab company that has to maintain it's own fleet and pay out benefits, you having to balance your desire to always have a car handy when a customer wants a ride with the practicalities of actually having to have and maintain those vehicles. Uber doesn't have to do that.
this is very interesting video regarding the subject. havent seen such an interesting video on the subject before