Tag: Technology
Automation and the Classic Political Response – Retrain Workers – Inadequate
When the threat of automation is raised, politicians tend to respond with banal platitudes about retraining workers. "We need to train people for the jobs of the future," they'll say. When asked what those jobs will be, they inevitably say: coding. But what if there are no jobs? And what if we can't all be ...
Can Andrew Yang Become U.S. President?
For years, I've been reading and writing about the looming threat of automation, A.I. and new technologies, including their capacity to wipe out traditional jobs. The bulk of this writing was compiled into a book Essays in A.I. released a couple years ago. When confronted with the looming threat of automation, the traditional response from ...
We Need Less Experts: The Power of Educating Generalists
Imagine that you’re a doctor and that your patient has just died on the operating table. Now, you have the difficult task of telling the family the bad news. You’re an expert in medicine but you have no knowledge of...
The Prison of New Technology
There is a line in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death that has been haunting me for months now. It reads in part: “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” The idea is counter-cultural. We believe, intrinsically, that new technologies empower us to think. The ...
Law Schools are Failing Their Students
This is a brief excerpt from my book Legal Education, Privatization and the Market, about the role universities play in guiding young law students away from charity and towards private practice.
The Cinema Rosa – Now on Kickstarter
The Cinema Rosa has just been launched on Kickstarter. We need your help to make the game a reality.
Can creativity SAVE your job from automation?
Around 40% of all law jobs are at risk of automation, according to a 2016 Deloitte report. Traditional skills expected of law graduates are increasingly going to be undertaken by new AI-driven software. Basic skills such as database research and document drafting are already being automated by large Australian law firms. The race is on ...
The Systematic Mistreatment of Casual Workers
* This is an article written by Chloe Byrne, featuring quotations from myself and others on casual work and employment laws. Casual employees within the retail and hospitality sectors are often systematically exposed to wage theft and mistreatment by employers, industry sources have said. An expectation of working unpaid hours outside of rostered shifts has ...
South Korea is Shutting Down Computers to Stop Overtime Work, We Should Too
Recently, the South Korean government announced that they will be automatically shutting down government computers to stop overtime work. Computers will be shut down preliminarily at 9pm on Fridays, before being shutdown at 7pm, after a six month waiting period. Should we be following suit? In Australia, working hours are actually higher today than in ...
Why Do People Feel Alone in Cities?
Humans need each other in order to survive. Not necessarily in a physical sense, but in a deeply psychological sense. Time spent apart from each other is destructive in an ultimate way; we tend to lose our minds. We are generally happier when in close contact with others, and especially so when we have a ...
