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Steve Bosserman

It's time to regulate the gig economy | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...s-time-to-regulate-gig-economy

gig economy sharing economy favors exchange platforms labor unions

shared by Steve Bosserman on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Although it would seem straightforward that the laws protecting workers should also apply to workers in what is described as the ‘gig economy’ or ‘platform-based work’, there is much debate – and confusion – on this issue. This lack of clarity stems in part from the novelty of platform-based work. There has also been an effort to conceal the nature of platform-based work through buzzwords such as ‘favours’, ‘rides’, and ‘tasks’ as well as the practice common to many platforms of classifying their workers as independent contractors. Platform-based work includes ‘crowdwork’ and ‘work-on-demand via apps’. In crowdwork, workers complete small jobs or tasks through online platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, and Clickworker.  In ‘work-on-demand via apps,’ workers perform duties such as providing transport, cleaning, home repairs, or running errands, but the workers learn about these jobs through mobile apps, from companies such as Uber, Taskrabbit, and Handy. The jobs are performed locally.
  • Platforms mediate extensively the transactions they have with their workers, and also between the customers and the workers.  Platforms often fix the price of the service as well as define the terms and conditions of the service, or they allow the clients to define the terms (but not the worker). The platform may define the schedule or the details of the work, including instructing workers to wear uniforms, to use specific tools, or to treat customers in a particular way. Many platforms have performance review systems that allow customers to rate the workers and they use these ratings to limit the ability of lower-rated workers to access jobs, including by excluding workers from their system. The amount of direction and discipline that clients and platforms impose on workers, in many instances amounts to the degree of control that is normally reserved to employers and is normally accompanied by labour protections such as the minimum wage, limits on working time, and contributions to social security. This recent ILO study provides more detailed analysis on these features of platform-based work.
Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality By Boosting Conspiracy Theories | Co.E... - 0 views

www.fastcoexist.com/...y-boosting-conspiracy-theories

social_networking conspiracy_theories viral platforms

shared by Steve Bosserman on 13 May 16 - No Cached
  • Social platforms—in their effort to keep users continually engaged (and targeted with relevant ads)—are designed to surface what’s popular and trending, whether it’s true or not. Since nearly half of web-using adults now get their news from Facebook in any given week, what counts as "truth" on our social platforms matters. When nonsense stories gain traction, they’re extremely difficult to correct. And stories jump from platform to platform, reaching new audiences and "going viral" in ways and at speeds that were previously impossible.
Bill Fulkerson

Long Tails, Aggregators & Infrastructures - Stories of Platform Design - 0 views

stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/s-infrastructures-bdf84e32531d

platforms internet design valueChain

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 27 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 27 Aug 18
     
    "Understand how to navigate the platform landscape, once and for all."
Bill Fulkerson

Behind The Magical Thinking | Center for a New American Security - 0 views

www.cnas.org/...behind-the-magical-thinking

drones

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 02 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 02 Aug 18
     
    "Drones' greatest attraction for the national security world is that they create options where there were none - or none at a cost policymakers feel comfortable with. With a public tired of large scale military interventions, drones and other approaches that gave the U.S. options to study or intervene against security challenges in a low profile, low risk way fit perfectly into the Obama administration's comfort zone. These platforms came to symbolize and enable much of the Obama national security team's approach. But the enthusiastic embrace of drone technology, particularly in counterterrorism, left some former Obama officials questioning whether they'd been clutching a Pandora's box they should have opened more deliberately. Overall, such "light footprint" strategies generate enduring disagreements about their efficacy, risk, and oversight. Unlike any other recent military platform, drones in particular engender strong emotion - hope, revulsion, overconfidence, demonization - and magical thinking, even among those who know them best. And the attributes that make them so compelling - that they are precise, remote, sensing, and unmanned - may sometimes be too reassuring."
Steve Bosserman

Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-next-great-computing-platform

crispr dna genetics biology

shared by Steve Bosserman on 06 May 18 - No Cached
  • Crispr, the powerful gene-editing tool, is revolutionizing the speed and scope with which scientists can modify the DNA of organisms, including human cells. So many people want to use it—from academic researchers to agtech companies to biopharma firms—that new companies are popping up to staunch the demand. Companies like Synthego, which is using a combination of software engineering and hardware automation to become the Amazon of genome engineering. And Inscripta, which wants to be the Apple. And Twist Bioscience, which could be the Intel
  • They’re betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language.
  • “Being able to do that in a parallel way is the novel part,” says Paul Dabrowski, who estimates that Synthego cuts down the time it takes for a scientists to perform gene edits from several months to just one.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • his company’s first move was to release a different gene-editing enzyme called MAD7—you can think of it like a Crispr/Cas9 knockoff, but legal—free for R&D uses. Inscripta will charge a single-digit royalty, far below market standards, to use MAD7 in manufacturing products or therapeutics.
  • We’re trying to get more people into the game now, by democratizing access to this family of enzymes,” he says. It’s a page from the Steve Jobs playbook; get them hooked on the MADzyme platform, down the line sell them personal hardware.
Steve Bosserman

A BIG Start-up Opportunity in Politics? - Global Guerrillas - 0 views

globalguerrillas.typepad.com/...p-opportunity-in-politics.html

direct democracy political platform startup

shared by Steve Bosserman on 10 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • This means there is still a massive opportunity available.   An opportunity to build the first political social network that replaces a traditional party apparatus.  One that operates completely different than any political party we've had in this country.   A political platform that provides direct participation (think apps) in the political process on a daily or hourly basis rather than once every two years.     A platform that could grow to 60 m active participants in less than two years.   A platform that establishes norms of conduct and expectations of the future rather than rips them down.   A political network that allows us, as a country, to aspire to greatness again. 
  • This window of opportunity will close fast.
Steve Bosserman

Here's How Facebook Actually Won Trump the Presidency | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...mp-election-not-just-fake-news

social media conversation coverage politics elections

shared by Steve Bosserman on 21 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were. Bleeker says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned from this election cycle is that social media is increasingly going to be part of any candidate’s so-called “earned media strategy”—that is, the coverage a candidate gets for free in the press. The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less; in a recent 60 Minutes interview, he said he plans to continue using Twitter as president. “He’s going to tell his side of the story from the digital bully pulpit,” Lira says. Whether fake news did or didn’t affect the election’s outcome, Facebook as a platform did. The winning candidate was not just willing, but eager to break with traditional models of campaigning. His team invested in new ways of using the digital tools and platforms that have come to dominate the media landscape. Anyone who wants to defeat him in the future will have to do the same.
Steve Bosserman

Donald Trump, the First President of Our Post-Literate Age - Bloomberg View - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ident-of-our-post-literate-age

literacy platforms social media storytelling

shared by Steve Bosserman on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • And here we begin to see how the age of social media resembles the pre-literate, oral world. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other platforms are fostering an emerging linguistic economy that places a high premium on ideas that are pithy, clear, memorable and repeatable (that is to say, viral). Complicated, nuanced thoughts that require context don’t play very well on most social platforms, but a resonant hashtag can have extraordinary influence.
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