Friday Fives
Friday Fives
A round up of five things that have caught our eye (or ear) this past week.
1. WIRED’S FAVOURITE STORIES FROM THE LAST 25 YEARS
Wired magazine has long been a compulsory read for us here at O/TG HQ, and this month sees the “Rolling Stone of technology” celebrating 25 laps around the sun at the forefront of the digital revolution.
And in a great look back through the archives, Wired’s editorial team cast their net wide to pull together a list of their favourite 25 stories from the last 25 years.
With a stellar list of contributors (ranging from Neal Stephenson through to William Gibson), the articles selected cover topics as varied as Bill Joy’s famed ‘grey goo’ article from 2000 “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us” on the perils of emerging technology; through to Gibson’s 1993 look at modern Singapore in “Disneyland with the Death Penalty”, a piece which led to the magazine being banned for a period by the Singapore government.
Read more (and we mean A LOT more) here: https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-favorite-stories-from-last-25-years
2. DOCKLESS BIKES MAPPING YOUR MOVEMENT
We’ve noticed lots of people whizzing around town on scooters here in Auckland with silicon valley startup Lime’s scooters hitting our shores this week. They join the Onzo bikes as the two dockless share services we currently have on offer and which has seen our local government agencies update the code of practice for bike share operators to also cover shared e-scooters.
A number of cities in the US, who have access to ride data from Lime’s bike share, are looking at using the trip-level data to help inform the investment in new bike related infrastructure such as bike paths and bike lanes.
While the advantages of having access to the data in terms of city planning is clear, there are concerns around the privacy of the data given cycle share users can park the dockless bikes at their destination, such as their homes, which opens up a whole host of issues if the data was hacked and individual users identified.
There is a call for independently-verified safeguards for the data, along with an industry standard in terms of data collected and shared. With dockless share services becoming ubiquitous in cities around the world, this will be an interesting one to watch.
Read more: “The secret data collected by dockless bikes is helping cities map your movement”
3. FEMALE FOUNDERS FACE SEXUAL HARASSMENT FROM INVESTORS
The tech industry, notorious for its culture of sexual harassment, was front and centre of the recent conversations on workplace sexual harassment last year following Susan Fowler’s February blog piece on her year at Uber which ultimately led to the resignation of Uber’s CEO. This was quickly followed by the New York Times article ‘Women in Tech Speak Frankly on Culture of Harassment‘, the resignation of 500 Startups co-founder Dave McClure and a mea culpa from high profile investor Chris Sacca.
Wired magazine published a piece early this year examining what has been done in the US tech industry to address its harassment problem which is not going to happen overnight and will require consistent efforts to address.
Startup accelerator, Y Combinator (YC), is one organisation in the tech sphere taking action to address the harassment issue. More than 20 percent of women who responded to a recent survey of YC female founders said they had been harassed. The survey was undertaken by YC in partnership with an investee company Callisto, a non profit startup who creates tech to combat sexual assault and harassment. YC are taking proactive steps such as creating a formal process for founders to report bad behaviour by investors and pledged to continue to support startups dedicated to addressing gender issues in the workplace.
Read more: “Female founders still face sexual harassment from investors”
4. AGENTS OF AUTOMATION
Any conversations around the ‘future of work’ these days increasingly include an element of nervousness around the looming prospect of mass automation of jobs thanks to ever more capable AI. So the topic of who gets to automate work and on what terms is more and more crucial.
We’re watching the developments here with interest, and have been mulling over the implications of a recent Atlantic article on self-automation a fair bit this week.
Despite many impressive advances in technology over recent decades, repetitive tasks persist. However automation continues to charge forward especially with new gains in machine learning and AI capabilities; and generally it’s fair to say the gains from automation have been enjoyed not by those who operate the machines, but by those who own them.
Against this backdrop, we’re now seeing the emergence of ‘self-automators’ - employees who have deliberately automated their own jobs, usually through coding their own scripts and programs to remove the mundane aspects of their roles to free up time for other activities, often to their own benefit rather than an employer’s.
The Atlantic highlights a key challenge for self-automators: even if a program impeccably performs their job, many feel that automation for one’s own benefit is wrong.
But the flip side here is that the example of self-automators shows that coders are in a unique position to negotiate with employers over which automation-derived gains—like shorter work weeks and greater flexibility to pursue work that interests them—should be kept by workers.
It seems a rare opportunity - and we agree with the Atlantic assessment that with the advance of AI, it could be one of the last - to try to set the terms for a mode of automation that puts people first.
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/agents-of-automation/568795/
5. REALME VS THE DECENTRALIZED WEB
A couple of weeks back we covered the launch of Sir Tim Berners-Lee new “startup” Inrupt which has a mission to decentralise the web and give users back control over their data.
In this piece from NewsHub, Richard McManus looks at the NZ Government’s investment into a centralised online identity service, RealMe, and questions why when the online world is trending towards decentralisation.
RealMe has failed to gain much traction, with only half a million users after five years, however as more and more government services are added, such as passports and citizenship, it’s running close to being mandatory for all NZ citizens.
We’re all for one-stop-shops and ease of use - but, like McManus, have concerns about privacy with the centralisation of all this data especially given security breaches earlier this year with RealMe. And with McManus tipping the end game for RealMe being online voting, the potential threat to democracy associated with also has to be front of mind.
Read more: “RealMe vs the decentralized web”
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Thanks to the folks that suggested content this week. If you have any startup stories, new products, or other thoughts to share, please get in touch.
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