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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
...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.
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.