Future Jobs
For this assignment, we listened to several TED talks and chose three that were our favorites, and embedded them here:
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Economist Andrew McAfee suggests that, yes, probably, droids will take our jobs — or at least the kinds of jobs we know now. In this far-seeing talk, he thinks through what future jobs might look like, and how to educate coming generations to hold them.
This [the new machine age] is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons: the first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we're on, were output goes up over time, while at the same time prices go down and volume and quality just continue to explode. Now, some people talk about this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that one androids start dong jobs, we don't have to do them any more, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil. 2:34-3:21 |
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How much do you get paid? How does it compare to the people you work with? You should know, and so should they, says management researcher David Burkus. In this talk, Burkus questions our cultural assumptions around keeping salaries secret and makes a compelling case for why sharing them could benefit employees, organizations and society.
When people don't know how their pay compares to their peers, they are more likely to feel under payed, or even discriminated against. Do you want to work at a lace that tolerates the idea that you feel under payed? Or Discriminated against? Keeping salaries secret does just that, and it's a practice as old as it is common despite the fact that in the United States, the law protects employees rights to discuss their pay. In one famous example, from decades ago, the management of Vanity Fair Magazine actually circulated a memo entitled "Forbidding Discussion Among Employees of Salary Received." Now that memo didn't sit well with everybody. The New York Literary figures Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchly, and Robert Sherwood, all decided to stand up for transparency and showed up for work the next day with their salary written on signs hanging around their neck! Imagine showing up for work with your salary written across your chest for everyone to read! 1:45-2:46 |
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What happens when the way we buy, sell and pay for things changes, perhaps even removing the need for banks or currency exchange bureaus? That's the radical promise of a world powered by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. We're not there yet, but in this sparky talk, digital currency researcher Neha Narula describes the collective fiction of money — and paints a picture of a very different looking future.
The point I want to make with these two examples is that there is nothing inherently valuable about a dollar or a stone or a coin. The only reason these things have any value is we've all decided that they should. And because we've decided that...they do! Money is about the exchanges, and the transactions that we have with each other. Money isn't anything objective. It is a collective story that we tell each other about value. A collective fiction. That's a really powerful concept. In the past two decades, we we've begun using digital money. I get paid via direct deposit, I pay my rent via bank transfer, I pay my taxes online, and every month, a small amount of money is deducted from my paycheck and invested in mutual funds in my retirement account. All these interactions are literally just changing ones and zeroes on a computer! 1:57-3:02 |