🔗 WWW
There are a lot of links out to different parts of the web on this site. I try to mark them all so they get listed here.
🔗 Identity as a Product … neat idea from @dave
An identity service as a business. Operated by a strong company with longevity and a good track record for treating users and developers fairly.
Hmm - let me think who that might be?
🔗 New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy … just when you thought you had done everything you need …
Over on LinkedIN, 🔗 Richard Foster-Fletcher - founder of 🔗 MKAI asks
The full piece is here
I started to reply and of course LinkedIN gave me its usual ‘too long’ message … hence the post. (Those that follow me, might recognize some of the arguments.)
My Response
Yes we do need to rethink work-life balance … and we should start by scrapping the concept entirely. I doubt Ed Sheeran (to pick a random name) worries about his work-life balance? Or anybody who is doing what they love and getting paid to do it for that matter.
The problem is that for most people ‘work’ is not a passion, or love … it is the means to an end of building income that then allows them to follow their passion. Remember ‘hobbies’? Remember ‘holidays’? Remember retirement? … all constructs that allow people to take a break from ‘the machine’ and do what they really want to do.
Work-Life balance is one of those. It is only needed in a world where the work part is not your dream, passion, love …. So bring on the AIs and let them pick up the drudgery of our work lives. Let people move on to thinking and doing things that they consider meaningful and love and have a passion for.
Of course, this Utopia is destined to fail, without significant changes in the social fabric of society.
Take a look at what most musicians, artists, writers (insert the thing you really love and want to do) actually earn and quickly realise that they don’t make a living, much less a good one. Now imagine doubling or trebling the number of people trying to earn a living in that way .. and ask yourself if X million people currently struggle to make a living, how 2X or 3X are going to do that?
Bonus question. When will corporations stop thinking of customers and staff as two distinct ‘audiences’, and realize that they are all connected, starting with the fact that they are all people. As more companies shed people from their books through automation, outsourcing, off shoring and now (apparently) AI, they get to produce more and more things for customers to buy at less and less cost. Thats the ‘maximizing shareholder value’ bit.
Last time I looked, the buying power of the robot market was non existent - primarily because they don’t get paid for the work they do. As ‘the machine’ replaces more and more people by ‘machines’, there will be less and less people earning income to buy the stuff that the corporations are producing, it doesn’t matter how good their product is … nobody can buy it, even if they want to. Then what?
This is why asking what the future of work looks like is asking the wrong question.
BTW - Richard hosts an excellent salon under the umbrella of MKAI, hit me up if you would like to join - and I will connect some dots.
Idris Elba and I Have Something To Talk About.
Idris Elba Says He Was Held at Gunpoint After Trying to Intervene on Man Threatening Woman
True story. So was I. A little over 30 years ago … South of Market in San Francisco. (Just in that one sentence you have more information about my story than the linked article tells you about the Idris story)
AND I wasn’t even intervening on an argument - I was just ‘hanging’ with my friend.
There were three of them, one with the gun, one watching while the third put his hands into my pockets looking for (I assume) money or a wallet. He found nothing. I don’t know why because the wallet was there. Finding nothing, the one with the gun looked at me intently, staring me down. It seemed to last a lifetime. And then he nodded to his two buddies and off they sauntered. No words spoken. No need.
I have had on occasions shared this story with small groups of people - generally when people start going on about how they won’t travel to x or visit y - after they have just heard about some violence in said location … which IMHO is just ridiculous - and why I share it. That said, I have never shared my story in writing, on a blog, into Social Media. For a start - who would be interested? After all, nothing happened. Then nothing happened in the Idris story, where the key point of the piece was …
“He pulled out a gun, stuck it right in my face.”
and
Elba didn’t elaborate on the actions he took to talk the man down, or what happened to the woman after the encounter. But given that the actor is able to recollect the instance, the situation seems to have been quelled.
That’s the story - and that qualifies for an entry in 🔗 Entertainment Weekly, The NME, The Daily Mail and hosts of other places
What Makes News? I sense a pattern.
In parallel with the flow I felt my mind disappear into another world. A dream world. A world that I understood and recognized, but knew wasn’t my normal state, in turn begging the question - which one is normal?
🔗 😂 Especially when the trip is sponsored by corporate
Truth In Humour
🔗 Hollywood’s doom loop - Brian Morrissey - The Rebooting
Video is now 65% of all internet traffic
… of course it is. But is that a worthwile measure?
And finally I get it. All this planning, all this assessing of sequences and balancing of resources, it all does exactly what outlines do. It lets you feel busy while you put off the actual writing.
💬 William Gallagher
and
I hadn’t thought of it like that, but the instant it was said to me, I couldn’t disagree. I just didn’t do it.
“I’m afraid I’ll be eating my breakfast one morning and choke and I don’t want to die alone.”
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
The Antidote To Worldcoin
and then there is this ….
… she’s talking about Sam Altman
🔗 You can read the whole piece by Molly here, which includes substantial thinking on the challenges of decentralized identity.
The cryptocurrency industry is rife with projects that embrace the idea of “progressive decentralization”: beginning out as a highly centralized project run by a small group, but promising to eventually turn over control of the project to a DAO. Few ever follow through,10 but it is a convenient way to stave off criticism.
💬 Molly White
In my same ‘reading session’ this piece from my friend Alan Mayo : The Reasonable Future: Identity 2.5 appeared. He concludes;
Some of the world is hell-bent on achieving Identity 3 Decentralization and, ironically, this is not going to happen anytime soon. With our current proven technologies we have all the building blocks to build sophisticated Identity solutions that provide a good customer experience and good security. That is where we should be spending our time, rather than dreaming of an impossible future.
💬 Alan Mayo
The Antidote?
Stop listening to people who are playing both sides of the ‘Business Equation’ - even better … stop acting on their recommendations. Altman isn’t the only one.
This is a 🧶 People First post - to see others in the series, click here.
🔗 Socialroots is a ‘worker-owned cooperative business’ and they are working on an interesting problem that is hard to articulate to anyone who hasn’t already experienced the problem they are fixing. #Catch22
🔗 Is Rock Dead? (and Other Questions from Readers)
An interesting read from Ted Gioia … but later on in the piece he talks about archives, a topic I have been mulling recently.
🔗 ‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation’: the states pushing for 14-year-olds to serve alcohol (Apple News)
… of course they are - keeps the wages down.
🔗 Dear Rishi Sunak, you’ve declared war on people who want to curb car use. It’s one you’ll lose.
It’s fascinating how parochial the ‘right’ are.
🔗 ‘Put learners first’: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools.
I would argue misguided. What say you?