The next US President should copy Indian Prime MInister Modi in outlining a tech growth plan says Cisco’s John Chambers.
Author: Paul Wallbank
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Switzerland debates giving away money
Staid, conservative Switzerland is one of the first developed countries to seriously discuss a universal guaranteed income.
While it appears the proposition will fail, the fact it is being debated indicates an acknowledgement of changing attitudes towards income and social security.
In many respects governments – particularly in the English speaking world – have ignored the personal social consequences of their economic policies over the last thirty years that have seen working people’s and increasingly the middle classes’ incomes fall and become more precarious.
Now those costs are being acknowledged in the face of increasing concentration of wealth with politicians and business leaders being forced to confront far less stable and cohesive societies.
It may be that the discussion of a universal guaranteed income forms the foundations of a new social compact that defined the mid Twentieth Century, increasingly it looks like something is needed in increasingly divided economies.
While a unified guaranteed income may not be the solution to addressing the economic and social needs of a substantial proportion of a workforce that is under employed and poorly paid, a discussion on what we can do needs to be had. At least the Swiss have started this.
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Social media is now the six o’clock news
Six out of ten Americans use social media for news reports the Pew Research Center.
The days of the family sitting down to watch the six o’clock news are long gone and now instead of us trusting the newsreader, we now trust the algorithm and our friends.
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Goodbye Moto
It appears faded mobile phone brand Motorola has proved disappointing for Chinese computer giant Lenovo reports TechCrunch.
For Lenovo, this is concern as the company explores ways to diversify away from the shrinking PC and tablet marketplaces although the smartphone market which itself suffers from poor margins doesn’t seem to be the opportunity the company is looking for.
It does however show that Google is often right in casting off companies it doesn’t see a future in.
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Robots replace Chinese factory workers
Taiwan’s Foxcomm, the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, has announced it will replace 60,000 Chinese workers with robots.
As the cost of robotics falls and the price of Chinese labour increases, the economics of automating low skilled work increasingly looks attractive.
While automating manual work is process that’s been familiar for three centuries, this automation is now heading into the management suite as artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a viable alternative for lower level supervisory roles.
The workplace of the future is going to look very different to today’s, all of us need to be asking if we have the skills that will be needed by it.
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