Over the last several years I’ve been reading extraordinary amounts about the future of artificial intelligence, and how it’ll affect human work. I’ve written about this extensively here, so feel free to explore if you’re interested. Recently a reader reached out and pointed me to a video by Moshe Vardi of Rice University. The reader was himself a…

Let me propose one potential future to you—a future where most everything is done through the gig economy. Here is roughly how that might take place. Companies get rid of many or most of their employees, and decide to go with short-term contracts instead. There is extraordinary data showing that 94% of job growth (jobs created vs. jobs…

Glassdoor just compiled a list of top companies that are dropping college degree requirements. There are a couple of different ways of looking at this. One is to say that the job market is so hot—in favor of employees—that companies are relaxing standards just to get people in. Another way to see it is that the correlation between…

I think the content creation ecosystem—especially around blogging—will be ultimately disrupted by the rise of three interlocking componets: Digital Assistants APIs Customized interfaces Google Duplex just gave us a preview of how natural it’ll soon be to interact with assistants. This is currently quite different. There is no Digital Assistant yet, and content and interface are currently merged…

Art by Dan Tepfer This is an experimental series where I attempt to put Algorithmic Learning into practice. I describe Algorithmic Learning here: It starts with having an algorithm—a methodology—for doing some task or approaching some problem. Then, when new information is acquired, instead of relying on osmosis, we modify our actual algorithm for doing that thing. Then…

I mostly use Microsoft Word for documents because Office is the platform of business, but in my more creative side projects I tend to use Apple’s Pages. One of the things that Word does really well is copying formatting from one place to another. They have a feature called Format Painter, and it can be invoked in any…

Everyone hates bad advertising, which is why the industry is in a freefall. But what does it mean to be bad advertising? Is there such a thing as good advertising? I think there is, and I think the way to tell the difference is to simply ask yourself if you consider the thing you’re being shown to be:…

For some reason I get a lot of questions about how to create a resume from a LinkedIn profile. I love this functionality because I find it much easier to keep LinkedIn updated and print a resume from there, rather than updating Word docs or whatever. Here’s how you do it. Log into your LinkedIn account. Click the…

I love the psychology that goes into post-outage write-ups. Amazon just had a doozy, with S3 going down and crippling much of the internet for a day. The image above captures their approach to the narrative, which I would classify as dense and opaque. Key attributes of the write-up include: Small text Formal language Massive paragraphs No bullets…

I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the American history timeline people became convinced that employers owe people jobs. They don’t. Companies have employees for one reason alone: it helps them serve their customers better. The moment this stops being true is the same moment the company will get rid of employees. This is what people…